The Failure of American and British Propaganda in the Middle East, 1945-1957: Unconquerable Minds (Cold War History)

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The Failure of American and British Propaganda in the Arab Middle East, 1945–57 Unconquerable Minds

James R. Vaughan

Cold War History Series General Editor: Saki Dockrill, Professor of Contemporary History and International Security, King’s College, London The Cold War History Series aims to make available to scholars and students the results of advanced research on the origins and the development of the Cold War and its impact on nations, alliances and regions at various levels of statecraft, and in areas such as diplomacy, security, economy, military and society. Volumes in the series range from detailed and original specialised studies, and proceedings of conferences to broader and more comprehensive accounts. Each work deals with individual themes and periods of the Cold War and each author or editor approaches the Cold War with a variety of narrative, analysis, explanation, interpretation and reassessments of recent scholarship. These studies are designed to encourage investigation and debate on important themes and events in the Cold War, as seen from both East and West, in an effort to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon and place it in its context in world history. Titles include: Günter Bischof AUSTRIA IN THE FIRST COLD WAR, 1945–55 The Leverage of the Weak Christoph Bluth THE TWO GERMANIES AND MILITARY SECURITY IN EUROPE Dale Carter and Robin Clifton (editors) WAR AND COLD WAR IN AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, 1942–62 Saki Dockrill BRITAIN’S RETREAT FROM EAST OF SUEZ The Choice between Europe and the World, 1945–1968 Martin H. Folly CHURCHILL, WHITEHALL AND THE SOVIET UNION, 1940–45 John Gearson and Kori Schake (editors) THE BERLIN WALL CRISIS Perspectives on Cold War Alliances Michael F. Hopkins, Michael D. Kandiah and Gillian Staerck (editors) COLD WAR BRITAIN, 1945–1964 New Perspectives Ian Jackson THE ECONOMIC COLD WAR America, Britain and East–West Trade, 1948–63 Saul Kelly COLD WAR IN THE DESERT Britain, the United States and the Italian Colonies, 1945–52 Dianne Kirby (editor) RELIGION AND THE COLD WAR

Wilfred Loth OVERCOMING THE COLD WAR A History of Détente, 1950–1991 Erin Mahan KENNEDY, DE GAULLE AND WESTERN EUROPE Steve Marsh ANGLO–AMERICAN RELATIONS AND COLD WAR OIL Crisis in Iran Donette Murray KENNEDY, MACMILLAN AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS Effie Pedaliu BRITAIN, ITALY AND THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR Andrew Roadnight UNITED STATES POLICY TOWARDS INDONESIA IN THE TRUMAN AND EISENHOWER YEARS Kevin Ruane THE RISE AND FALL OF THE EUROPEAN DEFENCE COMMUNITY Anglo-American Relations and the Crisis of European Defence, 1950–55 Helene Sjursen THE UNITED STATES, WESTERN EUROPE AND THE POLISH CRISIS International Relations in the Second Cold War Antonio Varsori and Elena Calandri (editors) THE FAILURE OF PEACE IN EUROPE, 1943–48 James R. Vaughan THE FAILURE OF AMERICAN AND BRITISH PROPAGANDA IN THE ARAB MIDDLE EAST, 1945–57 Unconquerable Minds

Cold War History Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–79482–6 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

The Failure of American and British Propaganda in the Arab Middle East, 1945–57 Unconquerable Minds

James R. Vaughan

© James R. Vaughan 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4714–7 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–4714–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vaughan, James R. The failure of American and British propaganda in the Arab Middle East, 1945–57 : unconquerable minds / James R. Vaughan. p. cm.—(Cold War history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4714–7 (cloth) 1. Middle East – Foreign relations – United States. 2. United States – Foreign relations – Middle East. 3. Middle East – Foreign relations – Great Britain. 4. Great Britain – Foreign relations – Middle East. 5. Cold War – Propaganda. 6. World politics – 1945–1955. I. Title. II. Cold War history series (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm)) DS63.2.U5V35 2005 327.1409410956—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Abbreviations

vii

Introduction: The Business of Climate – Propaganda as the Fourth Dimension of Foreign Policy

1

1 ‘The Men and Machinery’: Building the Middle Eastern Propaganda Instrument

11

2 ‘Western Voices, Arab Minds’: Orientalism, Stereotypes and Propaganda in the Middle East

48

3 ‘National Projection’: Cultural Propaganda and the Cold War

70

4 ‘Who Can Be Neutral?’: Anti-Communism and Cold War Propaganda in the Middle East

