Someone to Hate

Amorality in Personal and World Affairs

“According to my personal code of ethics, I believed that lying, stealing, throat-cutting and disingenuousness in general had a place in the undeclared wars of the international gameboard, just as killing had a place in declared wars such as the one we had just been through, but when it came to politics at home I was almost sentimentally moral.”
-Miles Copeland Jr.

“Stand back from your wall clock. It’s about to blow up.” The mysterious voice on the phone had placed the call to an OSO officer of the CIA in early 1952. The officer looked up at the wall and within seconds, there was a light pfft noise that emanated from the clock. Someone had detonated the explosion device from outside of the building; the explosion was small, but could have been the equivalent of a letter bomb. A technical expert sat in the office of Lyman Kirkpatrick, deputy assistant director of operations, later that day to explain how a miniature bomb, planted in a piece of gum, could be detonated by a radio signal from a car a quarter of a mile away. Finding out who planted it was an insurmountable challenge; too many people without security clearances entered the office on a daily basis.

The next year, while stationed in Egypt, Copeland was tasked with delivering $3 million in unvouchered funds from the President’s executive budget to Nasser, an amount in addition to the $12.9 million committed to Egypt in U.S. foreign aid that year. Copeland informed Nasser’s associate Hassan Touhami “the U.S. Government isn’t pressing on you. I’m only telling you it’s available if you want it.” Touhami responded: “We can always find some use for $3 million. Let’s see what it looks like.” After consulting with U.S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery, Copeland was on his way to Touhami’s home in Ma’adi with two suitcases full of cash alongside groceries Copeland’s wife had ordered. Arriving at the destination, Copeland found two Egyptian security guards accompanying Touhami, who showed no emotion at this prospect of a large infusion of cash. Copeland and Touhami quietly counted the cash twice, both times arriving at a total of $2,999,990. “We won’t fuss about the missing $10,” Touhami remarked.

Nasser toyed with the idea of returning the bribe (similar to an incident involving the Prime Minister of Singapore years later), but instead used the money to build the Cairo Tower, which became the tallest structure in Egypt until the 1990s. In 1954, during the long period of construction of the tower (which lasted until 1961), the CIA hid explosives tied to a radio receiver in the basement of the structure. This action provided the Agency with the ability to blow up the building upon sending a radio signal from a ship in the Mediterranean Sea. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, with the U.S. government upset with Nasser over his nationalization of the Suez Canal, Secretary John Foster Dulles ordered the activation of the explosives in the tower, then still under construction, which by that point had already been discovered and dismantled by Egypt’s General Intelligence Service.

A Violent Merger

CIA DIRECTOR WILLIAM COLBY: In 1947 through 1952, I believe, we had a separate service in the CIA to conduct that kind of positive political or paramilitary work abroad as distinct from the intelligence collection. It created an enormous amount of problems because you were frequently using the same sources, you were frequently at cross purposes in your operations in certain foreign countries—

REP. PETE McCLOSKEY: I know you don’t want to talk about it, but there were no shootouts, I hope.

COLBY: No. It was a bureaucratic monstrosity solved by General Smith consolidating the two services of collection and this responsibility for action.

-U.S. House of Representatives, Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, June 25, 1975

General Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith, appointed as Director of Central Intelligence in 1950, was determined to reorganize the CIA and had no tolerance for dissent. In late 1951, he tackled the administrative side, bringing Lawrence K. “Red” White that December into a meeting with the organization’s most senior officials. White was to be made in charge of a centralized administrative arm, as Assistant to the Deputy Director for Administration. “I am sick to the teeth hearing about administration around here, and I have called you together to tell you how it’s going to be,” Smith informed them, putting up a simple chart on a blackboard. “If you have a problem, you take it to White.” He went around the room, to each senior official, asking them: “Do you understand what I said, and do you agree with it?” The responses were a variant of “Oh, yes,” until he got to Assistant Director for Policy Coordination H. K. Kilbourne “Pat” Johnston, who worked in the CIA’s covert action arm. “Oh, yes, General,” Johnston responded, “I understand what you said, but there might be one point where you and I would disagree.” Smith pounded the table in frustration, explaining that despite his question, this was not a consultation: “Goddamn you, Johnston, you don’t disagree with me, do you understand that?” Johnston replied: “Yes, sir.”

