A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East--from the Cold War to the War on Terror

PROLOGUE

America in the Middle East

Night had long since fallen over central Saudi Arabia in early 2004 when George Tenet came trudging out of his bedroom in Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s palace and asked for scotch whiskey.

In Riyadh, the capital of a conservative Islamic monarchy where alcohol was banned and women were not allowed to drive, it was possible in the cloister of the Saudi royal family to grant this wish to the American director of Central Intelligence.

Tenet had retired for the evening, or so the household thought. His security detail was bedded down.

It was unusual for a CIA director to have such a close relationship with a foreign envoy, but Prince Bandar was an unusual figure, having served for more than two decades in Washington as ambassador to four American presidents, having traveled the globe on discreet missions for his king, and having nurtured long-standing friendships—almost familial in character—with George H. W. Bush and his son, George W. Bush.

The CIA delegation had arrived late and eaten sumptuously from a buffet of lamb, salad, and sweets that Bandar’s staff laid out. A CIA bodyguard and two senior officers, the director of the CIA’s Near East Division and the agency’s general counsel, had accompanied Tenet for the overnight. The CIA station chief, based in the kingdom, had joined them, as had Prince Salman, Bandar’s younger half brother. But Tenet’s group was tired and groggy from a tough itinerary that included a high-security stop in Iraq. The next morning, they were headed for Amman, Jordan.

Tenet took a sleeping pill and Bandar walked him down the hall to the guest room and said good night. But fifteen minutes later, the door to Tenet’s room opened and closed. The director was stalking the elegant corridors in search of the prince. Bandar and his closest aide, Rihab Massoud, were still up watching television in the family room, which offered an inviting splay of well-stuffed divans oriented toward a wall covered with large-screen televisions. This high-tech array, with nine news channels on display at once, was a feature of Prince Bandar’s villas, manor houses, and chalets around the world.

One wall of the broad living area was glass, which opened onto a large veranda paved with the blond native stone of central Arabia and overlooking a sparkling pool and a grove of date palms. Each year, the dates were harvested and sealed in vacuum packs to be delivered as gifts to friends of Prince Bandar and his wife, Princess Haifa, the youngest daughter of the late King Faisal.

On one wall, a portrait of Bandar’s grandfather, King Abdul Aziz al-Saud, the tall and powerfully built warrior who had unified modern Saudi Arabia and who had cast the country’s lot with America, looked down on them with a stern visage.

The prince had just suggested to Massoud that he, too, stay over because it was already 1:00 a.m. They were talking about Iraq and the troubles that had befallen the administration of George W. Bush when Tenet reappeared, disheveled in his boxers and T-shirt and with thunder in his mood.

I can’t sleep, he said.

A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.

They’re setting me up. The bastards are setting me up, Tenet said, but I am not going to take the hit.

The prince understood what Tenet was talking about. Someone had to take the blame for the missing weapons of mass destruction—the overarching pretext for the war in Iraq—and Tenet was raging against the realization that the White House expected him to fall on his sword to protect the president.

As the scotch melted what was left of his restraint, Tenet began to flail verbally at his enemies: the assholes in the Pentagon, the crazies and sneering ideologues in the White House, especially around Vice President Dick Cheney.

According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the right wing of Israel’s political establishment, referring to them with exasperation as, the Jews.¹

More scotch. More invective.

After arriving in Riyadh, Tenet had spent part of his time on his secure phone back to Langley sometimes shouting over the instrument to his deputy, John McLaughlin. Fuck you… no, no, no, we are not going to take this… we’ve picked enough shit off our backs. Those were the lines that echoed in Bandar’s ears, and it seemed that Tenet was spitting mad, negotiating, indirectly, with the White House on what would be said about the intelligence meltdown.

I am going to protect the agency and my ass, Tenet had stated emphatically.*

Tenet was going to need a lot of protection, because by early 2004 the sham of the prewar intelligence had been revealed. David Kay, the veteran United Nations weapons inspector and chief of the Iraq Survey Group in Baghdad, had abruptly resigned and stated publicly that he didn’t think Saddam Hussein had possessed any stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.

We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 28. Kay had seen enough to conclude that it is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons there. Not only Americans were shocked. Many Iraqis—scientists, military men, and Baath Party officials—had assumed, as the CIA had, that Saddam maintained hidden stockpiles of weapons.

We weren’t smart enough to understand that the hardest thing in intelligence is when behavior remains consistent but underlying reasons change, Kay told the senators. Though Saddam had built a terrifying military mystique based on chemical warfare in the 1980s, the Iraqi dictator’s desire to end United Nations sanctions impelled him to destroy his arsenal. Apparently, it was as simple as that. Even Saddam, after his capture, admitted he had kept up the pretense that he was armed with weapons of terror: You guys just don’t understand. This is a rough neighborhood.²

After Kay’s bombshell, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that he, too, was having second thoughts about the war based on Kay’s testimony. The absence of a stockpile [of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq] changes the political calculus, he told the editors at The Washington Post, pointing out that the Americans had overwhelmingly supported the war with the understanding that there was a stockpile and there were weapons that posed significant threat to the United States and its allies. Powell all but retracted his remarks the next day, but the damage had been done.

For many Americans, such candor from inside the intelligence establishment was both illuminating and devastating. It didn’t matter that the Survey Group had reaffirmed Saddam’s capacity to reconstitute his illicit weapons program, or that he had been developing ballistic missile systems that might deliver new weapons in the future. It didn’t matter that Saddam had killed or scarred tens of thousands of Kurds and Iranians with nerve agents or mustard gas, or that he had been twice discovered developing nuclear weapons. Hadn’t the Israelis destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 to block one effort at getting an atomic bomb? And a decade later, UN inspectors discovered and destroyed a second and more advanced nuclear program.

All that mattered in the winter of 2004 for many Americans—and Britons as well, for they had been mobilized for war by the same intelligence claims—was that they had been colossally misled. Kay said that it was important that we acknowledge failure, but acknowledging failure was not something that came easily to the Bush administration when so many lives had been taken and so many billions spent on a war that had bogged down into a costly, low-intensity conflict against Iraqi insurgents and an influx of al-Qaeda operatives.

