Ropes of Sand

America's Failure in the Middle East

Wilbur Crane Eveland

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781504050074
• eBook ISBN: 9781504050050
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

A "stinging indictment" of US foreign policy and covert operations in the Middle East from a former military attaché and CIA operative ( The Christian Science Monitor).
After the close of World War II, former army intelligence agent Wilbur Crane Eveland trained as a military attaché, specializing in the new focal point of global concern: the Middle East. In the decades that followed, he personally witnessed the evolution and many blunders of American Middle East policy from embassies of Arab states, inside the Pentagon and the White House, and as a principal CIA representative in the region. Finally, as a petroleum-engineering consultant, he lived with the results of America's errors.
In Ropes of Sand, Eveland delivers a richly detailed assessment of the mistakes, miscalculations, and outright failures he observed. The governments the United States armed to defend the Middle East against Russia ended in collapse. American support of the Shah of Iran led to disastrous results. Many of the major crises the US faced, from the energy shortage to the border issues of Israel, had been forecast decades earlier. Eveland explains the country's failure to understand these problems and shows why every proposed solution, from the United Nations Partition Resolution for Palestine to the Camp David Accords, only added fuel to the fire. His insider critique is essential for understanding the Arab Spring, the threat of ISIS, and the ongoing conflicts we face in the region today.
 
First released in 1980, this memoir was initially blocked from publication by the CIA for its revealing and critical discussion of numerous covert operations, some of which Eveland engaged in himself.

CHAPTER ONE

The Genesis

On January 8, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson announced America’s Fourteen Point plan for a “peace without victors” that led to the armistices ending the First World War.

Just as the defeated European countries took solace from Wilson’s assurances that no nation would profit from the war, so the peoples of the Ottoman Turkish Empire looked to the United States to allow them self-determination and autonomy. Although America’s allies hoped to divide and annex parts of Arab Asia and Turkey as spoils of war, they were dependent upon American support in rebuilding Europe. Britain, France, and Italy therefore accepted Wilson’s proposal for a system of League of Nations mandates to oversee the transition of the Ottoman Empire to independence, the shape of the future states to be based on surveys of the wishes of the indigenous peoples.

Having already divided among themselves spheres of influence in the area and made commitments to various factions in order to secure political advantage and wartime support, America’s allies were hardly pleased by the prospect of plebiscites. In the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, Great Britain and France had defined their claims, looking forward eventually to an Arab state or confederation within the Anglo-French spheres. Great Britain was given Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), while France took Syria (including present-day Lebanon), although Britain was granted access to the Syrian ports of Acre and Haifa. Palestine (then southern Syria) was to be placed under some form of international control to ensure universal access to the Christian, Moslem, and Jewish holy places, especially Jerusalem.

As the price of Arab participation in the war against Turkey, however, Britain had guaranteed independence and territory to the two opposing dynasties on the Arabian Peninsula: the Wahhabis, under Emir Abul Aziz ibn Saud; and the Hashemites, under Emir Hussein. Not only were Great Britain’s promises to these dynasties in some ways conflicting, but its commitment that Hussein’s son Feisal would rule an Arab state from Damascus clashed with the Sykes-Picot provision that Syria be within the French sphere.

Then, in 1917, further undermining its promises to the Arabs, the British government promulgated the Balfour Declaration. This viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of “a national home for the Jewish people” on the condition that nothing should be done that would “prejudice the civil and religious rights and political status of existing non-Jewish communities or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

Almost simultaneously, the new Bolshevik government of Russia made public the various secret agreements of America’s allies, exposing the British and French plan to apportion the Near East between them and rule without popular consent. To counter Arab outrage over these revelations and the Balfour Declaration, Britain renewed its pledges to grant the Arabs independence and “full opportunity of once again forming a nation of the world.”

On July 4, 1918, President Wilson responded to these British and French machinations in a speech denouncing all secret agreements and giving America’s assurances that the Arabs under Turkish control could look forward to “an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity for autonomous development.” Thus, these Arabs had good reason to believe that the United States would be a guarantor of the independence they sought after four hundred years of Turkish subjugation.

CHAPTER TWO

Journey into History 1918–1948

Those of us born in 1918 were promised a future in a world made safe for democracy. There would be no more wars, no secret diplomacy, no treaties dividing the world into colonial empires, President Wilson had pledged. But the U.S. Senate rejected American membership in the League of Nations, their position reflecting public opposition to involvement in the affairs of other nations.* As for the destinies of the people assured independence from the Ottoman Turkish Empire, few Americans understood the promises made by the Allied Powers to the Arabs. The possibility that the aspirations of these people might someday affect America’s security seemed as remote as the Near East itself, then a rail-and-sea voyage of six weeks from my native state of Washington.

At the time of my birth, Spokane was still close to its frontier past. Squaws bearing papooses were a common sight; they lived in tepees on nearby reservations. Miners and loggers from Idaho came to Spokane for its brothels and speakeasies. Fort George Wright, the garrison from which the area had been settled, was still active, and the sounds of its bugle calls reached my home. While growing up, I visited the fort often, fascinated by the uniforms, drills, and retreat parades. I was enchanted also by my grandfather’s stories of coming west to Washington Territory to homestead a farm near the place then called Spokane Falls. I made him repeat his tales of leading posses when he was a county sheriff, and I wanted to be a police chief, as he had also been, when I grew up. My urge to travel grew as I accompanied my grandfather to the distant sites of the pioneering highways he built when he became a contractor.