Finally, Smith turned to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, posing rhetorically: “Allen, do you understand what I have said? Do you agree with it?” Dulles responded: “Oh, yes, Beetle, yes Beetle.” He looked at the chart, which in minimalist fashion featured only three boxes. “I do think it would be helpful if you would reproduce that chart,” Dulles offered. “I think it would be helpful if you would reproduce that so we could all have a copy.” Smith also lacked patience for such a request: “I will not reproduce that Goddamn chart, and you can sit here in silence until you have committed it to memory!” The group sat for a minute, quietly looking at the three boxes on the page. “Have you got it?” Smith demanded, breaking the silence. “Oh, yes,” came the reply from the group in unison.

Smith proceeded to merge the rival groups Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) and Office of Special Operations (OSO), which possessed some overlaps in terms of mandates and resources, into the Directorate of Plans (DDP). He sent Lyman Kirkpatrick, a representative for the OSO, along with Pat Johnston on a global tour to explicate the changes to CIA stations in Asia. Copeland joined them on the trip, which took them to India, Iraq, Lebanon, and then on to Istanbul, Turkey. At this last destination, Johnston and Kirkpatrick, the headquarters representatives, invited the entire staff of the Istanbul station, minus the secretaries, to attend their briefing on how under their Chief of Station, Archie Roosevelt, there would be “an OSO deputy, an OPC deputy, and section heads for intelligence, counter-intelligence, political action, propaganda, labor affairs and paramilitary,” although Roosevelt was free to alter these specific functions to fit within the regional situation.

Lacking Smith’s confidence to quash any potential dissent, Kirkpatrick turned to Copeland: “Is all this clear to you, Mr. Copeland?” Copeland had felt bullied the entire trip by Kirkpatrick, as he received these type of comments in every location they visited. “Oh, it’s clear enough to me, all right,” Copeland replied. “You’d better ask Archie if it’s all clear to him.” Copeland happened to count Roosevelt as a friend since their days in the CIG, when Roosevelt found him to be “a brilliant, talented extrovert from Montgomery, Alabama” according to his memoirs. Copeland watched as Roosevelt sat in stunned silence as he absorbed the messages he had just heard from Johnston and Kirkpatrick. “Then he did something I’d never before seen him do,” Copeland recalled. “He blew his top! I’ve forgotten exactly what he said, except that in well-chosen words and phrases he started out to tell them what bumbling philistines he thought they were.” Copeland then watched as another local staff member, a colonel whom he presumed worked on paramilitary operations, got up and threw his chair against the wall. This violent act “somehow broke the tension,” Johnston describing how their orders were in fact “recommendations” and Kirkpatrick focusing on the colonel and explaining to him how if he would only calm down, he could be “transferred to a post where his talents would be properly appreciated.” To round out their trip to Istanbul, the group had an awkward, largely silent lunch with the station. Recovering from the shock of what they had just witnessed, the brief dialogue that occurred was “forced and painfully polite, lubricated only by occasional attempts at humor and nervous unmotivated laughter.” Copeland, fed up with Kirkpatrick ragging on him out at every locale, finally confronted him: “he was oblivious to what he was doing, and when I finally protested he was deeply and sincerely apologetic.”

According to Samuel Halpern, then executive assistant to Desmond FitzGerald, Chief of the CIA’s Far East Division, another regional team turned to even worse violence over the prospect of the merger. According to Halpern, while in Bangkok, Thailand, Kirkpatrick tried to prevent rival OSO and OPC from "shooting live bullets at each other.” Halpern claimed that “OPC did the shooting” while “OSO did not.” The tensions escalated further: “OPC kidnapped the OSO communicator thinking the OSO station would be incommunicado with Washington since it couldn’t send messages. This was done by OPC guys in the field, it wasn’t ordered by Washington. They forgot, or they didn’t know, that the two guys at the OSO station were old United States Army communicators from World War II so they could communicate, and they told Washington what had happened.”

