Abstract
Considering the history of its involvement in the Middle East, it is easy to see why, for many Arabs and Muslims today, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has an almost diabolical reputation. In recent years, the CIA has been responsible for the most infamous American measures in the ‘War on Terror’, including waterboarding, secret prisons, and extraordinary rendition. Earlier, when it functioned as the US’s main weapon for waging Cold War in the region, the Agency was known for engineering the destruction of nationalist governments, shoring up pro-western autocracies in the oil-rich Gulf States, and anchoring the growing American-Israeli alliance. The events of the early Cold War era are widely interpreted as foundational to the current, fraught relationship between America and the Middle East; as Yale scholar Abbas Amanat has described the baleful consequences of covert meddling in the region by generations of western spies, ‘the thread of memory led clearly from the Great Game to the Great Satan’.1
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Notes
Quoted in Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 347.
See, for example, Robert D. Kaplan, The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite (New York: Free Press, 1993).
For examples of this approach, see Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford, eds., The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War: The State-Private Network (London: Routledge, 2006).
See Andrew J. Rotter, ‘Saidism Without Said: Orientalism and US Diplomatic History’, American Historical Review, CV (2000), 1205–17.
For a recent example of this approach by a leading practitioner, see Frank Costigliola, ‘After Roosevelt’s Death: Dangerous Emotions, Divisive Discourses, and the Abandoned Alliance’, Diplomatic History, XXXIV (2010), 1–23.
See Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), ch. 2.
The young Kermit Roosevelt identified with his fictional namesake so strongly that he once convinced a gullible family tutor that he actually was Kim. See Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., A Sentimental Safari (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), xiii.
Kermit Roosevelt, War in the Garden of Eden (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 201–4.
Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
For a recent account of this tradition, see Ussama Makdisi, Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of US-Arab Relations (New York: Public Affairs, 2010).
Theologian Samuel Hopkins, quoted in Abbas Amanat and Magnus T. Bernhardsson, eds., US-Middle East Historical Encounters: A Critical Survey (Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2007), 2.
See the informative biography of Eddy, Thomas W. Lippman, Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East (Vista, CA: Selwa Press, 2008).
Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., Arabs, Oil and History: The Story of the Middle East, 2nd edn (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1967), 7.
Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 34–6.
See Archie Roosevelt, For Lust of Knowing: Memoirs of an Intelligence Officer (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), esp. ch. 9.
See Copeland, The Game of Nations…, chs 3–6, and Miles Copeland, The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA’s Original Political Operative (London: Aurum Press, 1989), ch. 16.
Douglas Little, ‘Mission Impossible: The CIA and the Cult of Covert Action in the Middle East’, Diplomatic History, XXVIII (2004), 678.
Quoted in Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Islamic Fundamentalism (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2005), 107.
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–61 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
See Michael Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 151–5.
Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East since 1945, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 2, 11.
For more on the strains in US-Israeli relations in this period, see Peter L. Hahn, ‘The United States and Israel in the Eisenhower Era: The “Special Relationship” Revisited’, in Kathryn C. Statler and Andrew L. Johns, eds., The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 225–43.
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© 2011 Hugh Wilford
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Wilford, H. (2011). America’s Great Game: The CIA and the Middle East, 1947–67. In: Sewell, B., Lucas, S. (eds) Challenging US Foreign Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230349209_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230349209_6
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