In February 1967, following a trail blazed by the West Coast magazine Ramparts, reporters for the New York Times filed a series of stories exposing a massive covert operation by the Central Intelligence Agency. Shortly after its creation twenty years earlier, the CIA had begun secretly channeling US government funds via pass-through foundations to apparently private organizations of American citizens in an effort to counter similar “front” operations already being run by the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹ The recipients of these covert subsidies included literary intellectuals, labor leaders, students – and a pro-Arab, anti-Zionist organization founded in 1951 called the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME).

The CIA front organizations exposed in 1967 have by now attracted some scholarly attention. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), for example, the Agency's main weapon in the Cold War struggle for the “hearts and minds” of intellectuals, has been the subject of several recent studies.Footnote ² AFME has, though, received relatively little notice, perhaps in part because the group's relevance to the Cold War is less obvious than that of the CCF. Indeed, at first sight, the CIA's support for this anti-Zionist, pro-Arab organization is frankly puzzling given the later emergence of Israel as a major US ally in the Middle East and the accompanying rise of anti-American sentiment in the Arab world, with the CIA in particular developing an almost diabolical reputation among many Arabs. Why was the Agency secretly funding a group one of whose main purposes, especially during the early years of its existence, was promoting the Arab cause to the American public and countering the influence on US foreign policy of the emergent “Israel lobby”?

Answering this question is not easy given that the relevant CIA records remain closed to outside researchers.Footnote ³ Nonetheless, as earlier work has shown, it is possible to reconstruct the history of Agency fronts to some extent from scattered, often coded references in other government record groups, private manuscript collections, and oral-history interviews. Using such sources, and focussing chiefly on AFME's domestic advocacy work during the 1950s, this article will explore the origins of the organization, its characteristic values and relationship with the CIA, and the eventual decline of its influence vis-à-vis the Zionist movement, culminating in the “Ramparts revelations” of 1967.

In doing so, the article will shed new light on two areas of historical inquiry. One of these is the involvement of nongovernment actors and “state–private networks” in the making and carrying out of American foreign policy.Footnote ⁴ As a case study in state–private relations, AFME tends to confirm the finding of much recent scholarship that, rather than being entirely fabricated by the government, such networks typically originated in the pre-existing activism of private citizens and, even after the state had assumed the role of covert patron, exhibited a considerable amount of dynamism thanks to the fact that the citizens and government officers involved usually shared the same values and goals, removing the need for intrusive official management. That said, the state's control of the purse strings did give it the ultimate say in the running of these networks, meaning that they were never entirely free to manage themselves and leading, in some, if not all, cases, to the eventual subordination of the private element to the official. Again, the early history of AFME provides a particularly dramatic, and poignant, example of the latter effect.

Second, and perhaps even more poignant from a contemporary viewpoint, a case study of AFME helps illuminate a crucial, formative moment in modern American relations with one of the world's most troubled regions, the Middle East, and in particular the origins of US policy concerning that most intractable of conflicts, the Arab–Israeli dispute. The United States entered the post-World War II period with barely any official presence in a region that most recently had been the preserve of Western European powers, especially Britain. In effect, these years saw Americans inventing a Middle East policy from scratch. For a brief moment, an alliance of private US citizens and government officials attempted, with some success, to sway that policy in a pro-Arab, anti-Zionist direction. Eventually, however, a combination of factors, including the duality inherent in state–private networks and the growing power of pro-Israel advocacy groups, led to the defeat and dissolution of this alliance. The fate of the American Friends of the Middle East therefore has much to tell us about the subsequent course of US–Middle East relations.

The fact that AFME was created at all reflects the political weakness of Arab Americans relative to American Zionists in the early postwar period. The latter were already well organized in bodies such as the American Zionist Council (AZC) and linked to supporters in the US Congress. Moreover, World War II had greatly weakened the once powerful grip of anti-Semitism on American public opinion, while the horrors of the Holocaust had generated a ground swell of support for the Zionist vision of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, among Jews and gentiles alike.Footnote ⁵ Compared with the sizable Jewish American community, Arab Americans were few in number and lacking in political organization. Absent personal contact with Arabs, many US citizens nursed prejudices about them that drew on classic European “orientalist” stereotypes of the Arab “race” as atavistic, despotic, and cruel.Footnote ⁶ There were some efforts by the Arab and British governments to influence American opinion concerning Palestine, but they lacked public resonance. It was telling that the Arab Office, the information arm of the Arab League, shut up shop in Washington in 1947, blaming a “complete and arrogant disregard for Arab rights, Arab interests, and Arab feelings” in the United States.Footnote ⁷

However, the Arab cause was not entirely without its US advocates. While many American Protestants sympathized with the Zionists, seeing their project as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, others identified instead with the Palestinian Arabs who might suffer as a result. Most important of these were the descendants of nineteenth-century American missionaries to Syria. Although they had failed in their efforts to convert Muslims to Christianity, the missionaries had nonetheless left a lasting impression on the Arab world in the shape of the educational institutions they had founded there, among them the prestigious American University of Beirut (AUB).Footnote ⁸ In addition to earning a reputation among Arabs for “disinterested benevolence,” the founders of AUB and later generations of the American expatriate community in the Levant developed a definite sympathy with the nationalist Arab struggle against European imperialism in the region and, in some cases, an almost mystical faith in the importance of American–Arab friendship.Footnote ⁹ These views were echoed in the United States by mission boards and educational bodies such as the Near East College Association, as well as a group of Protestant theologians around the Chicago weekly Christian Century who disputed fundamentalist Protestants’ linking of Jewish restoration with the millennium.Footnote ¹⁰