At the time Kirkpatrick was believed by many, including Copeland, to be on the fast track to senior Agency leadership. He declined to mention any violence in his memoirs, only mentioning “a trip that took us around the world” and how it was capped at headquarters with a “memorable session chaired by General Smith at which all division and staff chiefs of the two offices were told the terms of the merger. At that session Smith was at his brutal best and was blunt and impatient with those who questioned the wisdom of merging the two offices.” Less than a week later, Kirkpatrick began to feel the effects of the polio he had contracted on the Asian tour and spent eight months in the hospital. He recounted the initial symptoms: “First, my left leg stopped working, then the right; then the paralysis spread until finally all that I could do was barely lift my head from the pillow and feebly raise my left arm.” FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote a letter to Beetle Smith, expressing regret at the CIA’s loss. When Smith visited Kirkpatrick in the hospital, “For God’s sake, doesn’t Edgar think I can run the Agency without you?" Realizing his empathy was lacking given Kirkpatrick’s condition, he followed this up with: “Don’t worry about the fact that your legs won’t work; all I care about is your brains.” Paralyzed from the waist down, Kirkpatrick worked in a wheelchair for the rest of his career, appointed CIA Inspector General in 1953 by Smith’s successor, Allen Dulles.

Unlimited Money

When Copeland was assigned as leader of the Political Action Staff at the CIA, they set about identifying priority areas of the world worthy of the focus of U.S. covert action. These were countries “which had in them materials or locations that were absolutely essential to our survival and well-being—raw materials, possible sites for military or naval bases in the event of war, areas we would have to cross in order to be sure of speedy and economic access to essential raw materials or places of strategic military importance.” All told, Copeland remembered there being around 30 countries and geographic units that fit this definition of strategic importance to the United States, Copeland noting that “the so-called Arab world was listed as one unit.” Despite this intended focus, Copeland believed that the Agency’s size and actions spun out of control given the number of CIA staff members stationed overseas. “Once there, the station chiefs weren’t going to sit on their thumbs,” he later wrote. “They immediately set about convincing themselves and us back in Washington that their respective areas of assignment were hotbeds of political activity which, if not stopped, would certainly spill over into neighboring areas in which there were countries on our priority list.”

There was always the matter of what funding the government should assign to each geographical area. Early in his CIA career, Copeland found the Agency's obsession over organizational charts and budgets tiresome. Working for the Near East and Africa (NEA) Division, he needed to figure out if certain countries like Egypt needed $1 million or $50 million allocated to them. How the hell should we know? he thought. Help arrived in the form of a desk officer for Syria who brought to Copeland’s office a proposal for $1.2 million for the country (worth $16 million today). Now Copeland had a basis upon which to build: if that much was required for Syria, then Iraq needed $2.4 million as it was twice as important. Egypt was four times as important and would therefore require $4.8 million. Using this method, Copeland remembered the NEA amount totaling around “$20,000,000 (or probably $21,467,233.56, or some such finely honed total), although none of us had the vaguest notion of what, exactly, we would be spending it on.”

Copeland took this calculation to his supervisor, Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt Jr., who was horrified and contextualized his ask: “We’ve got the most important division in the Agency, and if we ask for only a piddling $20,000,000 everyone will laugh at us.” The team increased the budget ask five-fold “and we got it!” Copeland recalled with amazement. “OPC started out with no more than three or four hundred people...By 1953, the next time I went off on a foreign assignment, it had well over five thousand.”

In 1950, Allen Dulles hired Tom Braden as his personal assistant at the CIA. Braden, who later became a journalist and CNN host, was interviewed in a 1975 documentary on the Agency’s unlimited funds in its early days:

QUESTION: Did the CIA ever have to account for money it spent?

BRADEN: No, it never accounted—it never had to account for the money it spent, except to the President if the President wanted to know how much money it was spending. But, otherwise, the funds were not only unaccountable but they were unvouchered, so there was really no means of checking it, unvouchered funds meaning expenditures that are not—don’t have to be accounted for.

QUESTION: Is that the only agency, government agency, which had that kind of system?