The White House had begun erecting its defense: Bush had relied on Tenet and the CIA in making the final decision for war based on the unambiguous CIA assessment that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction—the slam dunk case, as Tenet had famously referred to it.³Tenet knew that, in the end, he bore responsibility for the final intelligence judgments on Iraq that were presented to Bush. The National Intelligence Estimate that the CIA had produced and that had served as the foundation of the administration’s case for war was Tenet’s product. And it was wrong.

Tenet had tried to defend himself in public. In the intelligence business, you are almost never completely wrong or completely right, he said in a speech at Georgetown University days after Kay’s testimony. The CIA painted an objective assessment for our policy-makers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests.

Now the flaws in the CIA’s analysis, its deductive leaps, the unreliable sources were coming back to haunt Tenet’s doorstep, and the sulfurous tone that was filling Bandar’s spacious family room suggested to the prince that his friend had made up his mind to leave the administration.

My run is done, Tenet had told his top aides on the plane coming out to Saudi Arabia. We did our job. We called it like we saw it, but this is going to be a rough period and I think I want to get out.

The lines of loyalty and trust that had sustained Tenet in the Bush circle had snapped. Now the question was whether Tenet would leave with a modicum of dignity, or whether his enemies in the White House would drive him out unceremoniously, because Tenet had always had detractors among the neoconservatives. It was also an election year. The 9/11 Commission Report was due out, and Tenet knew that the CIA was going to get blasted for having withheld critical information from the FBI about two of the 9/11 hijackers who had been in the country for eighteen months before the attacks.

Bush had been one of Tenet’s defenders. Tenet’s under lots of pressure, but I am going to stick with him—I like him, Bush had confided to one of his Iraq advisers the previous October.⁴

To Bandar, Tenet was a lot like Powell: instinctively loyal, protective of the boss, and a strong member of the team. Neither was martyr material. They might remonstrate privately, but that was just part of the process of giving in to the inevitable realization that they would have to leave.

I would like to go swimming, Tenet suddenly announced.

Bandar and Massoud exchanged looks of alarm; Tenet was clearly too drunk to swim. All that scotch on top of a sleeping pill: How long would he be conscious? They followed closely out into the warm midnight air of Riyadh as Tenet rumbled down the stairs, still in his underwear, and threw himself into the water.

Somehow Tenet managed to hold on to a Havana cigar and a glass of scotch. But his watch flew off and CIA aides dove to the bottom of the pool to retrieve it. There was the director of U.S. intelligence, bobbing up and down, trying to recover his mood with humor and defiance. He did impressions of Yasser Arafat and of Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian intelligence chief who loved to make sport of how fat Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, had become.

Tenet gazed down at his own mountainous girth. He had gained thirty-five pounds during his directorship. I’m a pig! he shouted into the night.

Bandar watched from a stool by the bar where a Pakistani servant was mixing drinks. Let the guy have a swim; it was the least he could do for Tenet. Bandar had observed five American presidents from close quarters and he recognized the political excision that was under way.

There was nothing Bandar could do to save the best friend he had ever had in a CIA director. Though the antiterror war had gotten brutal, Bandar believed that Tenet had performed a great service to the United States and to its allies. No CIA director—not even the legendary William Casey of the Reagan era—had worked as effectively in the Middle East to build an intelligence alliance that actually worked behind the veil. Tenet had a gift for personal relations. He laid on hands, he shared gossip about despots and potentates, and he kept secrets. He had won the confidence of the Arabs as well as the Israelis. He demonstrated American trust by presenting key foreign leaders with CIA secure phones that enabled them to speak to the president or his aides without risk of interception. Among the first to receive them had been the Saudi royal court and the Israeli prime minister’s office. Bandar had his own CIA phone that traveled with him. These intelligence relationships continued to function even when diplomatic channels were roiled by George W. Bush’s hard edges or the unilateral bent of his foreign policy.

Tenet had done an unparalleled job of organizing America’s allies against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the wake of the September 11 attacks. He had dispensed hundreds of millions of dollars to the intelligence services of moderate Arab states—Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco—and to allies in Eastern Europe and Asia. He had built a formidable coalition and expanded agent networks in the Muslim world; he had shared technologies to put terror suspects under surveillance. He had broken down barriers, sharing raw voice cuts—conversations intercepted by the National Security Agency—with foreign intelligence services so native Arabic speakers could help identify them.

Tenet had been especially attentive to Saudi Arabia. He had traveled personally to the kingdom the year before to present the evidence to Crown Prince Abdullah, the day-to-day ruler, that al-Qaeda was planning to assassinate members of the royal family and that al-Qaeda cells were shopping for Russian-made nuclear weapons. Tenet’s warning, delivered with Prince Bandar at his side, had led to a broad crackdown on al-Qaeda in the kingdom.

Tenet and the CIA had taken the gloves off in the war on terror.

He had overseen the rendition of terror suspects who were dispatched on CIA planes to secret prisons or interrogation facilities in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. He had overseen the development of controversial interrogation methods, such as waterboarding, a simulated drowning that incites gagging and panic. It had been approved by Bush for use in these secret chambers. To any reasonable person, it was torture, but Tenet had been prepared to employ and defend such techniques because he and the president believed—they later said as much—that they could preempt new terror attacks with the information.

Those were the days when the American public overwhelmingly supported taking strong measures to prevent another attack on the U.S. homeland. The details of the CIA interrogation techniques were highly classified; the public was unaware until long afterward that George W. Bush had sanctioned torture in 2002 and 2003 against major al-Qaeda operatives in captivity⁵ In April 2004, when the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses were documented in Iraq, public revulsion set in; the instinct to take the gloves off dissipated when Americans saw what it had led to.

George W. Bush with George Tenet: one an idealist, one a pragmatist—and both called it wrong in the Middle East.