Other non-Arab groups likewise supported the Arabs against the Zionists. The US oil consortium ARAMCO depended on the goodwill of the Saudi king Ibn Saud, a fervent anti-Zionist, for its access to Arabian petroleum. Concerned lest US support for Zionism harm its business operations, ARAMCO executives launched a public-relations campaign on behalf of the Arab countries and established an office in Washington partly in order to lobby government. ARAMCO money also found its way to such educational institutions as the Middle East Institute.Footnote ¹¹

A third significant anti-Zionist grouping came, less predictably, from within the American Jewish community. Founded in 1942, the American Council for Judaism (ACJ), a group of “middle- and upper-middle-class lay Reform Jews of German descent,” objected strongly to Zionism on the grounds that it conflated religion and nationality.Footnote ¹² Insisting on the universal character of Judaism, ACJ leaders such as Michigan rabbi Elmer Berger carried on a vigorous campaign to dissuade American Jews from supporting the creation of a Jewish homeland abroad.Footnote ¹³

These various groups struggled to make inroads on the growing popular mood of support for Zionism galvanized by the Holocaust, which the Zionist leadership skillfully harnessed to its cause. Nonetheless, they did strike a chord in the US State Department, where senior officials such as the head of the Near East division, Loy W. Henderson, feared that US support for a Jewish state in Palestine would antagonize the majority Arab population of the Middle East and thereby open up the area to penetration by the Soviet Union. Henderson was probably motivated primarily by geostrategic concerns related to the Cold War rather than, as many Zionist critics charged, anti-Semitism.Footnote ¹⁴ Nonetheless, it would be true to say that he and many of the Arab specialists or “Arabists” who served under him in the State Department failed to understand the transformative impact of the Holocaust on domestic American opinion and resented the democratic pressures that the Zionist movement was mobilizing against them. In any case, the State Department Arabists were glad to make common cause with the assorted pro-Arab, anti-Zionist groups of private American citizens, for example working with the ACJ to try and counter the growing momentum of the Zionist campaign to partition Palestine.Footnote ¹⁵

The crucial figure in this emerging pro-Arab, anti-Zionist state–private network was Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt. A grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt educated at the elite Groton School and Harvard, Roosevelt had served during World War II in Cairo in the Middle East headquarters of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime precursor of the CIA. OSS/Cairo proved to be a nexus of the network that would become the American Friends of the Middle East. Roosevelt was under the command of Stephen B. L. Penrose Jr., a missionary-descended educator, future president of AUB, and ardent anti-Zionist. Moreover, he shared a room with State Department officer George L. Levison, a scion of an old San Francisco Jewish family who would later introduce Roosevelt to such leaders of the ACJ as Elmer Berger.Footnote ¹⁶ (The three men became close personal friends, Berger staying frequently at the Roosevelt family home when he visited Washington and Levison even acting as godparent to one of Roosevelt's children.Footnote ¹⁷ ) During his time in Cairo, Roosevelt developed not only a strong taste for covert action (later expressed in the CIA operation for which he is best known, the 1953 coup in Iran) but also a sympathy for Arab nationalism and opposition to Zionism. After quitting government service in 1947 and revisiting the Middle East on an extended research trip as a private citizen, he undertook a nationwide lecture tour of the United States on the theme “The Arabs Live There Too,” and even wrote a book explaining his interest in the Arab world, Arabs, Oil, and History.Footnote ¹⁸ It was as if Roosevelt was single-handedly trying to craft an Arabist counternarrative to rival the Zionists’ influence on American opinion.

The Zionist victory in securing the historic November 1947 United Nations vote in favor of the partition of Palestine – “A Lesson in Pressure Politics,” as Roosevelt described it in a 1948 articleFootnote ¹⁹  – persuaded the former OSS man of the need to organize the pro-Arab, anti-Zionist elements in American society. In February 1948, he announced the result of his labors: the formation of the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land (CJP). Calling on the UN to reverse partition, the CJP also urged the adoption by the US government of a bipartisan policy toward the region – a thinly veiled dig at Zionist influence on Democratic Congressmen – and American aid for Palestine.Footnote ²⁰ As executive director, Roosevelt ran the organization from the desk of his Washington home, assisted by Secretary Garland Evans Hopkins, a Virginia minister recently returned from a trip to Palestine on behalf of the Methodist Board of Missions.Footnote ²¹ The ACJ provided a vice chair, Rabbi Morris S. Lazaron, and constant logistical support from George Levison and Elmer Berger, who noted privately their hope that their association with Roosevelt and the other anti-Zionist gentiles would protect the new organization against allegations of anti-Semitism.Footnote ²² Also in the background was the ARAMCO executive William A. Eddy, a figure who, by virtue of his upbringing in Lebanon as the son of a prominent missionary family, wartime service as an OSS officer in North Africa, and postwar employment by the oil industry, embodied almost all of the strands of the emergent Arabist state–private network.Footnote ²³ Zionists later claimed that ARAMCO provided the CJP with $2,000, although there is no other evidence to corroborate this claim.Footnote ²⁴ What is clear is that, at least when compared with the later American Friends of the Middle East, the CJP existed in, as Roosevelt put it, a “straitened financial condition.”Footnote ²⁵

