America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East

Wilford (The Mighty Wurlitzer), professor of history at California State University, Long Beach, delivers an account of spy games and political maneuvering featuring the aristocratic grandsons of Theodore Roosevelt, Kermit and Archie, and their compatriot Miles Copeland. Reared on exotic tales from the Arabian Nights, adventurous Roosevelt cousins joined the OSS—precursor to the CIA—and ventured afield as elite operatives in Iran, Egypt, and Syria in order to master the clandestine arts, engaging in “psy-war” and tempting targets with the ever-alluring “honey-trap” (in which women are used as lures). Wilford runs through a sordid record of American imperialist pretensions, replete with coups, countercoups, intrigue, subterfuge, non-diplomatic back-channels, and convoluted plots that sometimes “descended into farce”—including attempts at “the possible use of hypnotism in political speech-making.” Often these efforts resulted in futile gestures, gross missteps, or insuperable problems. Yet aside from its reliance upon “the spooky channel” and clandestine intrigue, the United States government used benign means of exercising influence in the region, establishing the Syrian Protestant College (later renamed the American University of Beirut) and the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO). Wilford’s narrative of these ambitious imperialists and their machinations is a cautionary tale of “masculine adventure,” or as the case may be, elite misadventure. (Dec.)