Tenet’s case had to be handled carefully. Bandar, too, knew that the president had very specifically and graphically instructed the CIA to do what was necessary to extract information about possible terrorist attacks. Bush had expressed himself brutally in meetings that Bandar had attended because Saudi Arabia was a full partner in the American coalition to destroy al-Qaeda in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Why can’t we send them to be tortured? Bush had asked in one such conversation about al-Qaeda suspects.

Stick something up their ass! Bush had said. America was at war. Bush was willing to authorize tough tactics, even torture.

Look, I just can’t afford to see any more people in America die, he rationalized.⁶

Some of the scenes involving Bush that Bandar and Tenet had witnessed in the wake of 9/11 had been Strangelovian, and there were going to be court cases, maybe even criminal charges over the treatment of detainees. Bandar felt that the White House would be making a big mistake if it assumed that allegations of torture and detention in secret CIA prisons were going to be George’s problem. Tenet had made it clear to Bandar that he was not going to be the fall guy—everything the CIA had done, it had done with the authorization of the president, with review by the attorney general and briefings to key members of Congress. They both knew who had authorized the CIA to do what.⁷

Now, Tenet was going down.

Bandar deeply regretted his departure from the CIA because Tenet, along with Colin Powell, the secretary of state, and Tony Blair, the British prime minister, represented an informal cabal during the George W. Bush years. They understood the Middle East in the way Bandar did—that it was essential to work for peace in the Holy Land because the tragedy of Palestinians living under occupation for forty years represented an open wound that profoundly affected attitudes not just in the Middle East but throughout the world as a reservoir of grievance, passion, and anger. It fed the psychology of righteous retribution—the terrorist instinct—on the streets of Gaza, Ramallah, and Jenin, but also among those Islamic clerics throughout the world who preached an extremist course to impressionable young Muslims.

The four of them—Blair, Powell, Tenet, and Bandar—had worked in different ways and, at times, in concert to encourage George W. Bush to pursue a more pragmatic policy in the Middle East, one that balanced a determination to use military force to protect American interests with a humanistic agenda to bring an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and to establish a viable Palestinian state.⁸

Their energy was arrayed against an equally formidable policy cabal that also had the president’s ear, including Vice President Dick Cheney, his chief of staff Lewis Scooter Libby Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council (NSC) staff and, in the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, and Douglas Feith, the deputy secretary for policy. This neoconservative group of senior officials and their aides appealed to the president’s idealism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. They urged him to think of his presidency as a mission to expand the boundaries of freedom while ruthlessly attacking terrorism. The Palestinian cause was a sideshow and Arafat had discredited himself by playing the terror card when it suited him.

They defined terror as an all-encompassing evil in the Orwellian sense that ignored historic grievance or local political context; in this worldview, any state or political movement whose most militant adherents resorted to violence was the enemy.

Tenet might be taking the fall, justifiably, for the prewar intelligence blunders, but he also was walking away from the larger struggle to define America’s interests more pragmatically in the Middle East, and that was a struggle that connected him and his like-minded colleagues back through the line of American officials to Eisenhower and Dulles, to Truman and Roosevelt, each of whom laid down foundation stones of American policy based on self-interest, a strong sense of justice, and a magnanimous American spirit.

Tenet believed that Bush had the strength, the vision, and the will for great achievement in the Middle East. He could use those strengths to do what was necessary to close the deal—to create a viable Palestinian state that had been put on the table during Clinton’s final days in office. And both he and Bandar were disappointed by Bush’s delay and prevarication.

The prince was the most reluctant to give up on Bush. Over twenty-five years, the former F-15 pilot had become a phenomenon of Saudi-American relations, with unparalleled access to the White House, but also to European and Asian capitals. He was rumored to maintain a private dialogue with the director of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, about the requirements for Middle East peace; he lobbied both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush on a secret nuclear initiative: Would Washington consider putting moderate Arab nations under a NATO nuclear umbrella as a hedge against the growth of Iran’s power? And he used his private channel to Bush to make the case for setting a time line for creating a Palestinian state at peace with Israel before he left office.

The White House was seven thousand miles away across desert and ocean, but its wires were still intimately connected to Bandar, the Westernized prince of the House of Saud, and to Tenet, the beefy son of Greek immigrants from Little Neck, Queens, who was now wrestling with the beast of his disappointment in Bandar’s pool. It was tragic, and the intensity of the scene inspired surreal fantasy: What on earth would they do if he drowned?

In the annals of U.S. foreign policy, Tenet’s last night in Riyadh in April 2004 was not unprecedented. Other powerful men had been unhorsed or come unglued in the bureaucratic wars fought over policies forged confidently in Washington but played out disastrously overseas. Tenet was not the first or the last senior member of the Bush administration to suddenly recognize the cleavage between traditional American ideals and the ideological cant and whimsy emanating from the White House. Powell would follow him out the door by the end of the year. The collapse of the intelligence underpinning the invasion of Iraq, Tenet’s political demise, and the bloody insurgency that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and inflicted an incalculable cascade of destruction during the U.S. occupation of Iraq was the most current expression of a half century of costly miscalculations in the Middle East, the sum of which has deepened the American predicament.

This book is a history of the American experience in the Middle East over the past half century. It is a story of ten U.S. presidents and how they engaged or confronted the region and its leaders. The particulars are taken primarily from the declassified record of successive administrations buttressed by interviews with key players, recollections drawn from memoirs, oral histories, and other accounts. My aim is to understand—and to help the reader understand—the chaotic and very human perspective with which our presidents look out at the world while remaining tethered to politics at home.

It is essential to say at the outset that this narrative leads to a surprising conclusion about U.S. foreign policy. After nearly six decades of escalating American involvement in the Middle East, it remains nearly impossible to discern any overarching approach to the region such as the one that guided U.S. policy through the cold war. And, after endless cycles of conflict, an alarming buildup of arms, civil strife, and an escalation of religious confrontation, American leaders have been unable to agree on a firm set of principles, a consistent set of goals, or a course of action that could bring peace and stability to the Middle East. What stands out is the absence of consistency from one president to the next, as if the hallmark of American diplomacy were discontinuity.