Despite some success in gaining the ear of senior officials, including a sympathetic audience with Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the Committee for Justice and Peace failed to reverse the partition of Palestine. In May 1948, President Harry S. Truman, nettled by the sometimes pompous manner of State Department Arabists, and mindful of Jewish American votes in the approaching presidential election, recognized the new state of Israel. Although dismayed by this second Zionist victory in as many years, Roosevelt resolved to keep “plugging away,” pointing out that, while there was no going back on US recognition of the new Jewish state, “There is still room for doubt as to the extent of future support on which that state can count from this Government.”Footnote ²⁶ The following year saw the formation of a new group, the Holy Land Emergency Liaison Program (HELP), whose purpose was to coordinate American aid for displaced Palestinians while working to reduce US support for Israel. HELP's officers included Roosevelt, Hopkins, and Eddy, and its funding was allegedly provided by ARAMCO.Footnote ²⁷ However, it too eventually fizzled out in the face of Zionist resistance and public indifference. Roosevelt's efforts to organize a countermovement to Zionism were, it seemed, doomed to an endless cycle of initial hope and eventual disappointment.

By 1950, however, Roosevelt enjoyed two advantages he had not earlier. One was the support of a genuine American celebrity, the journalist Dorothy Thompson, described in 1939 by Time magazine as the most influential woman in the United States after Eleanor Roosevelt, and reputedly the model for the heroine of the 1942 movie Woman of the Year, a role played by Katherine Hepburn. Earlier a vocal anti-Nazi and supporter of Zionism, during the late 1940s Thompson had grown increasingly critical of Zionist actions in Palestine and what she perceived as the excessive influence of Zionism on American policy in the Middle East. This development was observed closely by both Elmer Berger and William Eddy, who corresponded with Thompson assiduously in 1949–50, trying to rope her into the nascent anti-Zionist network.Footnote ²⁸ The second advantage now enjoyed by Roosevelt was access to the covert patronage of the CIA, or, to be more precise, the Agency's new covert-action arm, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which he had joined in November 1949 as chief of Near East and Africa operations. The OPC was already starting to channel secret subsidies to labor, student, and intellectual groups in the rapidly developing Cold War battle for hearts and minds.

The first sign that the CIA intended extending its program of covert assistance to include Roosevelt's citizen network came in December 1950 when Eddy wrote to the retired diplomat Cornelius Van H. Engert informing him about a plan to create “a small group … to promote fellowship and interest in the Near East.”Footnote ²⁹ In March 1951, Berger, who had just received clearance to undertake part-time consultancy duties with the CIA, wrote to Thompson asking to see her “at a very early date privately on a matter of the utmost importance and confidence.”Footnote ³⁰ Following meetings in Washington involving Roosevelt and other unidentified CIA officers, in April Thompson circulated a letter to a long list of prominent citizens proposing the formation of a group to promote US–Middle East friendship, adding that “some financial support would be forthcoming” for the initiative.Footnote ³¹ On 11 May, the new CIA deputy director of covert operations Allen W. Dulles (a family friend of Kim Roosevelt's) instructed his office staff to expect a call from Engert, who was “engaged in setting up … a committee and [would] need office space and personnel.”Footnote ³² Four days later, on 15 May, twenty-four people meeting at Thompson's Manhattan home formed a steering committee to launch a new organization, the American Friends of the Middle East.Footnote ³³

Despite all these signs of covert official involvement, as of summer 1951 AFME still had an ad hoc, amateurish feel to it, with Engert effectively running the new organization out of Thompson's home, and ARAMCO appearing to exercise as much influence from behind the scenes as the CIA. In October, however, the Agency began taking steps to professionalize the operation, appointing a young member of Roosevelt's Near East staff, Mather Greenleaf Eliot, as its case officer and sending him to New York ostensibly to serve as a personal assistant to Dorothy Thompson. Within a month, Eliot had arranged office space in midtown Manhattan and brought in the former CJP secretary, Garland Evans Hopkins, to run AFME.Footnote ³⁴ At a second meeting of its charter members on 12 December 1951, Thompson announced that the organization had received a gift of $25,000 from a donor who wished to remain anonymous, with a promise of a further $25,000 if the group matched the amount with donations from other sources. (Another CIA front, a women's group called the Committee of Correspondence, likewise received $25,000 from an anonymous donor when it was launched in January 1953.) “Our situation is that we have friends who say ‘Go ahead, but for God's sake don't tell that I gave you any money,’” Thompson informed the meeting, before revealing that the mysterious patron was interested in “piping down some of the radical Zionists.”Footnote ³⁵ Engert rose to the challenge and secured the additional funding during the spring of 1952. Later in the same year, the Dearborn Foundation, only just formed in Chicago, made the first of a series of regular grants to AFME that would, by 1957, add up to a total of roughly $1.5 million.Footnote ³⁶ The Dearborn, whose other beneficiaries included the Committee of Correspondence, would later be identified as a CIA conduit. Although Kim Roosevelt was no longer involved in an open management position, he exerted a strong influence on AFME's affairs from behind the scenes. “One of his ‘little boys’ was up here on Tuesday,” Berger wrote George Levison from New York on 20 December 1951, probably referring to Mather Eliot, “and he tells me that Kim is involved more than ever.”Footnote ³⁷