BRADEN: Yes, that was the only one, because the other things that were secret, Secret Service, and so forth, were on very tight budgets. But if the Director of the CIA wanted to extend a present, say, to someone in Europe, a labor leader. Suppose he just thought this man can use $50,000; he’s working well and doing a good job—he could hand it to him and never account to anybody.

QUESTION: Were there a lot of handouts like that?

BRADEN: Oh, yes, a lot. I don’t mean to imply that there were a great many of them that were handed out as Christmas presents. They were handed out for work well performed or in order to perform work well.

QUESTION: For influence...

BRADEN: One, you influenced them, yes. Politicians in Europe, in Europe, particularly right after the war, got a lot of money from the CIA.

QUESTION: Do you think the CIA was too [big] for its own good?

BRADEN: Since it was unaccountable, it could hire as many people as it wanted. It never had to say to any committee—no committee ever said to it, you can only have so many men. It could do exactly as it pleased. It made promotions, therefore, for every contingency. It could hire armies. It could buy banks. There was simply no limit to the money it could spend and no limit to the people it could hire, and no limit to the activities it could decide were necessary to conduct the war, the secret war.

QUESTION: And you say it could have any money it wanted. Do you really mean that?

BRADEN: Yes, any amount of money.

QUESTION: So you’re saying the CIA became like a multinational.

BRADEN: It was a multinational, yes. Maybe it was one of the first.

Finding Someone to Hate

In order to join the CIA, Copeland had to answer a series of questions from Agency psychologists. One asked him to name quickly, without much thought, three people he hated. Copeland took a few seconds to scratch his head and replied that he could not think of anyone. “Oh, come on,” the doctor responded. “Surely there’s someone you dislike.” Copeland thought that there was no one he had ever met that he really disliked, but he knew this was not the answer being sought. “Well,” he added, “I’m not so hot on Adolf Hitler.” He was expecting laughter but this remark received no reaction. Another psychologist then followed up by asking him about his religious beliefs. Now Copeland knew what they wanted: he replied that his ambivalence was due to a “glandular deficiency” which “had no moral base whatever.” He went even further, offering himself as a willing participant in assassination plots: “And if you want me to ice someone, I’d be happy to do it,” he smiled. “Just don’t ask me to hate him.” The psychologist wrote in their assessment of Copeland “thoroughly amoral character” and passed him to his first overseas assignment.

Although he failed to mention it during the session, Copeland later admitted that he could have provided a name from his experience with the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) during World War II. While stationed in London in 1942, he became enamored of the English concert pianist Moura Lympany while hearing her playing while he happened to be walking outside the Cambridge Theatre one afternoon. A music aficionado and trumpet player himself, he marveled at the “combination of arpeggios winding up a Rachmaninov concerto that I knew very well, sounding as though they were being passed back and forth by two pianos.” He scammed his way inside by pretending to be a representative from the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra who was to discuss an upcoming tour of the United States with her. The ploy worked and he was face to face with Lympany as she ended the main portion of her concert and Copeland struggled to be heard over the thunderous applause of the audience. He introduced himself and Lympany offered that Copeland join her entourage back at her home in Oxshott “after I play an encore.”

Among Lympany’s numerous companions was someone whom Copeland found immediately contemptible. He was Colin Defries, a man in his late 50s “who looked like Igor Stravinsky, wore thick horn-rimmed glasses, smoked cigarettes in a long holder, and looked very, very sinister.” Worst of all in Copeland’s mind, he happened to be Lympany’s “guardian, companion, accompanist and, as I soon discovered, lover.” Unbeknownst to Copeland, Defries was 32 her senior and the two had wed in 1940. Copeland could tell immediately in interacting with Defries that there was “an instant non-mixing of chemistries” between the two of them. His positive view of Lympany, however, only grew as the evening went on and he engaged with her and a handful of her friends in conversation on the limo and train ride to their home in a residential area of Surrey. He was enthralled as they both spoke in English and French and ate a “picnic-type dinner” at the elegant home of Lympany and Defries. Copeland could not believe his luck as he and Lympany spent hours talking in front a log fire and he stayed at their place overnight. He woke up to a “fine English breakfast” and went for a walk with Lympany and listened to her practice the piano for two hours before taking the train back to London.