97

5 ‘The Less Said the Better’: Western Propaganda and the Arab–Israeli Dispute, 1945–56

128

6 ‘Equal Partners’?: Propaganda, Anglo-American Rivalry and the Nationalist Challenge

160

7 ‘The Last Trump’: Anti-Egyptian Propaganda from ‘Omega’ to the Eisenhower Doctrine

192

Conclusion: The Failure of Western Propaganda in the Middle East

238

Notes

250

Bibliography

296

Index

309

v

Acknowledgements I wish to extend my deepest gratitude to Professor Kathleen Burk and Professor David French for their invaluable guidance during my years within the History Department at University College London. I also extend my sincere thanks to Professor Nicholas Cull, Professor Peter Hennessy and Professor Scott Lucas, Professor Martin Alexander, Dr. Peter Jackson and Dr. R. Gerald Hughes, all of whom offered greatly appreciated suggestions, advice and constructive criticism at various stages of the project. Colleagues and support staff from the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth have been a constant source of academic inspiration and material support. Staff at the National Archives in Kew were invariably a model of professionalism and efficiency, as were the archivists at the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas, and the United States National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The undertaking of numerous research trips to the aforementioned archives would have been impossible without generous research grants from the British Academy, University College London, and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Thanks and appreciation to Tom, Camilla, Eva and Anna Morgan, Stefania Longo, Graeme and Rachel Davies, Björn Weiler, Mark Gudgeon, Angus and Jenny Meryon, John Haywood, Marcus Hall and all the members of Talybont Cricket Club, an institution which made the arranging of summertime research trips that much more difficult. Finally, I would like to thank my brother, parents and grandparents, without whose unwavering support this project, quite simply, could not have been completed and to whom this book is therefore dedicated.

vi

Abbreviations AFME AIOC ANA ARAMCO AUB BBCWAC BISME BMEO CIA COI CRD DDE ESB FO ICE ICFTU IDF IIA IIIS IPD IRD IRI ISD JIC LPS MAC MEDO MEID MOD MOI NAPRO NEA NEABS NERSC

American Friends of the Middle East (US) Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (British) Arab News Agency (British) Arab-American Oil Company (US) American University of Beirut BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham British Information Services Middle East British Middle East Office Central Intelligence Agency (US) Central Office of Information (British) Cultural Relations Department (British) Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas (US) Egyptian State Broadcasting Foreign Office Information Coordination Executive (British) International Confederation of Free Trade Unions Israeli Defence Force International Information Administration (US) Interim International Information Service (US) Information Policy Department (British) Information Research Department (British) Office of Research and Intelligence (USIA) Information Services Department (British) Joint Intelligence Committee (British) London Press Service (British) Mixed Armistice Commission Middle East Defence Organisation Middle East Information Department (British) Ministry of Defence Ministry of Information (British) National Archives, formerly Public Record Office, Kew, UK Bureau of Near Eastern, South Asian and African Affairs (US) Near East Arab Broadcasting Station (Sharq al-Adna) Near East Regional Service Center (US) vii

viii Abbreviations

NSAGWU NSC NUP OCB OEX OIC OII OWI PAO PSB PWE RIO SIS (MI6) SOE SPP TUC UNTSO UP USEF USIA USIE USIS USNA VOA WFTU

National Security Archive, George Washington University National Security Council (US) National Union Party Operations Co-ordinating Board (US) Office of Educational Exchange (US) Office of Information and Cultural Affairs (US) Office of International Information (US) Office of War Information (US) Public Affairs Officer (US) Psychological Strategy Board (US) Political Warfare Executive Regional Information Office (British) Secret Intelligence Service (British) Special Operations Executive Syrian Popular Party Trades Union Congress United Nations Truce Supervisory Organisation United Press United States Educational Foundation United States Information Agency (US) Information and Educational Exchange Program (US) United States Information Service (US) United States National Archive, College Park, Maryland (US) Voice of America (US) World Federation of Trade Unions

Introduction The Business of Climate1 – Propaganda as the Fourth Dimension of Foreign Policy

