Anything Goes

The CIA's Weird Years in the Game of Nations: Part 2

“The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves that make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something we are missing.”

-Miles Copeland quoting Gamal Abdel Nasser

“This is sort of a crazy story…” CIA officer Miles Copeland liked to tell the story of a former colleague who was “the most powerful witch in Louisiana.” He had also been a U.S. Army sergeant and a credit investigator in his civilian life. The witch side of his reputation began at the age of eighteen, when the man decided to overcome his fear of the dark. Outside of his home in a Louisiana swamp, he decided to “become a part of the darkness” and “be a force of the night” rather than “shivering with fright with blankets pulled up” over his head. He spent the night in a tree hooting as if he were an owl. At breakfast the next morning, his older brother complained that he had experienced nightmares, terrified of “one goddamn owl that sounded almost human.” Copeland’s friend skipped the next day of school to research witchcraft at the local library and later joined a coven. While riding with Copeland one day to Washington, DC, the man boasted of being a leader in the witch councils of Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama. The story, to Copeland, was “no crazier than my own feelings when I first entered intelligence. Friends of mine in the CIA to whom I have told this story, including several younger members, tell me that they felt the same way.” The man had joined U.S. intelligence agencies, including the Corps of Intelligence Police and the Office of Strategic Services, during a similar timeframe to Copeland, before being rejected during the CIA’s security clearance process. Instead of continuing down this career path, the witch won a seat in the U.S. Congress and became one of the Agency’s fiercest critics.

In 1984, Copeland had his own unique criticism about the CIA, one rarely expressed publicly: “My complaint about the Agency is it hasn’t assassinated nearly enough people or overthrown nearly enough governments. My objection is that they’ve fallen down on their job, and that’s the kind of criticism some of them like.” On the CIA having become a dirty word, he remarked: “It’s youthful ignorance, frankly, and that’s—you can’t take it for granted. In fact, we live in a world where the most lovable, nicest people and the great majority of people are really ignorant of what’s happening.”

In his memoirs, Copeland downplayed his CIA role, portraying himself as a low-level operative, with the exception of acknowledging his role as head of a small Political Action team towards the end of his tenure. CIA publications now acknowledge his roles as Chief of Station in Damascus, Syria and in Cairo, Egypt. According to the book America’s Great Game, in 1952 Copeland was also for a time deputy chief of intelligence in the Near East and Africa (NEA) Division at CIA headquarters. In addition, a CIA study indicates he was also, for a time, the Acting Division Chief in the NEA Division in 1953. His experiences in the early years of the CIA as he revealed them in pieces during the ensuing decades begin to become clearer in this context; he was as much a strategic planner as he was an operator, in some of the strangest operations to make it in print.

Preparing for World War III

As was done in other parts of the world, the CIA assisted the Middle East in preparing for a potential future launch of World War III. Copeland, however, found the effort to be a joke. Upon his return from Syria, he was assigned the task and within a month he was traveling to 9 major cities in the Middle East and Northeast Africa. Copeland sat with the CIA Station Chief in each location, explaining the raison d’être of the stay-behind program and instructing them to accept delivery of wireless and “survival” equipment that was to arrive via a CIA cargo plane. The local CIA team was then to go into the desert, dig holes, and plant the equipment with large rocks serving as markers. The materiel was all to be dug out in case of a future war, at some future unknown date. The problem, according to Copeland, was that the materiel was already obsolete at the time in 1950, never mind when the war would actually begin. There was a second, more pressing objective, that Copeland had been assigned by his boss Kim Roosevelt. “Is there anything going on in the country to which you are assigned which is, or which may become, a danger to American interests?” Copeland would ask the Station Chiefs, sometimes in the presence of the U.S. Ambassador. If there were aspects to these threats that normal diplomacy could not address, the CIA had the opportunity to fill those gaps, with two main options to be pondered: “can we buy the country, either through the government in power or through one which, with a little discreet help, could get into power?”

Copeland later heard from Deputy Director Allen Dulles directly that the Agency should seek out local groups within the Middle Eastern countries they were targeting to do the work of overthrowing governments on their own, “with only advice and money from us.” In many cases, the CIA would not be needed at all, as the funding could flow through the State Department, unless the recipients insisted on keeping the U.S. contributions a secret. Walking back to the “L” Building at CIA headquarters, Kim Roosevelt advised Copeland that he should not take what Dulles had said very seriously and that the Deputy Director would jump at any opportunity to organize the overthrow of a government. “Allen would give his left…well, let us say his left index finger,” Roosevelt explained, “if he could go somewhere in the field and engineer a coup d’état himself.”