Lympany would be a perfect companion if it were not for her husband in the way. “If there was nothing in the experience to justify jealousy on the part of Colin,” Copeland admitted, “it wasn’t for want of trying on my part.” He took Lympany to lunch a few days later and then to dinner on Saturday night with his CIC colleague Frank Kearns and the British actress Rosalinde Fuller, whom Kearns had met in a manner similar to Copeland and Lympany. To his great dismay, Lympany brought along her husband to the dinner at Mirabelle in London, and Copeland was infuriated at Defries’ comments on how he found Americans “refreshing”: in Copeland’s recollection, he found Defries “obnoxious, dominating the evening’s conversation, showing off his impressive skill at making insults sound like compliments.” Most of the subtle insults, Copeland felt, appeared to be directed at him personally. Here was a “problem” as defined in his CIC work manual, “something to be eliminated en route to an objective.”

In discussing this “problem” with his CIC colleagues, Copeland was shocked that Kearns actually “liked” Defries. The trio discussed several approaches of getting Defries out of the picture before Kearns suggested: “Why not just kill him?” They were in the middle of a war, after all, which would “kill lots of people. What’s one Svengali more or less?” Copeland rationalized that Defries “had nefariously lured an innocent young girl, a musician and a genius like myself, into his evil clutches.” Lympany’s story that he had learned from her was that she found herself without a place to stay following the start of the war, when she happened to be out on tour in Europe. Defries, “a wealthy industrialist and fine amateur pianist,” stepped in and offered her to stay at his Oxshott home, where he could play orchestral parts as she practiced her solo piano parts. The two married as the offer was too good to resist; while Copeland and Lympany had been born nearly a month apart in 1916, he noted that Defries was old enough to be her father.

Over the next few months, Copeland set about with his CIC work friends Kearns and James Eichelberger “in all seriousness” to come up with plans “to murder a reputable British citizen, and we did so with all the care and professionalism that I later brought to bear on problems of national import when I was working for the CIA.” The plan they landed on involved having Defries “clubbed during a brawl in a low dive,” with the important detail that the act be carried out “by someone else” as suggested by their Major, Kirby Gillette. The plan included contingencies and alternatives if events unfolded differently and Copeland circulated the plan widely for comment, incorporating suggestions from others. He even went as far as approaching a sergeant and an inspector with Scotland Yard, but he was disappointed to discover that they did not approve of his plan: “They are hopeless!” he wrote 40 years later. “Not only do they disapprove of murder on principle, they throw up every bureaucratic obstacle there is to be thrown up, and in Great Britain that’s saying a lot.”

So intensely proud of his “masterpiece,” Copeland submitted his plan up the chain of command, hoping for recognition. His superior Gillette referred to as “a work of fiction written up purely as a classroom example of sound staffwork” and his boss, a colonel, only wrote back: “I hope you are putting such talent as this to good use.” Rather than being assigned to catch spies, Copeland was tasked with chasing after security violations, both “real and imaginary,” work that he found immensely boring. For years afterwards, Copeland would receive Christmas cards from old Army colleagues referring to him as “Killer Copeland,” inquiring if he had “zapped any Limeys lately?” Copeland assured readers of his memoir that he “would not actually have gone through with the murder plot. I’ve killed, oh, perhaps half a dozen people since, but never anyone with whom I’ve mixed socially.”

Within a few years, Copeland had joined the nascent CIA, which also explored possibilities for the untraceable assassination. A 1949 letter from a consultant to a man named “Bill” at the CIA outlined a series of chemical methods in addition to those types contemplated earlier that decade by Copeland: “There are two techniques which I believe should be mentioned since they require no special equipment besides a strong arm and the will to do such a job. These would be either to smother the victim with a pillow or to strangle him with a wide piece of cloth such as a bath towel. In such cases, there are no specific anatomic changes to indicate the cause of death...”