Britain … finished the Second World War in 1945 in a blaze of glory. Her victorious armies were in peaceful and friendly occupation of the whole Arab world. … Twelve years later, and almost without firing a shot, the greater part of this position seemed to have been lost. It was lost, not as a result of physical defeat, but as a result of the action of human ideas. This fact does not as yet appear to have been appreciated in Britain, much less analysed. John Bagot Glubb, Britain and the Arabs (1959), p. 400 This book is about the role of propaganda as an instrument of foreign policy and the erosion of Western prestige in the post-war Middle East. The diplomatic, economic and military elements of Western strategic policy in the post-war Middle East have been the focus of much scholarly attention in recent years. The pages that follow investigate the psychological dimension of American and British policy in the Middle East between 1945 and 1957. In 1953, the Drogheda committee of enquiry into the British overseas information services argued that propaganda could never stand alone as a viable substitute for policy. Angus Malcolm, head of the Foreign Office’s Information Policy Department (IPD) had argued two years previously that Propaganda and diplomacy are complementary instruments of policy and [our policy objectives in the Middle East] can best be achieved by a combination of both. … Moreover there will be occasions when the 1

2

The Failure of American and British Propaganda

primary object of our diplomatic action should be to provide material for our propaganda.2 Too often in academic considerations of Western policy towards the Middle East, this relationship between propaganda and diplomacy has been ignored. Propaganda has been considered, if at all, as something peripheral to or detached from the main thrust of policy making. What Frank Ninkovich once termed ‘the diplomacy of ideas’ has remained a neglected aspect of foreign affairs when it should rightfully be considered as the ‘fourth dimension’ of foreign policy.3 William Jackson, the chairman of a seminal 1953 enquiry into American overseas propaganda, once observed that There is widespread agreement on both the terminology and functions of the diplomatic, economic and military means of promoting national objectives. There is also general agreement that there is a fourth area of national effort. Thereafter the trouble begins. Jackson, somewhat imprecisely, eventually defined this ‘fourth area of national effort’ as the act of ‘influencing public opinion by any means whatever’.4 Such ambiguity is indicative of the difficulties that practitioners and academics alike have experienced in providing a straightforward definition of ‘propaganda’. Vague as it is, there remains much to be said for Jackson’s formula. Jackson was later to chair the Eisenhower administration’s 1953 committee of inquiry into American overseas propaganda. His committee came to envisage a huge range of government actions and agencies as having a part to play in the psychological battle with the Soviet Union. When the Jackson Report emerged in June 1953, it stated clearly that ‘the “psychological” aspect of policy is not separable from policy, but is inherent in every diplomatic, economic or military action. There … are no “national psychological objectives” separate from national objectives’.5 As the committee’s executive secretary, Abbot Washburn, explained, if there was ‘psychological warfare (cold war) content in every official act’, then there was no point in propaganda being ‘separated out and handled by “cold war specialists” ’.6 The committee’s influence in this regard can be seen in the subsequent deliberations of Nelson Rockefeller’s ‘Planning Coordination Group’ which, at a 1955 conference, announced that ‘Our … concept of psychological strategy is not that of a separate course of action, but of an integral component of all our policies and programs … designed to further US security’.7

Introduction

3

The Jackson Committee’s assertion that ‘policy’ and ‘propaganda’ were to all intents and purposes indistinguishable must be regarded as something of an exaggeration. In this book the ‘fourth dimension of foreign policy’ is conceived of as the psychological and persuasive activities pursued by governments as part of the broader strategic policymaking process. The term ‘propaganda’ is understood to encompass the range of techniques by which governments sought to influence overseas public opinion for the benefit of their wider national objectives. Those seeking theoretical precision could do worse than to adopt Jowett and O’Donnell’s definition of propaganda as ‘the deliberate and systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist’.8 Certainly, their insistence that propaganda must represent a deliberate attempt to shape perceptions provides a useful reply to Oliver Thompson’s assertion that ‘it is unwise to insist on the words “deliberate” or “systematic” in any definition of propaganda’, since Thompson’s approach risks of opening up the field of study to such an extent that it becomes, to all intents and purposes, unmanageable.9 Even when one does insist upon the words ‘deliberate’ or ‘systematic’, the range of activities falling within the field of study remains daunting. Official vocabularies and rhetoric, cultural activities, educational exchange, even the formulation of policy itself can all be considered forms of propaganda, alongside the more obvious techniques of image and information manipulation through print and broadcasting media. It is for precisely this reason that terms such as ‘psychological warfare’, ‘public diplomacy’, ‘cultural diplomacy’, ‘public relations’, ‘information work’ and ‘mass persuasion’ all have their place within the field of propaganda studies. In the narrative that follows, however, these terms are all considered as falling within the inclusive category of ‘propaganda’ – the psychological dimension of Western diplomacy in the Middle East. The historian who seeks to gauge the effectiveness of propaganda enters a conceptual and methodological minefield. As Andrew Defty remarked in his recent study of British anti-communist propaganda in the early Cold War, It is notoriously difficult to assess the impact of propaganda, particularly if it is directed at a foreign audience. One may identify propaganda policies, and assess the output of the propaganda agencies, but it is very difficult to gauge how the propaganda is received.10