Whereas the CIA had been experimenting with the use of drugs against foreign leaders in order to either embarrass, incapacitate, or kill them, Copeland’s colleague James Eichelberger tried a psychological warfare approach against Jamil Baroody, Saudi Arabia’s representative to the United States. The goal was to deluge him with messages such that it would provoke an irrational response that the U.S. could then publicize in a manner questioning Baroody’s sanity. The messages were written by CIA officers with an “insulting and pious” tone, pretending to be from “deeply religious” Muslims who accused Baroody of not sufficiently defending their side of the Arab–Israeli conflict. Perhaps, the messages implied, Baroody had fallen too much under Western influence. Eichelberger was pleased with the result, calling the tactic “better and more practical than LSD tablets” as Baroody “babbled even more gibberish than customarily,” according to Copeland.

Roosevelt, however, was disappointed in their work. He happened to like Baroody and “agreed with most of what he said, gibberish and all.” Roosevelt could not understand why three Middle Eastern experts, with all of the resources of the United States government at their disposal, would spend their time trying to make “a fool of a well-intentioned friend.” Copeland and Eichelberg took the criticism to heart: “He made his point,” Copeland later wrote. “We hung our heads in shame.” Roosevelt impressed upon them the important distinction between beliefs and knowledge: “as propagandists we should have understood that ‘information’ must be fashioned to fit beliefs, not knowledge. Mussolini knew the difference (‘I don’t want my people to know,’ he said. ‘I want them to believe’); so should we. But it was the beliefs of our targets that mattered, not our own.”

Following his participation in the Za’im coup d’état and due to the fact that it had been the only Agency project overthrowing a foreign government that had been accomplished without the assistance of others, Copeland viewed himself as “the hottest property” in the “K” Building at CIA headquarters. Once he was exposed to the planned and in-flight operations of the Western European (WE) Division, however, he changed his mind and felt like “a second-rater.” Visiting their offices, he discovered “nearly a hundred projects on the drawing boards for influencing elections, penetrating and gaining control of labour unions, creating labour unions, subsidizing newspapers and forming political cadres in refugee groups, thirty or forty of which were already in operation.” The Za’im coup had been an extremely short-lived endeavor, with the leader lasting four and a half months as President of Syria; Copeland later developed a theory as to why. In African countries he visited, he noticed a distinct pattern of “blame and repress” in those who took over governments: gain power through making promises that could not be kept, jail dissidents, and maintain “bureaucratic control”: he concluded, “it was lack of this control that caused the fall of Husni Za’im.”

The Search for the Muslim Billy Graham

Working at CIA headquarters in 1951 and 1952, Copeland and a small team of eight to ten staff members worked on a number of ideas to covertly influence the Middle Eastern states. Among the “bright ideas” was a plan to locate and recruit the Muslim equivalent of the American evangelist Billy Graham. The team sent out a memorandum to all CIA posts in the region, which resulted in the Station Chief in Baghdad recruiting a local “wild-eyed” religious figure who was soon sent out on a speaking tour. The tour resulted in the holy man being arrested, tried and hanged by the Iraqi government. Copeland later told the press that the goal had been to mobilize the Muslim world against communism and he concluded: “the project did no harm.”

Prime Minister Nuri al-Said wrote an apology letter to Kim Roosevelt, stating he objected to such operations “on principle” and that he had not believed that the man had been in fact a CIA agent, despite his assurances made to his interrogators. Having been unaware of the operation completely, Roosevelt was “furious” with Copeland: “He thought I’d gone mad.” Roosevelt subjected him to a lecture about thinking things through to their consequences. He emphasized “how leaders, for all their charisma, can only be agents of their followers, and how a thoughtless combination of leaders and followers could produce an explosion rather different from the one we bargained for.”

Copeland continued his search until his last days with the CIA: “as a last act before leaving government service, I wanted to find and groom a messiah who would start out in Egypt, and then spread his word to Africans and perhaps other Third World peoples.” He used as his inspiration his experiences in the American South: “it was not for nothing that I had thought of a Moslem Billy Graham. As an Alabaman who had known holy rollers, shouting Baptists and snake-handlers, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, there was something about these characters to be taken seriously. After all, you’ve got to have a mind before you can lose it; you’ve got to feel yourself a part of the world before you can want to escape it.”

The Raw Materials Game

When Copeland was assigned to be head of Political Action Staff at the CIA, he looked to what the State Department could bring to the “International Game”; he found, in his estimation, employees who viewed themselves as only “professional diplomats, period.” His friend Archie Roosevelt had emphasized the need for those working on foreign policy to understand other cultures and “learn to think like them and see the world in their terms.” Copeland saw the diplomats as “professional ‘generalists’ who would be as much at home in Kabul as they would be in Paris--that is to say, fish out of water in either place.” He found them to be the least cognizant of the national security threats with which the U.S. was contending. In turn, the CIA was a perennial pain in their side.