With CIA money now flowing to the organization, AFME set about creating a permanent administrative structure for itself. In December 1951, the charter members constituted themselves as a national council, elected a board of directors to formulate policy, and created an executive committee to implement it, consisting of the president, Dorothy Thompson; secretary–treasurer, Cornelius Van Engert; and vice president (effectively chief executive officer), Garland Evans Hopkins. While volunteer branches sprang up around the United States and in the Middle East itself, Hopkins created four executive departments – Intercultural Relations, Research and Publications, Public Relations, and Student Affairs – and began establishing field offices in Middle Eastern capitals. This apparatus in place, and with its recorded annual budget rising to over half a million dollars in 1955, AFME embarked on a wide-ranging program of activities. These included staging annual meetings in New York and numerous lectures; hosting visiting Middle Eastern guests and sending AFME officers and grantees in the other direction; student exchanges and support for Arab student organizations in the United States; and a thriving publishing program comprising annual reports, monthly newsletters, a subsidiary news service (Phoenix), pamphlets, and books.Footnote ³⁸

In all its activities, AFME consistently expressed a very clear set of values. As with other CIA-funded citizen groups, one of these was anticommunism. From the outset, AFME was obviously intended to perform Cold War-related cultural diplomacy in the Middle East itself, improving Arab perceptions of the United States and thereby strengthening the region against communist penetration. Hence the organization constantly drew attention to the private American tradition of “disinterested benevolence” in the Arab world, contrasting it favorably with the historic expansionism of Russia. Closely related to this theme was the concept of a “moral alliance” between Christianity and Islam against atheistic communism, an idea particularly associated with the missionary-descended William Eddy, who pushed it heavily throughout the 1950s, among both American and Arab leaders.Footnote ³⁹

But AFME's aims were not confined to Cold War cultural diplomacy. The organization's leaders also believed that they had a mission within the United States to advocate for Arabs and Muslims, and dispel the orientalist prejudices of their fellow Americans. Again, this meant pointing out the spiritual and civilizational heritage that Arab Muslims and Christian Americans shared: “many of our prophets and much of our Scripture,” as Eddy pointed out.Footnote ⁴⁰ It also meant speaking up for Arab nationalism, which AFME announcements equated with the earlier American struggle for independence from Britain. Unlike many American anticommunists in the Cold War era, the AFME Arabists were fully capable of distinguishing between “Third World” nationalism and communism. Some of the organization's leaders, particularly Hopkins and Thompson, vocally criticized the British and the French – US Cold War allies – for continuing to behave like imperial powers in the Middle East.Footnote ⁴¹ In other words, AFME had a domestic agenda that was barely related to the Cold War. Bill Eddy even envisioned a grand synthesis of Christian and Muslim civilizations, one that would confer the benefits of American modernity on the Middle East at the same time as modern Islam conveyed some of its spiritual intensity back into the United States.Footnote ⁴²

In addition to these pro-Arab values, AFME was, like its predecessors the CJP and HELP, thoroughly anti-Zionist. This impulse was to some extent disguised during the first year and a half of its existence, so much so that Israeli officials in the United States monitoring the new organization even entertained the idea of encouraging Zionist groups to cooperate with it.Footnote ⁴³ It is not entirely clear why AFME was so reticent in its anti-Zionism at this point, although several possible factors suggest themselves, including the pro-Israel tendencies of the Truman administration, which the CIA was bound to respect, and internal CIA scruples about domestic operations explicitly prohibited by the Agency's legislative charter, the 1947 National Security Act. (In July 1952, Elmer Berger wrote to George Levison that, because of “the difficulties of money appropriated from Washington,” AFME was obliged to soft-pedal on domestic activity until it was able “to build up some kind of a segregated bank account.”Footnote ⁴⁴ ) Nevertheless, anti-Zionism was still clearly present in the organization's value system, detectable in vague references to “special interests” subverting US foreign policy and in the absence of Israel from the roster of Middle East countries included in AFME exchange programs and other activities.Footnote ⁴⁵ This was hardly surprising given that, although there had been some changes in open leadership positions since the days of the CJP – Kim Roosevelt's retreat from the public eye into a covert patronage role, for instance –many of the same personalities were involved behind the scenes. Berger, for example, kept a low profile but served in effect as AFME's “chief pamphleteer.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Later, Zionist detractors of AFME would charge that the organization's leaders were not only anti-Zionist, but anti-Semitic as well. This allegation is mainly unjustified. The fact that AFME was critical of Israel did not necessarily mean that it was prejudiced against Jews, and there is almost no documentary evidence of such prejudice in the organization. Indeed, during a 1954 meeting between Israeli officials and the leaders of Zionist or Zionist-sympathizing organizations, Milton Ellerin of the Anti-Defamation League stated “that after much probing his group has come to the conclusion that AFME [was] not anti-Semitic.”Footnote ⁴⁷ An exception to this rule was Dorothy Thompson, who did make some problematic statements in her private correspondence, for example complaining to (the Jewish) Elmer Berger about the “self-centered insensibility of the Israeli (and the Zionists) … so extraordinary among Jews, whom I have always thought to be possessed of, even afflicted by, hyper-sensibility.”Footnote ⁴⁸ (Ironically, Thompson's views about “Semitic” sensitivity also embraced Arabs, whom she described privately as “supersensitive,” a trait she blamed on a collective “psychological trauma involving ‘status’ and inferiority, made more murderous by the fact that they damned well are inferior.”Footnote ⁴⁹ ) Meanwhile, some other members of the AFME circle, such as William Eddy, tended to display the same insensitivity to the post-Holocaust emotions of American Jews and patrician annoyance with the new influence of Zionist lobbyists on the domestic political process as the State Department Arabists.Footnote ⁵⁰

