Central intelligence Arabists: how the CIA tilted toward the Arabs in the 1950s and '60s.

• Author: Young, Michael
• Position: America's Great Game: The CIA's Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East - Brief article - Book review

America's Great Game: The CIA's Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East, by Hugh Wilford, Basic Books, 342 pages, $29.99

AT A TIME when intelligence services have come to play an outsized role in American foreign policy, Hugh Wilford's informative and highly enjoyable book America's Great Game imparts some especially important lessons.

Wilford, a historian at Cal State Long Beach, explores the Central Intelligence Agency's actions in the Middle East in the 1950s and, to a far lesser extent, the 1960S. His focus is a group of officials who developed a yen for the Arab world, among them two of President Theodore Roosevelt's grandsons, Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt and Archie Roosevelt, as well as Miles Copeland, better known now as the father of rock drummer Stewart Copeland. This group's brief period of influence illustrates the limits of letting spies play a defining role in a country's diplomacy.

In the aftermath of World War n, the United States greatly expanded its intelligence capabilities, establishing the CIA on the foundation of the wartime Office of Strategic Services. People such as the Roosevelts, elite figures who had engaged in intelligence work during the war and saw government service as a duty, became prime recruits for the new agency.

At the same time, despite their backgrounds and traditional Anglophile streak, the intelligence men focusing on the Arab world tended to favor the emerging nationalism and anti-colonialism there. Wilford's principal contention is that the CIA was far more sympathetic to Arab concerns and hostile to Israel than was Congress and, at times, the White House. This would serve the U.S. well in Egypt during the years after the 1952 coup against King Farouk, when the CIA developed a close relationship with the Free Officers Movement led by the country's new dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The Arabist tradition in the United States owed a lot to the educational and religious institutions founded by American missionaries in the Middle East in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The jewel in that effort's crown was the American University of Beirut, in which the families of several U.S. intelligence Arabists played a prominent role.

How strange this sounds to someone like me, who entered American University in the early 1980S. By that time the CIA was anathema to most Americans supportive of Arab political causes, including a large number of missionaries. They viewed the agency as a place of dirty...