Dwight Eisenhower, when confronted with a crisis, liked to say the fat is in the fire, and it often was in the Middle East. Arab-Israeli wars broke out in 1956, 1967, 1969, 1973, and 1982. Islamic revolution in Iran was followed by the eight-year Iran-Iraq War (1980-88). Libya invaded Chad. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Israel pummeled Lebanon in 2006 following a Hezbollah incursion. Each catastrophe blindsided or flummoxed presidents who wondered how, given the billions of dollars spent on American spy satellites and the most extensive intelligence apparatus in the world, surprise was the most frequent denominator in the Middle East equation. War, for the most part, triggered escalating interventions by superpowers, whose arms deliveries were fueled by the run-up in Arab oil-producing wealth. Presidents found themselves reacting to events, or flailing at the last minute to head off the violence, as Jimmy Carter did in the face of Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Tehran and the Soviet army’s march into Afghanistan.

Given the extent of American commitment in the region today—in response to the aftermath of war in Iraq, the rise of Iran’s power, devastation in Lebanon, and the ongoing struggle between Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land—it is surprising to look back and realize that for most of the last century the Middle East was not a crucial region for the United States. When Eisenhower and Richard Nixon captured the White House in 1952, the Middle East was considered a backwater. Israel had been a state for only four years and most Americans had only a passing familiarity with the history of the region. But with the declaration of Jewish statehood in 1948, together with the rise of Arab nationalism, the advent of oil politics, and Islamic revivalism, ignorance gave way to curiosity and, eventually, to the near obsession with which America now seeks to manage its affairs in the region. If anything mattered more than religion for many Americans—because the Middle East was synonymous with the Holy Land—it was oil. Oil had won the world wars. Access to Middle Eastern oil was essential for America’s postwar development. In the event of renewed world war, the control of oil would be pivotal to Western security.

Because of this, the victorious powers that emerged from World War II—Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States—came to see the Middle East as a zone of competition. British and French colonial armies withdrew, abandoning possessions and protectorates that had been secured for centuries; they gave up bases along the Suez Canal and in Algeria and Bahrain. It was not surprising that America would come to the fore, if only to block Moscow’s opportunities. But it was far from inevitable that America would prevail, and what is most striking about the half century of U.S. effort is the record of vacillation, of shifting policies, broken promises, and misadventures, as if America were its own worst enemy. The Middle East would never have been an easy region to master for the purpose of protecting U.S. national interests, but our mistakes have made it progressively harder to do so. The cumulative effect of American diplomacy has fed the anti-American rhetoric that is heard on the streets in Middle Eastern capitals, even in countries nominally allied with the United States. While it would be overstatement to say that John F. Kennedy reversed Eisenhower’s approach, Lyndon Johnson reversed Kennedy’s, Nixon reversed Johnson’s, and so on, the most prominent feature of this chronicle of presidential thought and action is how much each leader sought to distinguish himself from his predecessor—a very human trait—and in doing so injected a permanent element of instability to Middle East policy.

Kennedy, for example, thought it was crucial for the United States to prevent Israel from obtaining nuclear weapons; he was certain such an eventuality would give rise to a nuclear arms race in the region, or could prompt the Soviets to place a nuclear umbrella over Israel’s Arab foes. But by the time Nixon entered the White House, the focus had shifted to building up regional allies like Israel and Iran with massive infusions of conventional weapons and a studied silence about their secret nuclear ambitions.⁹ Thirty years later, Bill Clinton’s frenetic and undisciplined peacemaking efforts in the Middle East were abandoned by an incoming George W. Bush, who rebelled against the notion of spending political capital in endless negotiations with Arab and Israeli leaders at Camp David, the site of previous Middle East breakthroughs. The intensity of partisanship that flowed out of the 2000 presidential election called forth a hubristic mantra among the Bush advisers, who insisted that the new president would be very un-Clintonian, and Bush himself said he would be unlike his father in dealing with the Middle East.

Some historians argue that history is shaped by tectonic forces among nation-states seeking a balance of power or a kind of equilibrium. But this chronicle of American involvement in the Middle East is rooted in the conviction that history arises chaotically from the scrum of human events, where the tactical maneuvering of leaders, local politics, and the seemingly random eruptions of war, revolution, and natural disaster drive the human narrative more profoundly, and unpredictably. Tectonic forces count. Playing the balance-of-power game is one path along which heads of state may proceed, but this can cause them, fatally at times, to ignore the finer mesh of social, religious, and intellectual upheaval where the turns of history take place.

America’s engagement with the Middle East demonstrates just how dramatically history goes its own way. It also reveals how outsized personalities and freewheeling intellects arrogate unto themselves the prerogatives of power, putting self-interest ahead of national interest with willful and history-changing acts. Witness the conspiracy of allies to deceive Eisenhower in the Suez crisis, or Anwar Sadat’s amazing decision to go to Jerusalem to break the psychological barrier to peace. Consider Kissinger’s breathtaking deceptions during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War; or Nixon’s betrayal of his own desire to engage Leonid Brezhnev for comprehensive peace in the Middle East. Witness the depth of Alexander Haig’s contempt for Ronald Reagan, who was so little prepared for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that he had to spend the next two years zigzagging across a burning landscape to find an adequate American response. All the while, the death toll mounted for American civilians, diplomats, and the marines in Beirut.

Though many analysts believe that American foreign policy is heavily influenced by the pro-Israeli lobby in Congress, and others assert that the great economic power of the Arab oil-producing states weighs heavily on presidents, it is startling how quickly these salients of leverage and political influence, which are real, sometimes are swept aside.

When Saddam Hussein’s army overran Kuwait in August 1991, George H. W. Bush and his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, built a coalition of Arab states—including Syria and excluding Israel—to oppose Saddam on the premise that Arab cooperation was critical if the Iraqi dictator was to be defeated. Bush was firm that Israel not be allowed to participate in the war, or even in the search for Scud missiles that Saddam’s forces fired against the Jewish state, because Israeli involvement would have split the American-Arab coalition.