While one cannot say for certain in the absence of the relevant Agency files, it is possible to infer from State Department records and other sources the motivations that impelled the CIA to support AFME. Some of these were tactical in nature, and reflected Cold War priorities. As with other front groups, AFME's appearance as a nongovernment entity was vital to its function as an instrument of overseas cultural diplomacy. “[W]e have found it extremely helpful to call on AFME to sponsor certain visits [by Americans to the Middle East] which we as a government were unable to sponsor,” one foreign service officer informed another in 1959. “Exchanges under such auspices tend to give the individuals concerned an independent status which enhances their effectiveness.”Footnote ⁵¹ The fact that Americans had a strong reputation for private benevolence in the region only increased AFME's utility in this regard. Second, the mere fact of the organization's existence was tactically advantageous, as it advertised the existence of pro-Arab, anti-Zionist opinion in the United States, and therefore the possibility of future US foreign policy being different from the pro-Israel orientation of the Truman White House. “In the absence of any marked change in policy which would remove [Arab] political mistrust, we, as propagandists, can only do our best to keep alive the hope in the Arab world that a political solution on the part of the United States is possible,” explained the US ambassador to Iraq, Burton Y. Berry, in 1952, before going on to describe the government's “channel to the … American Friends of the Middle East” as holding “the greatest promise in this direction.”Footnote ⁵² Again, other CIA fronts performed the same function, enabling the US government to present more than one American face to foreign audiences at the same time. Finally, at the most basic operational level, AFME offices in the Middle East provided CIA officers with non-embassy cover, enabling them to carry out other espionage and covert-action duties. One, based in Syria, would rendezvous with colleagues from the embassy in Agency safe houses so that he could pass on intelligence he had gathered; another, in Baghdad, would type up “at least weekly roundups” of local events and hide them in “a special bookcase with a secret compartment in its base.”Footnote ⁵³

The CIA's close operational relationship with AFME was maintained through constant liaison and oversight. These functions fell primarily to the organization's case officer, a role performed first by Mather Eliot, then, after he moved to Syria in October 1953 as the director of AFME Middle East field operations, shared with two other junior CIA officers, Lorraine Nye Norton and Jack Williams. Later, in 1956, when Eliot left AFME altogether for a new assignment under cover as an oilman in Iran, Norton took over the job entirely, making her one of very few women to command such responsibility in the CIA at this time.Footnote ⁵⁴ The board of directors was another important channel between the Agency and AFME, with individuals styled as representatives of “the Foundation” attending meetings to pass on decisions about policy made elsewhere, which were then relayed by members of the board to the organization's executive officers.Footnote ⁵⁵ (The CIA's women's group, the Committee of Correspondence, received similar visits from “the Dearborn.”Footnote ⁵⁶ ) Sometimes, executive officers would correspond directly with individuals who, judging by the contents of the letters concerned, must have been senior CIA officers. For example, in May 1954 Hopkins wrote to Harold U. Stobart (probably a code or “funny name”) at a PO box address in Washington, DC, identifying “people fully to be trusted to cooperate” whose participation should “allow the maximum opportunity for guidance.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Finally, AFME took on administrative staff who had previously worked for other groups later identified as CIA fronts or, as in the case of Alice B. Whelen, the organization's general factotum during its first years of existence, the OSS.Footnote ⁵⁸

In sum, the CIA used AFME for tactical purposes overseas and kept a tight rein on its headquarters at home. Still, it would be a mistake to leap to the conclusion that the organization was merely an official invention, an inanimate instrument of the CIA's will. Such a view fails to take account of several factors: the long history of private-citizen engagement with the Middle East that preceded AFME's creation; the group's immediate organizational origins in genuinely nongovernmental bodies such as the CJP and HELP; and the fact that the man in overall charge of the CIA's covert operations in the Middle East, Kim Roosevelt, had himself participated in the prior tradition of citizen activism. (Scattered evidence suggests that Roosevelt maintained a strong personal interest in AFME throughout his time at the CIA. For example, Lorraine Norton later testified that he sometimes attended board meetings personally.Footnote ⁵⁹ ) At this early stage of AFME's existence, the relationship between the CIA and its Middle East front group was less like that of patron and client than an alliance of equal partners united by a shared purpose and outlook. Tellingly, even intelligence officers such as Mather Eliot who lacked prior area experience began to acquire pro-Arab, anti-Zionist beliefs after working with AFME. Writing privately in 1953, Eliot lamented the plight of Palestinians forced to abandon land that was “their whole life” and predicted that the “Jews who took easily will live to rue … the day they did this taking.”Footnote ⁶⁰