In her 1991 autobiography, Lympany wrote of Defries’ marriage proposal to her: “Colin could see that the strain of years of work added to the perils of war were telling on me and that I was nearly at the end of my tether. He told me I was terribly in need of someone to look after me. He proposed to me and so I faced a difficult decision. I was not in love with him and told him so, but this did not deter him...” Lympany asked Defries: “Suppose I fall in love with a younger man?” In response, he winced as if she had struck him in the face. He ultimately replied that of course he would let her go if that were the case, but that really she “needed a proper home so you can give all your energies to your music instead of worrying about earning a living.” She “grew to love him” and became “blissfully happy.”

By 1950, however, she had fallen in love with Bennet Korn, an American television executive, and she requested that Defries honor the bargain they had struck and they retired to their separate rooms. The next morning, it took several hours before Lympany realized she had not seen or heard any sound from Defries in his room. She knocked on the door but heard no reply. Entering the room, she found him in bed, still asleep, but when she touched him he did not react. Terrified, she called a doctor who determined that Defries had taken an overdose of sleeping tablets. After he was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, she resolved to continue with her marriage, despite their ages now being 34 and 72. This lasted another nine months, wherein she continued to correspond with Korn until she “could stand it no longer.” Lympany and Defries eventually divorced in 1950; in the agreement, she let him keep their home in Oxshott to her eventual dismay. Defries later remarried and had a son. Lympany married Korn in 1951 and she tried to start a family, but after two miscarriages and a son who died shortly after birth, the pair were divorced in 1961. Defries died two years later and is now mostly remembered as an early flight pioneer in Australia, having taken his first flight in a Wright Model A on December 9, 1909. Copeland did not manage to obtain a footnote mention in Lympany’s life story: after spending months planning her husband’s murder, he saw her once more only to discover that despite his obsession, Lympany “had trouble remembering who I was. So that was the end of it.”

Syrian Shootout

Copeland’s State Department bio laid out his educational background, spelling out first his full name: Copeland, Miles Axe, Jr.—born Birmingham, Alabama, July 16, 1916; Ramsay High School graduate; University of Alabama 1933-34; Birmingham Southern College 1937-38; Washington College of Law 1938. Despite his lack of attendance at Ivy League schools in contrast with many of his later CIA colleagues, he wanted everyone to know that he was in fact a genius. After taking a U.S. Army IQ test, he claimed he scored in the 160s, which brought him to “roughly the same” level “as the estimated IQs of Albert Einstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Jesus Christ as calculated by a group of psychologists at Stanford University…”

Working his way through the early incarnations of the CIA (Office of the Coordinator of Information, Office of Strategic Services [OSS]), he became involved in the post-World War II period in bringing Nazi scientists and intelligence personnel to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip. Once the war “was over and forgotten” he believed, the Nazis “would be valuable to us in facing any new enemies that might have grown out of it.” Among the captured German prisoners of war, scientists would be identified “sometimes over protests of the camp commanders who knew that most of them were Nazis, to take them to special quarters where they were to be given VIP treatment.” Citing his “glandular deficiency” when it came to morality, Copeland “was all for the operation” despite opposition from his colleagues: “Eichelberger, Jim Gardner and others in our Paris CIC unit who were still university liberals at heart would have nothing to do with it, and the Jews among us were practically in tears when they heard about it.” Copeland felt that preventing a third world war justified any method the U.S. government wanted to employ and saw “no reason to take revenge on the Germans, however horrible their crimes had been.”

As Copeland grew “tired of listening to the outraged arguments” regarding smuggling Nazis “past the Nuremberg investigators,” he was fascinated by the prospect of joining an overseas assignment with the CIA after being praised for his “fine work with fleeing Nazis.” He was looking to engage “in a bit of clandestine hanky-panky with the justification that it was in the national interest.” A spot had opened up in Damascus, Syria since a former Marine captain had failed the polygraph test “for, of all things, being a homosexual!” Copeland wrote. “The marine Captain had buggered just one RAF pilot, just one, and he didn’t enjoy it (‘It was sort of an experiment,’ he explained), yet he was now to be known for the rest of his life ‘as a fuckin’ fairy’, as he put it. He didn’t think it at all fair, and when he told me all this as I ran into him striding angrily down the hall of L Building he was on his way to complain to his Congressman. All the same, he was fired, leaving the important Damascus post up for grabs.” His State Department biography shows his undercover posting there began on July 3, 1947.