But after the Persian Gulf War cease-fire, Bush pushed Israel’s interests back to the fore. He convened a Middle East peace conference in Madrid that afforded respect to all the parties, most particularly for Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli prime minister, who became the first Israeli leader since 1948 to sit with the Arab leadership and debate their rival national claims. Even so, the competition between Jews and Arabs to sway U.S. presidents in order to gain the upper hand in congressional debates or to seize the moral high ground in public opinion is now a permanent aspect of American foreign policy. And this fact reaffirms the contours of the core dispute.

The creation of a Jewish state in the heart of the Arab world has proved to be one of the great rifts of history brought about by an equally great confluence of events at the end of World War II. Ever since the Zionist brief to establish a Jewish homeland was elevated to the level of moral imperative by the Holocaust, the Arab-Israeli dispute has loomed over every American effort in the region. It arises, of course, from two competing national claims on the same land, where the Bible documents the birth of Hebrew nationalism that was crushed and dispersed by Rome, though never extinguished. Islamic conquerors supplanted Rome in the Middle East, and when the Zionists returned in numbers in the late nineteenth century, a population that was predominantly Arab and Muslim was still in charge of the Holy Land. The dispute has animated politics, diplomacy, and war since the first stirrings of Arab nationalism in the early twentieth century and Arab passions were vented against Jewish pioneers living under Ottoman rule. The depth of this conflict is so profound that some modern political figures have sought to escape its power over the diplomatic agenda by denigrating its importance, arguing that America has a larger stake and a broader portfolio in the region. During the presidency of George W. Bush, the conflict was shunted aside by neoconservative strategists who reassigned the conflict as a local issue, one not worthy of the president’s attention and not worth investing political capital in, as Bill Clinton had done painfully and without substantial results over his eight-year term. Some even argued that the road to Palestine lay through Baghdad—in other words, that once America had toppled the region’s worst dictator and established a democratic model in the Arab world, resistance to a Pax Americana would melt and old conflicts would settle under the force of American will or military coercion. When these chimeras fade, the core conflict reemerges, more complex and more deeply felt than ever. And if history has revealed anything, it is that it takes American leadership, robust leadership that galvanizes the Congress and world opinion, to bring the two sides—Arab and Israeli—into a position where they have a chance to solve it.

Many historians have produced insightful portraits of postwar American leaders, but even the best of them lack extensive familiarity with the Middle East and its personalities. This book attempts to join the two worlds to show that it is not enough to perceive Eisenhower’s or Nixon’s or Clinton’s Middle East outlook without also understanding Nasser’s zeal for the Arabs, Ayatollah Khomeini’s rage against the West, Saddam Hussein’s ruthless ambition, or Osama bin Laden’s alienation from the modern world.

The United States still stands as the indispensable power in the Middle East. Yet American leadership, especially during the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, has measurably declined. The security of the West, including that of the continental United States, has steadily eroded in the face of intensifying enmities and grievances directed at Washington. American policy mistakes have cost countless thousands of lives. They have sundered landscapes once vibrant with diverse cultures, and they have squandered hundreds of billions of dollars of resources.

Most distressing for America today, and for a new American president, is the task of untangling the policies of the past, of addressing the acute hostility that has developed toward a country once trusted as an honest broker, of containing an unrelenting arms race that has introduced nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to the region, and of bridging the intractable differences that lie at the heart of the Middle East’s most long-standing conflict.

It is high time Americans reached a consensus—both at home and with our allies in Europe and Asia—on the next steps toward peace and security. To achieve this, a new president will need help—from a bipartisan congressional leadership, from academia, and from trusted allies. Above all, he will have to reestablish America’s standing as a benevolent and magnanimous power capable of engendering trust and exercising leadership—with continuity.

These requirements may appear self-evident, but they can be fulfilled only when Americans gain a fuller understanding of their own history in the region that was not always apparent in the making because so much was shielded by the strictures of classification, diplomatic artifice, or just blatant concealment and obfuscation. The foreign policy of great powers is difficult to distinguish or separate from domestic politics, and because of this, Americans will have to protect any consensus from the tactical maneuvering of politicians, domestic grandstanding, and demagoguery. They will have to distinguish among sound national strategy, interest-group lobbying, and propaganda, all of which are part of the background noise and of the occasional foolishness of modern media. As Americans, we may know who we are, but we may not understand how we are regarded or how our policies are perceived in the Middle East. And so we must learn who we are in fuller dimension if we hope to succeed in the region that is critical to our future. That is the story that this book aims to tell and the question it hopes to answer.

* The scene at Prince Bandar’s palace is taken from the accounts of three people who witnessed it, including the CIA Near East division chief, who was responsible for writing the trip report and who was not drinking. Tenet, in an interview, initially suggested he had not stayed at Prince Bandar’s palace. He then denied that he had said anything during his midnight foray to the pool, which he asserted was of short duration. He disputed the remarks attributed to him and denied that his memory might have been affected by the amount of alcohol he was reported to have consumed on top of a sleeping pill. The CIA general counsel who accompanied Tenet to Saudi Arabia also disputed the account of the other witnesses, saying that he was with Tenet every moment during the evening; he asserted that Tenet did not make the remarks attributed to him by others.

1

THE ARAB AWAKENING

Eisenhower, Nasser, and Suez

John Foster Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, had a bloodless and terrifying manner when conveying American disquietude. He was a righteous man—his critics said self-righteous—and his formidable intellect, honed by practicing diplomacy and international law for nearly half a century, radiated a Calvinist certitude that could be unsettling, if not pompous. On the last weekend in October 1956, it was this very tone that was emanating from the secretary’s chair as he looked out from the edifice of his discontent and demanded from Abba Eban some kind of explanation for what was happening in the Middle East.

Why, the secretary of state wanted to know, was the Eisenhower administration receiving intelligence reports by the hour indicating that a full military mobilization was under way in Israel?¹

Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, was prone to sit as erect as a British schoolboy. A charming studiousness animated every muscle in his face and was meant to show Dulles how seriously he took the secretary’s concern. There was also, perhaps, a slight furrow of puzzlement to signal that Dulles was not likely to get a real answer because Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was not prepared to surrender details at this most sensitive moment of conspiracy.