The sense of AFME as a dynamic movement increased markedly in 1953 with the inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Unlike his predecessor, Eisenhower had achieved election without courting Jewish voters, and shortly after obtaining office his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles (brother of Allen), announced a new policy of “friendly impartiality” in the Arab–Israeli conflict.Footnote ⁶¹ Although a campaign to secure Kim Roosevelt's appointment as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs failed, with Truman's appointee, Henry A. Byroade, retaining his position, Byroade soon proved unexpectedly well-disposed toward Roosevelt's citizen network, befriending Elmer Berger and even appearing on an ACJ platform.Footnote ⁶² AFME likewise enjoyed much greater access to the new administration than it had to the old, a development personified by the arrival on its board in 1954 of Edward L. R. Elson, pastor of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, whose congregation included both the President and Secretary of State.Footnote ⁶³ Emboldened by their newfound influence in Washington, AFME leaders such as Garland Hopkins began to cast off some of their earlier reticence and engage directly in anti-Zionist publicity, with the result that the organization's focus now became overwhelmingly domestic. Meanwhile, Kim Roosevelt's position within the CIA was strengthened both by the elevation of Allen Dulles to director of central intelligence and by the success of the 1953 operation to topple the nationalist Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mosaddeq. Paradoxically, this gave Roosevelt greater latitude to pursue another covert operation more consistent with his previous enthusiasm for Middle Eastern nationalists: a program of clandestine support for the revolutionary government of the Egyptian “Free Officers,” who the previous year had overthrown the British client king Farouk, among them the rising star of Arab nationalism, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Arabists and anti-Zionists were, for once, riding high.

Such was the background to the AFME network's participation in Project ALPHA. Formulated in the winter of 1955 by a team of US and British diplomats, ALPHA was a comprehensive Anglo-American plan to settle the Arab–Israeli conflict, in particular the two most divisive issues of the Palestinian refugees and Israeli borders. Coming as it did before the piling up of grievances caused by later wars, it has since struck many Middle East experts as a moment of genuine promise in Arab–Israeli relations.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Eisenhower administration was keen to conduct the ALPHA peace talks, which assigned an important leadership role in the Arab world to the Egyptian Nasser, before the next US presidential election in 1956, when American policy toward Israel was bound to become a source of renewed domestic contention. “The Administration had succeeded in deflating Israel in order to make a reasonable settlement possible,” Foster Dulles explained during a January 1955 planning meeting. “As a result the Israeli position was now weaker than it ever had been, but by 1956 it was likely to gain new strength.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In the months that followed, the AFME-ACJ network redoubled its pro-Arab, anti-Zionist campaigning at home in the United States, running interference for the Eisenhower administration against pro-Israel lobbyists. Hence when, as part of the ALPHA plan, the White House nominated Henry Byroade for the crucial role of US ambassador to Egypt, AFME's leaders worked successfully to neutralize opposition to his confirmation in the Senate.Footnote ⁶⁷ They also stepped up their efforts to influence American opinion through the media, with, for instance, Dorothy Thompson providing a glowing introduction to the first English-language edition of Nasser's nationalist tract, Egypt's Liberation.Footnote ⁶⁸ Later in the year, when Kim Roosevelt took over personal responsibility for conducting the Egyptian end of the peace negotiations in a new iteration of ALPHA codenamed GAMMA, AFME ratcheted up its campaign to avert possible Zionist opposition even further. In January 1956, for example, it published a full-page advertisement in the New York Times demanding, “Take the Middle East out of Domestic Politics!”Footnote ⁶⁹ This was not just a case of AFME dancing to a tune played by the Eisenhower administration; the group was actively trying to push US foreign policy further in a pro-Arab, anti-Zionist direction, with Mather Eliot (lest it be forgotten, an undercover CIA officer) “in Washington for a week, ‘lobbying’ with members of Congress, labor officials, newspaper men and others.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Unfortunately for AFME, events in the Middle East conspired against it. Due in part to Kim Roosevelt's failure to secure a secret US arms deal with Egypt, relations between Washington and Cairo had already begun to sour by late 1955. Nasser turned for support instead to the communist bloc, concluding the so-called Czech arms deal in September 1955, an act that dismayed the rigidly anticommunist John Foster Dulles. Additional setbacks occurred in 1956: the unraveling of the GAMMA peace talks, Egyptian recognition of communist China, Dulles's cancellation of US aid for Nasser's flagship Aswan Dam project, and Nasser's subsequent nationalization of the Suez Canal. Despite a brief revival of Egyptian–American amity following the Suez Crisis of late 1956, the downward trend continued in 1957 with the announcement of the Eisenhower Doctrine, effectively an official US declaration of Cold War against Nasser.Footnote ⁷¹

For AFME, this disastrous turn of events in the Middle East coincided with a series of adverse developments at home in the United States. One of these was a distinct strengthening of its Zionist opposition. Earlier, Zionist leaders had tended to single out individuals in the AFME circle for criticism as opposed to taking on the organization itself. In 1951, for example, the American Zionist Council launched a systematic national campaign to discredit Dorothy Thompson's lectures and columns.Footnote ⁷² Later, Edward Elson became a similar target, attracting (not unwarranted) charges that he was using his position as the President and Secretary of State's pastor to influence US Middle East policy.Footnote ⁷³ After 1953, however, Zionists and pro-Israel Protestant groups such as the American Christian Palestine Committee (ACPC) also went after AFME itself, sending observers to its meetings and pumping disgruntled employees for derogatory information, using the intelligence they gleaned to write denunciatory pieces for the Zionist press, and reporting to the Israeli consulate in New York and embassy in Washington, DC.Footnote ⁷⁴ (Although none of this hostile commentary mentioned the CIA, or any US government agency for that matter, some of it did speculate about the mysterious sources of AFME's considerable funding, with the finger usually pointed at the oil companies or Arab governments.Footnote ⁷⁵ ) In 1954, the AZC created the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs, subsequently renamed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), under the leadership of the highly regarded I. L. “Si” Kenen. In his Near East Report, “A Washington Letter on American Policy in the Near East,” Kenen routinely criticized AFME in a special column, “Propaganda Pressures.” Meanwhile, Israeli information or hasbara officials, while never entirely controlling or even approving of all of the activities of Zionist organizations (in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the secret relations between the CIA and its front groups), met with leaders of the AZC, ACPC, and Anti-Defamation League to coordinate attacks on the AFME–ACJ network.Footnote ⁷⁶ The Washington embassy pursued Dorothy Thompson, described as “anti-Israel writer Number One,” with particular ruthlessness.Footnote ⁷⁷ So clearly had the ideological lines of battle become drawn that it is possible to see the conflict between AFME and Zionist organizations such as AIPAC as, in part at least, a proxy war between the US and Israeli governments for control of American public opinion concerning the Middle East.