Copeland prepared for his assignment in the NEA reading room, absorbing as much as he could regarding a land about which he knew very little. He learned that “Damascus was beautiful, climatically comfortable and utterly fascinating.” He likened it to “a middle-sized Colorado town,” from what he could glean from photographs clipped from National Geographic magazines, featuring homes for diplomats that looked “very much like the villas of rich folks in Southern California.” From State Department files, Copeland learned that their attitude was that Arab countries would be natural allies of the United States were it not for “mischievous or misguided leadership—theirs, not ours.” If these countries could not understand that they should fear the Soviets and that “our oil companies were going to make them rich,” then their leaders deserved to be overthrown or more precisely, the CIA would “enable their own people to overthrow them.”

Syria was selected as the first country to be tested using a “free” election model. “It is in good shape economically,” he explained to a local agent, “it has a population untamed by years of Turkish and French subjection, and the conditions for democratic elections are ideal. Fairly run elections will certainly be won by intelligent and co-operative leaders.” By this, he meant that the elections “would not only be fair but would come out as we wanted.” When the local population soured on the Americans, such elections would have resulted in the closure of the U.S. diplomatic mission and “all of us being declared persona non grata.”

The next step in 1949 was to effect a coup d’état, led by the Syrian Army chief of staff, Husni al-Za’im. Two of Copeland’s agents in the Ministry of Defense had worked on his instructions to portray al-Za’im in reports and correspondence “as a soldier who was not only 100 per cent loyal to his political supporters but insufficiently imaginative to be otherwise.” The ploy worked, the agents employing a local cultural sensitivity that someone who had “grown up in a foreign culture couldn’t possibly understand. They did a superb job...” Made leader of the entire Syrian army, he was in a prime position to orchestrate a coup. Desk officers reading Copeland’s reports back at CIA headquarters were under the impression that given the detailed planning accounts that the Syrian CIA station was running the entire affair, but Copeland later admitted that he let HQ believe this to bolster his reputation within the Agency. His fellow CIA officer Stephen Meade did ride around in a limousine showing al-Za’im different targets to seize during the coup, including the radio station, power generators, telephone company, and opposition politicians. al-Za’im sat listening politely and “pretended that he hadn’t thought of them already.” Copeland’s most important contribution was providing al-Za’im with assurances that the U.S. government would “immediately give him de facto recognition” once he took power.

One disinformation campaign led by Copeland called into question his claims of possessing the highest level of intelligence. Learning from an embedded agent that the head of the current government’s intel agency in Syria suspected Copeland of being leading CIA operations in the area, Copeland and his associates set what they believed to be a trap to smoke out the government officials snooping into Agency affairs. Bringing the idea to al-Za’im, Copeland claimed he responded: “Yes, you must have the agent in your Legation report…that Copeland is in the habit of keeping all personally incriminating documents in his home, not in his Legation office, thereby tempting him to make a raid on it. We’ll have military policemen on hand to arrest the raiders. Then we can point to the incident as further evidence that things are not safe for foreign diplomats in Syria. Leave the rest to me.”

When the planned day of confrontation came, Copeland lay on the floor with fellow associates in his home, which had been rigged with teargas to “go off when one of them tried to open the top drawer of my desk.” al-Za’im had told them to expect three unarmed men to raid the home, looking for documents from Copeland to prove his espionage work. The doorbell rang at 9:00 p.m. that evening and a light was flashing through the window. Copeland was anticipating “an easy time” as he lay on the cold tile floor since he and his co-workers were armed. There was a crash at the front window and four men climbed into the home, guided by a flashlight. They crossed the CIA men’s line of vision and entered Copeland’s home office. Meade decided to not wait for the deployment of teargas and yelled “Lights!” and continued in Arabic: “Come out slowly with your hands up!” That move would be a pivotal mistake as it turned out the intruders were also armed.