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, and raised in England as Aubrey Meir, Eban changed his name as Ben-Gurion and others had changed theirs to accentuate their Jewishness. Educated at Cambridge University, Eban represented the British intellectual school of Diaspora Jews, whose number included many scientists and academics whose contribution to the nation-building process would prove crucial.

Eban had served with British forces during the war as a liaison to the Jewish Agency before rushing to Palestine in 1948 and then to the just-established United Nations, where he assisted in marshaling the votes needed for the creation of the Jewish state. For the first eight years of Israel’s existence, he had been serving as its ambassador in America, working to expand its recognition internationally and voraciously defending its prerogatives as a sovereign and independent nation.

These were years during which Israel was a tenuous outpost of a million or so Jews in a sea of fifty million Arabs. People, not least the Arab leaders, were betting that the Zionist enterprise would not survive. Its budget consisted of loans and donations. The achievements of each year were measured by hectares cleared, meters of irrigation pipe laid—in other words, the full metrics of anchoring a state on the Mediterranean shore. While some toiled, others rescued displaced persons, survivors of Hitler’s extermination campaign, and still others opened camps for Jews arriving from Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, and Yemen. The Zionist dream was now a frenetic, day-to-day task of breaking rocks on barren landscapes to build up an agricultural base, seize and channel water resources, lay out a plan for industry, and construct housing for the flood of immigrants.

Sitting there in Dulles’s intimidating presence, his dark hair combed neatly back above black-framed glasses in the style of the times, Eban was ever the London sophisticate, though given what he knew, he had every reason to be nervous. He had quick eyes and an impressive expanse of jowl. Put Eban at a podium, stand him in the pit of diplomacy, and he could call down the heavens with a ringing oration. His voice had become one of Israel’s most powerful weapons.

In the midst of the War of Independence, when Israel had existed barely a fortnight and was under Arab attack, Eban had taken the rostrum at the United Nations to warn the Arab leaders of their folly: Israel is the product of the most sustained historic tenacity which the ages recall, he told the delegates. The Jewish people [have] not striven towards this goal for twenty centuries in order that, having once achieved it, it will now surrender it in response to an illegitimate and unsuccessful aggression. Whatever else changes, this will not. The State of Israel is an immutable part of the international landscape. To plan the future without it is to build delusions on sand.² Words flew out of Eban as if he were tearing them from Scripture.

Dulles’s aides had tracked Eban down at Congressional Country Club in the Washington suburbs where he had been enjoying a round of golf with Congressmen Sidney Yates of Illinois and the journalist Martin Agronsky. Israel’s mobilization looked opportunistic to most analysts in the State Department. The Jewish state faced no immediate provocation, yet it had summoned its population to arms. Men and women dismounted their tractors and reported for military duty—but what duty?

Now, pinned to his chair like an insect before the secretary, Eban was desperately short of a strategy. Dulles had handed him a copy of President Eisenhower’s letter to Ben-Gurion of the previous day warning against any precipitous military action by Israeli forces. Eban had to think fast. He studied the letter for a few moments, then pointed out that the secretary had placed him in a position that made it difficult to respond. If he had been given a copy of the president’s letter on Friday, he might have had the opportunity to cable home, before the Sabbath, for some instructions or elucidation about the mobilization that was of such great concern.

Next, he parried the limited facts that were in Dulles’s possession.

Israel might be overreacting with this mobilization, he said, but it had very good reason to fear that the Arab nations were concerting together in preparation for an attack on Israel. Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian leader, had whipped up the Arab world to a crescendo. A joint command had been established among Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian forces. Preparations for attacks by Arab fedayeen—self-sacrificing martyrs with guns—against Israel had been detected by Israeli intelligence; also detected were Iraqi troops near the Jordanian border. Israel had to be prepared, Eban said, and so it should be no surprise to the secretary that some reserve battalions had been called up.

Instead of allaying Dulles’s suspicions, Eban only incited them.

Some reserve units had been called up, Dulles repeated Eban’s words. No, no, no. That was not what Dulles was talking about. According to his information, Israel’s armed forces were totally mobilized. Totally. Hundreds of thousands of able-bodied men and women had dropped their civilian routines and reported to military units, bringing the economy to a virtual standstill. Of course, Israel had a right to call up its reserves, Dulles said, but he wondered why Eban would minimize the extent of this vast mobilization. According to the information he possessed, Israel had called up all of its reserves.

What could be the purpose? Was it the situation in Jordan?

Dulles knew that Jordan’s monarch, the twenty-year-old King Hussein, was shaky on the throne. His grandfather, King Abdullah, was one of the Hashemite princes whose line had long ruled in Mecca as descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. Both Iraq and Jordan were unique British protectorates owing to the fact that they were created to reward the progeny of Sherif Hussein, the Hashemite patriarch in western Arabia who had thrown in with the British to defeat the German-Ottoman axis in World War I.

Abdullah and his older brother, Faisal, had fought with Colonel T. E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia—against the Ottoman Turks because they believed imperial Britain would allow the Arabs to reclaim the glory that had existed under the caliphate, the early Islamic empire, by reestablishing its realm on the Arabian Peninsula, in Mesopotamia, and across the Levantine crescent to include Damascus, Beirut, and Jerusalem.³But the British had broken most of their promises, allowing the French to kick Faisal out of Damascus and standing pat as Sherif Hussein himself was driven out of Mecca by Abdul Aziz al-Saud, the upstart desert warrior from central Arabia who was unifying a state that would take his name, Saudi Arabia. As a consolation, Winston Churchill had put Faisal on the throne in Iraq; Abdullah was imposed on the Arab population of a new state that the British colonial office had dubbed Transjordan (later, simply Jordan), a wedge of desert that would come to include East Jerusalem and the Old City, where the holy mosques al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock stood on ancient Jewish foundations.⁴ This artificial desert kingdom was facing the threat of overthrow by pro-Nasser students and Palestinians, who made up the bulk of Jordan’s population.

King Hussein’s cousin in Iraq, King Faisal II, had marched Iraqi troops westward to bolster the loyal elements of Jordan’s armed forces. Ben-Gurion suspected that Iraq was positioning itself to take over the eastern half of Jordan if Jordan’s monarchy collapsed.