At the same time as AFME was coming under increasing pressure from pro-Israel elements, it was also being subjected to criticism from within its own camp. Alfred A. Lilienthal, a zealous Jewish anti-Zionist who had served in Cairo with George Levison during the War, chided the organization for not being forthright enough in its anti-Zionism, blaming AFME's “self-censorship” on “the terms of certain contributions to remain neutral in the United States.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Members of AFME's other main constituency beside anti-Zionist Jews, pro-Arab Protestants, began to raise similar questions about the group's financial backing. The National Council of Churches’ Division of Foreign Missions, concerned about AFME's growing presence in a field previously occupied only by experienced volunteers acting with the clearest of intentions, discreetly investigated the Dearborn Foundation.Footnote ⁷⁹ Even Middle East hands in the State Department, earlier a reliable source of support, started to express concern about AFME's fuzzy background and mission, especially after its change in direction to more overt political advocacy in 1953. The group was in danger of becoming “merely a mouth-piece for pro-Arab and anti-Israel sentiments,” opined two foreign service observers at its January 1954 annual conference. “We plan to discuss this problem with … ARAMCO and certain other financial supporters of AFME who also have indicated their unhappiness.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The precise circumstances are unclear, but in the course of 1954 ARAMCO withdrew its support from AFME. Simultaneously, new foundations linked to the Texas oil industry, and later revealed to be CIA conduits, began to appear in the organization's accounts.Footnote ⁸¹

These developments were the backdrop to a shake-up of AFME that began in July 1956, at almost precisely the moment John Foster Dulles indicated his withdrawal of support from Nasser by canceling the Aswan Dam loan. First, the board of directors informed the executive officers of a major change of policy: henceforth, AFME would avoid “any activities which smack of propaganda and might be considered provocative,” and scale down its domestic program to “the minimum required to support its overseas efforts.” The board had, it explained, taken these decisions in “light of the great political changes which have recently taken place in the Arab World” and “the repeatedly expressed preferences” of the “one or two Foundations” that were AFME's “principal supporters.”Footnote ⁸² In other words, the CIA was instructing its front group to stand down from its domestic battle with the nascent Israel lobby and focus its attention on Cold War cultural diplomacy in the Middle East. Next, during a meeting in September 1956, “Harold Stobart,” the CIA officer who corresponded occasionally with AFME's executive officers, effectively sacked Garland Evans Hopkins. A few days later, an overwrought Hopkins wrote Stobart a remarkably recriminatory letter, complaining that his treatment violated “the old concept of the dual nature and operation of the organization … The conception of AFME has greatly altered since its [launch] in 1951,” he continued. “It has increasingly become simply a vehicle for your purposes.”Footnote ⁸³ The final change in what the organization's 1956–57 report described as “A Year of Test” occurred in April 1957, when Dorothy Thompson stepped down as president.Footnote ⁸⁴ Although not apparently imposed by the CIA, Thompson's resignation was clearly propitious for those seeking a new direction for the organization, signaling as it did a total clear-out of the original executive leadership.

The AFME that emerged from the long crisis of 1956–57 was not completely different from what had gone before. Such anti-Zionist luminaries as Elmer Berger and Edward Elson kept up an intermittent fire on the Zionist movement, drawing fierce ripostes in publications such as the Near East Report, while Mather Eliot's successor as Middle East director, Elmo H. Hutchison, earned a reputation as a particularly outspoken critic of Israel.Footnote ⁸⁵ Nevertheless, changes there were. For example, the new executive leadership was markedly more amenable to official direction than the old. When reproached by State Department officials for making a strongly pro-Nasser statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the new president, former ambassador Harold B. Minor, “indicated that he would make an effort to amend or modify his remarks.”Footnote ⁸⁶ It is hard to imagine the indomitable Dorothy Thompson bending so easily to official diktat. In the fall of 1958, AFME's American headquarters relocated from New York to Washington, bringing the organization closer still within the orbit of government. Around the same time, three new field offices were opened in the Middle East. This expansion reflected the greater emphasis the organization was now placing on citizen diplomacy and “Technical Services,” meaning the placement of Middle Eastern students at US universities and industrial training in the region itself. From having been primarily an advocacy group in the United States, AFME was now a more typical CIA front group, waging the Cold War fight for hearts and minds overseas. As the Near East Report gloatingly put it, the group had “veered away from explosive and controversial centers to distant, peripheral, and picturesque oases.”Footnote ⁸⁷