4


Embarking on an analysis of the ‘failure’ of British and American propaganda in the Middle East between 1945 and 1957 therefore requires some clarification. This book concerns itself with the formulation rather than the reception of Western propaganda and makes no claim to have solved the problems inherent in any effort to appreciate the impact of propaganda upon a foreign audience. It focuses instead upon the role of propaganda as an integral part of the policy-making process because it is in the context of policy failure that the historian can best understand the problems that beset Western propagandists in the Middle East. As a result, it draws almost exclusively on Western government sources and does not try to ‘get inside the heads’ of Middle Eastern leaders and peoples. This is not to suggest that the historian seeking to gauge the effectiveness or impact of Western propaganda in the Arab world cannot find plenty of evidence upon which to draw. Indeed, one might choose to support the general thesis of this book that Western propaganda largely failed in the Middle East to fulfil its psychological objectives, with the story of the Jordanian interviewed in 1951 by social scientists from Columbia University who, in response to a question about the United States, replied simply, ‘The United States? What is it? Where is it?’ The Columbia researchers were startled to discover that 15 of 26 respondents to their survey ‘literally had never heard of the United States, and most of the remainder had only the most naive notions concerning its nature, distance and peoples’.11 Nevertheless, the focus of this book will remain on the formulation and execution of British and American psychological strategies and the manner in which these strategies combined with the general direction of policy making in the often vain pursuit of national interests. One of the most significant developments in recent Cold War scholarship has been the shift away from the examination of the defence, diplomatic and economic factors upon which international historians have traditionally concentrated. To be sure, these factors remain important, but the manner in which recent studies have interpreted the Cold War as an ideological, cultural and psychological struggle has opened up fascinating new opportunities for historical analysis. As Gary D. Rawnsley asserts, it is ‘no longer possible to discuss the Cold War in any meaningful way without considering the importance which its main actors attached to the persuasion of public and political opinion, at home and overseas’.12 In addition to the valuable work being done by a new generation of Cold War historians, scholars in the fields of communications, media and cultural studies have been instrumental in developing an interpretation of the Cold War as ‘a war of words, images, perceptions, attitudes, motives and expectations’.13

Introduction

5

It is in the light of these developments that Scott Lucas invited historians to go ‘beyond the stale and unrewarding evaluation of propaganda as an adjunct to policy’ and to engage fully with the relationship between propaganda, ideology and diplomacy.14 This exhortation could serve as the impetus for research projects in a number of regions and periods, but in the context of the post-war Middle East, it seems an especially relevant call to arms. The 1945–57 period not only saw the extension of the Cold War to the Middle East, it also witnessed the conjunction of an intriguing set of strategic, diplomatic and cultural forces. When the global competition between the Soviet Union and the West spilled over into the Middle East, it became entangled with the politics of anti-colonialism, nationalism, the non-aligned movement, Zionism, the Arab–Israeli conflict and the rivalries and tensions within the AngloAmerican relationship itself. It is essential, therefore, for historians to investigate the relationship between diplomacy and propaganda in terms that extend beyond the more obvious ideological contours of the Cold War. In this respect, British and American policy making in the Middle East had a psychological dimension that has been ignored by historians for too long. This negligence is reflected in the absence of any substantial monograph on British or American psychological operations in the Middle East. Among general histories of propaganda, Philip M. Taylor’s Munitions of the Mind (1995) and Selling Democracy (1999) make only passing mention of the Middle East (mainly in the context of the 1956 Suez Crisis), but both are superior to Oliver Thompson’s Easily Led, which, in a chapter entitled ‘Decolonization and the Cold War’, manages to overlook the Middle East completely.15 Even the excellent and wide-ranging collection of essays on Cold War propaganda in the 1950s edited by Gary Rawnsley has little to say about operations in the Middle East apart from Rawnsley’s own study of the BBC’s External Services during the Suez and Hungarian crises.16 Rawnsley has also published a comparative study of British and American official broadcasting and a fascinating article on British grey and black broadcasting during the Suez Crisis.17 Other important studies of radio propaganda include Michael Nelson’s study of Cold War broadcasting18 and Peter Partner’s official history of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Arabic Service.19 In these, Nelson confines his analysis to the efforts of Western broadcasters to reach beyond the Iron Curtain leaving Partner to provide a wide-ranging account of British broadcasting in the Middle East, including valuable insights into British propaganda during the Palestine affair. British policy in Palestine has inspired some important articles and essays, two notable examples of which are C.J. Morris’s study of