Since the Agency used the State Department for diplomatic cover abroad, placing their officers in the embassies, legations, and consulates to hide their true intentions, the diplomatic staff felt their need to distance themselves from these intruders. The State Department made it clear to outsiders that the CIA officers were not “one of us” and added designations next to their names in official listings to make that point clear. Copeland wrote: “If they disliked us under ordinary circumstances, they hated us while John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State and his brother, Allen, was our boss and protector.” What he took from the State Department staffers was a view that the Soviets had a fear that “capitalism and imperialism” would dominate the world if Soviet Communism did not and that the Soviets “really believed” the Western system was based on “exploitation” of the nations of the Third World. One way Soviet domination could be achieved was through the denial of resources, under which the Western system would fall under its own weight. As an example, Copeland was shown “unassailable proof” from air force intelligence that Western Europe’s industries would fail in under a month if denied access to raw materials from a single country in southern Africa.

Copeland referred to the issue of access to raw materials as being almost entirely hidden from the American public. He wrote in 1973 of the problems that terrorism posed in areas where rare substances could be found:

…the U.S. Government still publishes lists of “strategic” and “critical” materials—metals, botanical products, and other substances on which our productive capacities are totally dependent. But you possibly do not know that the lists that are available to the public are by no means the ones that guide our national-security planners. Some of the substances on them are so rare and of such specialized use that nobody but metallurgists and chemists ever heard of them; yet they are indispensable to the hardening of steel, to making machinery resistant to high temperatures and acids, to the manufacture of electronic products, and for other such purposes. Despite herculean efforts by our scientists to find homegrown substitutes, many of them can be obtained only from abroad. It happens—and it could hardly happen by chance—that those areas of the world where the substances are to be found are exactly those in which local anti-American extremist groups enjoy the greatest monetary, logistical, and administrative support and which comprise the front line of “the people’s war against imperialism and capitalism.” Since the list of substances for obvious reasons must be kept top secret, together with the facts on how critically dependent we are on them, there is no way the U.S. Government can convey an awareness of the problem to the American public. Those who have access to the information can only writhe in discomfort as uninformed politicians and editorialists state with pious confidence their conviction that the U.S. Government should remain indifferent as countries containing the necessary substances turn hostile to American interests.

Occult Advisors

Before beginning his new role as the head of Political Action, Copeland had been preceded by an employee, Robert Mandelstam, who had engaged the problem of achieving influence through what he termed “occultism in high places.” When Mandelstam learned from the CIA Station Chief in Kabul that politicians there settled parliamentary disputes with cockfighting, he was in the midst of seeking the advice of a Mexican chicken-trainer to seek a way to influence the course of events in Afghanistan. Their boss Kim Roosevelt put a stop to the work: “our superiors would have to be introduced slowly into the more exotic kinds of projects we would eventually be generating,” they were cautioned.

Copeland, Mandelstam, and a handful of other researchers approached divisional desks at CIA headquarters, each responsible for a different area of the world. They asked: “What is going on in your area that endangers American interests? Why? What can we do to alter it?” Some replies included that certain countries were not holding “free elections” or that “human rights” were not part of their culture. The team’s attitude was: “So what? How does that hurt us?” In some instances, free elections harmed U.S. interests “because the peoples, hating Americans, would consistently vote for those candidates who promised to undermine us at every turn. In such places, it would hardly be in our interest to generate enthusiasms for ‘free speech’ such as we have put up with at home.” In looking for political action projects, they were sometimes asked: “Why don’t you tackle the Soviet Union?” Copeland’s team responded with a standard reply: “We must walk before we can run.”

Copeland’s team found it advisable to influence foreign heads of state through employing local advisors, those “of the same nationality, religion and ethnic” whom the leader could trust. Mandelstam brought to this effort a series of “astrologers, palmists, numerologists, witch doctors, necromancers and other exegetes of the occult.” The political action group surveyed the list of world leaders they wanted to influence and discovered that more heads of state used occult advisors than those who did not. It was not necessarily required to plant an advisor in these governments; rather, the CIA was able to influence many of those already in place who “lived in constant fear of giving advice that would lead their clients astray (they were charlatans, not fools)” and were therefore “happy to get our help.” With this assistance, the CIA was able to insert advice that suited U.S. interests and that at the same time appeared to be divinely guided.

Undoubtedly swayed by this experience, Copeland effusively praised the idea of occult influence when President Ronald Reagan’s astrologer Joan Quigley came to the attention of the press, implying that the presence of this advice improved chances of CIA influence over the President: “the deterioration of the CIA’s effectiveness began on the day when its heads began to think ‘practically,’ i.e. to operate on the assumption that peoples elsewhere in the world thought like no-nonsense American businessmen. We have been breathing sighs of relief over the revelation that our President has been taking advice from an astrologer instead of from the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor.”

Killing for the British

Copeland had seen a lot in his years with the CIA and he had been asked to undertake a wide range of disturbing activities. Now his vaunted amorality was being put to the test; he was being asked to kill a close friend.