These measures were not, however, enough to shelter AFME from the storm that eventually broke in 1967. By this point, the anticommunist consensus in American society that had underpinned the secrecy of CIA front operations was breaking down, a casualty of the war in Vietnam. At the same time, the once undisputed ethno-cultural dominance of East Coast Anglo-Americans was eroding, so that, for example, senior Protestant clergymen such as Edward Elson no longer enjoyed the privileged access to national media they had in the 1950s. Such circumstances meant it was only a matter of time before the CIA's cover in AFME would be blown. Indeed, Zionist publications such as the Near East Report were beginning explicitly to speculate that the organization's funding came from government sources.Footnote ⁸⁸ Fearing imminent exposure, in 1966 Secretary of State Dean Rusk ordered a review of “continued U[nited] S[tates] G[overnment] support of AFME though CIA channels,” but the move came too late.Footnote ⁸⁹ On 17 February 1967, three days after carrying an advertisement announcing Ramparts magazine's imminent exposé of CIA links with US student groups, the New York Times identified AFME as a recipient of grants from an Agency pass-through, the J. Frederick Brown Foundation.Footnote ⁹⁰ Similar stories about other foundations that had funded the group appeared over the course of the following week, drawing loud condemnation from Zionist spokespersons probably privately delighted by this spectacular confirmation of what they had long suspected.Footnote ⁹¹ AFME's directors responded by claiming that they had not known about the true source of their funds and therefore that their program was unaffected by it (a common self-defense among blown Agency fronts) while scrambling to speed up the handover to new, private sponsors. A meeting of the board to discuss recent events – what executive vice president Orin D. Parker later called “our 1967 War”Footnote ⁹²  – was scheduled for 5 June 1967. At precisely the moment when the directors were gathering in AFME's Washington headquarters, word arrived of a surprise Israeli attack on Egypt. Within a week, Israel had captured territories three times its original size. Throughout the Arab world, angry crowds attacked American targets, including the AFME office in Baghdad. The 1967 Six-Day War completed the rout of the American Friends of the Middle East and the cause it represented, in both the United States and the Middle East itself.Footnote ⁹³

In December 1958, AFME drafted a pamphlet, Story of a Purpose, which eloquently articulated the group's founding values: “sympathy toward Arab nationalism,” rejection of “the last vestiges of colonialism and imperialism,” and a belief that “the Palestine Question is the very heart of the Middle Eastern problem,” requiring a US policy “of friendly and sympathetic impartiality.” Above all, Story of a Purpose portrayed AFME as a “people-to-people operation,” an attempt to give organizational form to a tradition of personal interaction between Americans and Arabs based on tolerance, understanding, and “an enduring mutuality of interest” that was “apart from considerations of government.” The pamphlet was quite firm on this point: “The foundations for such a policy were carefully laid by a century and a half of private American endeavor in this part of the world.” Far from building on this tradition, US government intervention in the Arab world over the past decade had, if anything, harmed it. “Grants of money have not concealed our failure to act … by the American ideals of the past.”Footnote ⁹⁴

AFME truly did represent a sincere effort to embody the private tradition of American citizen “disinterested benevolence” in the Middle East – yet the irony was that the effort was supported by covert government grants of money. At first, “the dual nature and operation of the organization,” as Garland Hopkins put it, operated successfully, AFME's government and nongovernment elements working together dynamically, united by shared values and aims. Gradually, however, as Eisenhower administration policy diverged from the agenda of Kim Roosevelt's state–private network, the duality became problematic. It was other anti-Zionists and Arabists who first noticed that there was something odd about the organization, an artificiality that suggested it must be operating under some hidden constraints. Eventually, in a development similar to events in several other CIA front groups, AFME's covert patrons in government abandoned the appearance of consensus and asserted their control, dictating changes in the organization's policy and leadership. From being a state–private alliance, AFME became, in Hopkins's phrase, a vehicle primarily for the CIA's purposes.

The state–private duality at the heart of AFME's existence represented one profound problem for the organization, but it was far from the only one. The absence of a population of Arab Americans to compare with the Jewish American community meant that, while Arabists and anti-Zionists might have had influence in the executive agencies of the US government, they could not rival the Israel lobby's clout in Congress and sympathetic media. This weakness meant that AFME's cause was peculiarly dependent on the goodwill of a few officials at the top of the American foreign-policy establishment and, when that goodwill was withdrawn due to events in the Middle East, the organization suffered accordingly. Finally, whereas the pro-Arab, anti-Zionist camp undoubtedly contained some extremely able advocates – Elmer Berger, for example – it simply never told Americans the story of the Arabs as compellingly as the Zionists and Israeli hasbara officials told that of the Jews. Where was the Arabist Exodus, the wildly successful novel about the founding of Israel by the Jewish American popular writer Leon Uris?Footnote ⁹⁵ Again, this failure might have been related to the relatively aristocratic, WASP-ish cast of Kim Roosevelt's citizen network. Compared with, say, Edward Lansdale, the legendary CIA officer who, among numerous other projects, successfully conducted several front-like operations at home in the United States to persuade Americans that they should support the anticommunist regime in South Vietnam (he was perhaps too successful in this regard), Roosevelt never managed to influence the wellsprings of American public opinion.Footnote ⁹⁶

In retrospect, the failure of AFME and the pro-Arab, anti-Zionist network it represented might seem inevitable, even overdetermined. Yet the fact that the organization existed at all shows that certain things now almost taken for granted about US policy in the Middle East – Arab–US conflict, and Israeli–US alliance – are not natural or given, but rather historically constructed and contingent.

Readers may take from this what contemporary lessons they will.