The depression years of my youth were lean, giving me special incentive to earn money. In high school I worked nights for Western Union, and the delivery of telegrams to passengers on transcontinental trains was part of my job. Roaming through the Pullman cars, I often dreamed that I’d be carried off with them to distant places.

Determined to see the wider world, I joined a Marine Corps Reserve battalion (lying about my age) and spent my seventeenth summer at Puget Sound Navy Yard. The next year, my last in high school, I took the West Point examinations; unprepared, I failed the written tests, and I put aside my hopes for an army commission and foreign travel for a time.

I worked in Spokane for a while, but growing restless, I set off for San Francisco, where a part-time job enabled me to take courses on the Berkeley campus until the next summer’s marines encampment at San Diego called me away. Returning home, I heard of England’s declaration of war on Germany and began to think of enlisting in the service. Not then fancying the life or status of a private, I decided to see what else life offered.

Christmas 1939 was difficult for me. My father was hard hit by the depression, and we quarreled about my wanderlust. During the middle of the night I started to hitchhike east. I had no definite plan; I knew only that I was determined not to return until I became successful. My timing was terrible: as I moved across the snowbound northern states, I was often left off by farmers in freezing weather, with only haystacks or culverts for shelter. Short of money, I deferred my quest for independence long enough to stay with relatives of my father in his native New Jersey.

There I learned about my paternal heritage. When I visited the home-site of a grandfather three generations removed, Major Nathaniel Crane, and was told that George Washington and Lafayette had been quartered there while they planned raids on British stores on Staten Island, I made up my mind to enlist and seek an army commission. Again leaving at night, in order to frustrate plans of my relatives to return me to Spokane, I hitchhiked to Boston and enlisted as a twenty-one-dollar-a-month regular army private on February 13, 1940. A strong sense of controlling my own destiny accompanied this decision: my life would have started in Boston had my parents not moved from there to Spokane three months before I was born.

I was assigned to Fort Banks in Winthrop, just outside Boston. By the end of 1940 I had passed a competitive examination for becoming a staff sergeant. To prepare for the West Point preparatory school for enlisted men, I took extension courses held on the Harvard campus.

Then, in January 1941, I was summoned to the post commander’s office. After warning me that my visit was to be kept secret, the colonel left me standing at attention and stalked out of the room.

A man seated on a couch behind me laughed and then said, “Relax, Eveland, the Old Man doesn’t like taking orders from corps headquarters.” This, it turned out, was a lieutenant from First Corps Area G-2, a military intelligence officer. Far from comfortable before this officer in civilian garb, I racked my mind to come up with what I’d done to get in trouble. Was having lied about my age to enter the Marine Corps Reserve a crime? I finally blurted out, “What’s wrong, sir?”

Grinning, the lieutenant told me that I was one of ten men selected from throughout the Corps Area for assignment to secret intelligence duties. Relieved, but not knowing what was involved, I spoke of my desire to attend West Point. “We know all about that,” the lieutenant responded impatiently, “but that’s all off. Our country may soon be at war. Meanwhile, we have to guard against potential enemies from within. You should be flattered that you’ve been chosen for the Corps of Intelligence Police.”

As I accepted an invitation to be seated, a blue leather folder was put into my hand. On the outside, embossed in gold, was the seal of the War Office, United States of America. Inside, printed over the outline of a badge reading “Corps of Intelligence Police,” was certification that the lieutenant in the identifying photograph was “entitled to exercise the authority and perform the duties provided by law and regulations.” I was duly impressed, as the lieutenant intended, but perhaps more than he knew. I was staring at the oval-shaped silver badge he held in his hand, enameled in black on its face, bearing the letters CIP. I was thinking of my grandfather and his days as a sheriff.

Snapping me back to reality, the lieutenant explained that the CIP had been formed in 1917 to protect the American Expeditionary Force against espionage. The only American counterespionage organization at the time, the CIP had been maintained after the armistice, although its strength had dwindled to 40 by 1938. In 1940, however, with the exposure of spy rings in the United States and the threat of war, the authorized strength of the corps had been increased to 188. I’d been chosen to be one of this number.

My acceptance was taken for granted. I was told to hurry to my barracks and pack while it was empty. I was not to explain myself to any soldiers I might meet, the lieutenant cautioned, and I would never return to Fort Banks. My records would be collected by the post commander, who would explain my departure.

Gathering my things, I accompanied the lieutenant in a staff car to a small Boston hotel. There he explained th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• SERIES INTRODUCTION
• AUTHOR’S NOTE
• PREFACE
• 1 The Genesis
• 2 Journey into History—1918–1948
• 3 Thirty Years of Indifference
• 4 Starting the Odyssey
• 5 The View from Washington
• 6 Ominous Precedents
• 7 In Defense of Oil, the Shah, and the Khyber Pass
• 8 Farewell to Arms
• 9 At the Highest Level
• 10 Spooky Corridors
• 11 Wait and See
• 12 Apple-Pie Diplomacy
• 13 Peace or Plots?
• 14 Game Plans
• 15 The Ticking Clock—1956
• 16 A Nibble on the Bait
• 17 Through the Glass Darkly
• 18 Suez and the Bluff
• 19 The Drop
• 20 Friends and Enemies
• 21 Uncertain Secrets
• 22 The Eisenhower Doctrine
• 23 Candidates and Coups
• 24 The Philby Connection
• 25 Gathering Storm
• 26 Showdown
• 27 Death of a Doctrine
• 28 On the Outside Looking In—1959–1974
• 29 Denouement in Lebanon—1975
• 30 Looking Back and to the Future
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Copyright