The United States and Britain had taken pains to consult with Ben-Gurion over the Iraqi troop movements—meant to stabilize Jordan—but the Israeli mobilization seemed to give the lie to Ben-Gurion’s reply that Israel was not threatened by the Iraqi force.⁵

Did Israel fear an attack from Jordan? Dulles asked.

Yes, Eban replied, it did—he was now on the verge of blatantly deceiving the secretary of state. Given Israel’s fears, Eban continued, he understood that its mobilization might raise the question of whether Israel’s intentions were defensive or offensive. But all of his information, Eban said, indicated that Israel’s mobilization was for defensive purposes.

This was a lie, of course. Eban knew more about the mobilization than he was allowed to say. He had just returned from Israel. Ben-Gurion had called home his ambassadors as a way to signal that he was preparing to take action against Jordan. It was a grand deception, for it had been plain for some time that if Jordan fell apart, Israel would be tempted to seize all of the territory west of the Jordan River that had been part of the historic land of Israel.⁶

That would leave nothing for any future Palestinian Arab state as envisioned by the UN’s partition resolution of 1947, and the presumption was that Israel would push the Arabs across the Jordan River where they could take over the remnants of King Hussein’s realm.

Since coming out of retirement the previous year, Ben-Gurion had been pursuing an activist military strategy against the Arabs, staging large-scale raids on Jordan and Egypt in retaliation for attacks against Jewish settlements. A raid at Qalqilya on the night of October 10 had turned into a ferocious battle in the densely populated Arab town, and when dawn broke nearly one hundred Palestinians lay dead with as many wounded. The Israeli paratrooper force, under the command of Ariel Sharon, a brash young practitioner of the punitive strike, limped home with eighteen dead and sixty wounded.

Eban had come to understand—he wasn’t fully informed—that the border tension with Jordan was more calculated charade than real invasion. When he arrived home that October, Ben-Gurion pulled him aside and whispered conspiratorially that he was about to fly secretly to France to confer with Prime Minister Guy Mollet on a plan that would have sensational results.⁷ The real target was Egypt, not Jordan. The conspiracy—with Eisenhower and Dulles kept in the dark—was to seize the Suez Canal, overthrow the Egyptian regime, and expand Israel’s frontiers into the Sinai Peninsula and thereby bolt Jewish foundations even more firmly on the Mediterranean shore where the Hebrew nation had been born.

Eisenhower was campaigning for reelection against Adlai Stevenson. The war hero president was riding a wave of popularity—he had ended the Korean War—and not even an incipient uprising in Hungary against Soviet tyranny was going to induce him to betray his political instinct that, above all, America needed a period of peace and prosperity. He was dedicated to building up institutions (the United Nations) and alliances (NATO) that would avert war in the future.

The sum of our international effort, he said in his State of the Union address that year, should be this: the waging of peace, with as much resourcefulness, with as great a sense of dedication and urgency, as we have ever mustered in defense of our country in time of war. In this effort, our weapon is not force. Our weapons are the principles and ideas embodied in our historic traditions, applied with the same vigor that in the past made America a living promise of freedom for all mankind.

Eisenhower looked at the Middle East with the eyes of a military strategist and saw a fulcrum that joined continents, a nexus where lines of communication crossed and, crucially for the future, a basin that held the world’s most bountiful oil supply.

There is no more strategically important area in the world, he had said, and whoever controlled it in a world war would have an enormous advantage.⁸ After Korea, Eisenhower had no illusions about the Soviet Union or Mao Zedong’s China. America had entered a long struggle against international communism. Eisenhower and Dulles believed that the Kremlin leadership was itself seeking to minimize the risk of war, but a global competition for influence and power would be intense. In the Middle East, the American leaders saw the potential for collaboration with the British in erecting a new alliance to block Soviet attempts to encroach on the oil-producing region or to secure warm-water ports for the Soviet fleet. In this competition, Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, the rising star of Arab politics, figured prominently. The British distrusted him. So did Israel, whose national emergence represented a completely new kind of challenge for the United States: here was a state whose very existence was deeply resented by its neighbors.

Truman, who was both emotionally and politically attuned to the Jewish community in the United States—his friend and business partner Eddie Jacobson had been a passionate Zionist—infuriated the British and his own State Department in 1945 by supporting Jewish immigration to Palestine.⁹

Unlike Truman, Eisenhower was not beholden to Jewish votes or the Jewish community’s nascent political fund-raising machine. Eisenhower struck some people as uncomfortable around Jews, though not anti-Semitic. Eban had met him in Paris in 1952, when Eban accompanied Moshe Sharett, the foreign minister, on a trip to Europe. They had been surprised when the general, the amiable war hero running for president, explained unabashedly how he had come to consciousness about the Jewish experience in history. He told them that as a boy in Abilene, Kansas, he had believed that Jews—he called them the Israelites— were creatures of mythology and legend, like angels or cherubs. He confessed to being surprised and disconcerted to discover upon reaching a certain age that they existed outside the Bible.¹⁰

Eisenhower’s easy confession may have seemed strange and inscrutable to a Cambridge man, but Ike’s awkward Midwestern naïveté masked the calculating politician who had contested and maneuvered among the great egos of the world war. And he had come out on top.

It had again surprised the Israelis—indeed, it alarmed them—that from the outset of the administration, Eisenhower and Dulles worked diligently and creatively to find solutions in the Middle East. The alarm went up because most of these schemes required Israel to give up land or share water resources with the Arabs. Eisenhower’s motivation was straightforward and certainly not hostile to Israel. He was out to protect and expand American interests in the region.

In their first year in office, Eisenhower and Dulles concerted with the British to overthrow Mohammad Mossadegh, the nationalist prime minister of Iran, who had taken the first steps to nationalize British Petroleum’s assets in Iran, Britain’s largest single investment abroad. Eisenhower and Churchill agreed that Mossadegh was a demagogue who would drive Iran into the Communist camp, upending the pro-Western monarchy of the young shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

The CIA’s Operation Ajax to bring down Mossadegh was touch-and-go. Mossadegh stood his ground when the shah issued a decree dismissing him. The fate of Iran teetered when the shah lost his nerve in midplot and fled the country. The CIA was looking at failure until Iranian mobs—with some inducements from American and British intelligence agents—rallied the populace for the shah. The army did the rest. The shah returned to Tehran, and Iran (along with British oil assets) was saved for the West.

