BY FREDERICK DEKNATEL
The New Republic - JANUARY 6, 2014
In September 1947, on the day the Central Intelligence Agency was
formally established in Washington, D.C., two of Teddy Roosevelt’s
grandsons, Archie and Kim, drove from Beirut across the Lebanese
mountains into Damascus to meet a fellow spy named Miles Copeland.
Archie, 29, was the CIA’s first station chief in Beirut; Copeland, 31,
was its man in Damascus. Kim (or Kermit Jr., whose namesake and father
had roared around the Middle East like T.E. Lawrence during World War I)
would, by 1949 at age 33, head the CIA’s covert operations in the
region. For now he was traveling, nominally, as a private citizen,
working on a book based on his posting to Cairo during World War II for
the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA.
In two
years, Copeland would help engineer the first military coup in the Arab
world: the 1949 bloodless putsch by Colonel Husni al-Za’im in Syria. To
what degree is a matter of debate, including Copeland’s own boasts, and
then retractions, in subsequent memoirs. Archie would try and fail to
engineer another military overthrow in Syria in 1957, after a series of
coups and countercoups in Damascus (Za’im only lasted a few months
before he was overthrown and executed by rival officers). But the 1947
meeting, like the men’s CIA years in the Middle East during the Truman
and Eisenhower administrations, was a mix of business and pleasure. As
Copeland later wrote, after Archie and Kim arrived in Damascus, they set
out “on a tour of Crusader castles and off-the-beaten-path places.”
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