Gamal Abdul Nasser with Edward R. Murrow in Cairo: America’s anticommunist in the Middle East

Then came Nasser as the new Arab leader. In the postwar order, Eisenhower understood that ideological loyalty—communism versus democratic capitalism—was the new geopolitical currency in the competition with Moscow for hearts and minds in the so-called third world. Nasser’s appeal was an organizing force and in Washington there was great excitement when he turned against Egypt’s Communists. Washington wanted him to lead the opposition against international communism in the Middle East.

Dulles was getting nowhere with Eban over the military buildup in Israel as Eisenhower’s campaign swung into its final weekend. But he wanted to send a signal to Ben-Gurion. Israel was safer than at any previous time in its short history, he told Eban. There was no need to contemplate war. To the east, King Hussein’s position in Jordan was extremely weak. To the west, Israel had nothing to fear from Nasser because Egypt was locked in a dispute with Britain and France over control of the Suez Canal.

Thinking out loud, Dulles wondered whether Israeli leaders had concluded that the region was so distracted by other confrontations that Israel might take advantage of the chaos and strike out. He did not specify a target, but Dulles knew that Ben-Gurion considered Jordan a non-viable state ripe for the plucking.

Eban said nothing to allay Dulles’s other concern: if Israel attacked Jordan, Britain and France could then seize the moment to attack Egypt.¹¹ Dulles had no idea that a significant conspiracy still was hidden from Washington’s view.

The secretary needed some answers. He told Eban that even the American ambassador in Tel Aviv had not been able to see Ben-Gurion, who was avoiding him by saying he was endlessly tied up in cabinet meetings. This was Eban’s cue to escape Dulles’s glare. He would get through to Ben-Gurion and relay all that Dulles had said and then he would report to the secretary as soon as possible, probably the next day, Monday.

But Monday was the day of the attack.

Eban had deceived Eisenhower’s secretary of state on a crucial matter of war and peace. Ben-Gurion had taken a calculated risk that America would understand (or at least tolerate) the duplicity and deception. But his relationship with Eisenhower never really recovered. Both men knew that America was, potentially, Israel’s most important protector. If world war should ever engulf the Middle East, only America could save Israel from Soviet and Arab aggression aimed at extinguishing the Jewish state. Eisenhower was thus livid when reports of war breaking out reached him in the final days of the presidential campaign.

Israeli tanks and artillery sundered the calm with explosive percussion, causing the Egyptian garrison in the Gaza Strip to dive for cover, returning fire as best it could. But the main attack was deep in Sinai, where paratroopers commanded by Ariel Sharon leaped from transports and caught the Egyptian defenders, who were guarding the passes just a few dozen miles from the Suez Canal, by surprise.

The principle of nonaggression, deeply imbedded in the postwar efforts to stabilize the Middle East after the armistice of 1949, lay in tatters. Another Arab-Israeli war was under way. In Eisenhower’s view, Israel was in brazen violation of the armistice.

The president was so worked up on that Monday that he was ready to call a special session of Congress and throw America’s weight behind the victim, Egypt, a prospect that he did not fancy but felt compelled to consider if anyone was going to take American policy seriously in the future. In the Cabinet Room at the White House, Dulles wondered aloud whether the Israeli assault might touch off a wave of anti-Semitism in the United States, and there was a chorus of muttered agreement among Eisenhower’s advisers.¹²

On the second day, however, all talk of bringing back Congress or of taking immediate action to defend principles ended when British warplanes started bombing Egypt, destroying camps and airfields and brutally killing more than one thousand civilians living in the canal zone.¹³ British and French troops landed with tanks and artillery on the Egyptian coast.

With this unilateral act by America’s closest allies—not only Israel but also Britain and France had deceived him—Eisenhower stood humiliated on the eve of his reelection. Their conspiracy violated everything that bound them to America as allies. And under all that Midwestern affability, Eisenhower’s vanities had been sorely abused. His best friends had torn up the Tripartite Declaration¹⁴ and ignored the greatest power in the alliance. He was flummoxed: How could America confront its own allies militarily? The Western alliance would dissolve. The Soviets would achieve a great victory. What was he to do?

The conspiracy had been finalized just six days earlier, when Ben-Gurion flew secretly from Tel Aviv to Paris. In those days, that required a seventeen-hour entombment in a DC-4. When his plane touched down on a rain-soaked runway in the French capital, an unobtrusive motorcade whisked his party to a villa in the Paris suburb of Sèvres. With him were his military chief of staff, Moshe Dayan, and Shimon Peres, a young Defense Ministry aide to the prime minister. Greeting them in secret was the Socialist prime minister, Guy Mollet.

With the whole group arrayed before the French leaders, Ben-Gurion spoke in Hebrew of his fervent desire to tap the power of France, Britain and, he hoped, the United States to redraw the boundaries of the Middle East. The current boundaries did not make sense, he argued. The armistice lines of 1949 did not augur well for long-term security. And Israel, in his view, the newest state with the greatest potential, already felt confined.

David Ben-Gurion, at seventy, had been fighting for the Zionist cause for much of the century. He had arrived in Palestine from Poland in 1906, was expelled by the Ottoman Turks at the onset of World War I, and returned to Palestine in 1918 to eventually head the Jewish Agency as the indispensable organizer of military, political, and social institutions that would provide the structure of the future state.

Excepting Chaim Weizmann, playing the role of Zionist elder from London, there was no one on the Israeli scene like Ben-Gurion, a leader prone to volcanic outbursts, an admirer of Lenin, and a militarist driven by an exaggerated sense of threat. (I am a quarrelsome, obstreperous man, he often said.¹⁵) He was the founding architect, the military strategist, and the political master at once. His