6


the Attlee government’s publicity policy before the establishment of Israel and Susan L. Carruthers’s work on propaganda and terrorism in post-war Palestine.20 Andrew Defty’s extensive research into British anti-communist propaganda in the 1940s and 1950s has unearthed much important material pertaining to psychological operations in Iran and the Arab world, although the Middle East necessarily remains somewhat peripheral to the main thrust of his argument.21 Lashmar and Oliver’s history of the Foreign Office Information Research Department (IRD), although less thoroughly researched than Defty’s book, nevertheless makes several important revelations about British psychological operations against Nasser.22 It is perhaps predictable that the Suez Crisis has dominated analysis of post-war British propaganda in the Middle East. Within the voluminous Suez literature, Anthony Gorst’s essay on Sir Gerald Templer has exposed the importance of the psychological dimension to British military planning,23 while Kyle and Lucas, in the best single-authored accounts of the crisis, also note the role of propaganda at various points in their narratives.24 Tony Shaw, in a ground-breaking monograph on Suez Crisis propaganda, concentrated primarily on the manipulation of domestic public opinion and comprehensively dismantles the case that Eden failed to understand the role of propaganda and the media in the modern world.25 From within the intelligence studies fraternity, meanwhile, Richard Aldrich and Stephen Dorril have provided invaluable accounts of intelligence and propaganda during the Suez Crisis, as well as examining clandestine operations in 1953 at the moment of the AngloAmerican coup against the Iranian Prime Minister, Mohamed Mossadeq.26 A survey of the literature on American post-war propaganda reveals an extensive and growing body of work on the Cold War but little in the way of detailed analysis of psychological operations in the Middle East. Scott Lucas, Kenneth Osgood and Shaun Parry-Giles have all developed important analyses of US propaganda policy in the early Cold War, presenting valuable accounts of the difficult transition from a wartime programme to a peacetime propaganda instrument geared towards fighting the Cold War battle of ideas.27 Another group of texts has sprung from the conception of the Cold War as an ideological and cultural conflict in which propaganda had a vital role to play in promoting democratic values and the Western ‘way of life’. Ground-breaking studies in this field have focused upon the exposure of intelligence agency activities in supposedly non-political enterprises,28 the role of American cultural exports and exhibitions within the Cold War struggle29

Introduction

7

and the role of private enterprise within the Western bid for cultural supremacy.30 Even so, detailed analysis of American propaganda in the Middle East remains hard to find. A number of studies of the United States Information Agency (USIA) and the Voice of America (VOA) are now available, but the tendency is towards institutional histories and there is little to be found in the way of analysis of activities and operations in the Middle East.31 The Middle East has flickered on the radar of the group of American scholars dedicated to analysing the rhetorical aspects of presidential leadership, most clearly in Richard B. Gregg’s illuminating essay on Eisenhower’s Suez Crisis speech of 31 October 1956.32 Similarly, a small number of more traditional diplomatic histories have occasionally concerned themselves with American propaganda activities. Irene Gendzier’s study of American post-war Middle East policy, Isaac Alteras’ account of US–Israeli relations during the Eisenhower years and David Lesch’s survey of US–Syrian relations and the Middle Eastern Cold War all contain useful information regarding United States Information Service (USIS) and USIA operations, although none match the level of detail contained in Mark Gasiorowski’s study of US–Iranian relations.33 More recently, the ‘cultural turn’ in US diplomatic history has encouraged new approaches to the US post-war encounter with Asia and the Middle East but, as Matthew Connelly has pointed out, the tendency towards ‘seeking out the voice of the subaltern’, admirable enough in itself, has had the unfortunate effect of transforming the high officials of American policy into ‘the exotic “other” of post-colonial studies’.34 On a more encouraging note for future scholarship, recent events in the Middle East have begun to inspire research into the history of American propaganda in the region. An interesting consequence of this has been the provision of a valuable online resource in the shape of a collection of documents edited by the National Security Archive team at George Washington University.35 The memoirs of various British and American officials constitute an alternative source of information about Western propaganda that historians of the Cold War have often overlooked. On the British side, Robert Marett, Christopher Mayhew and Sir Fife Clark provide fascinating insights into the activities and organisation of the IPD, IRD and Central Office of Information (COI) respectively. Douglas Dodds-Parker’s memoirs contain a small but important section on the difficulties encountered by British propagandists during the Suez Crisis and are complemented by the more extensive examination of Britain’s psychological warfare

8


operations during Suez included in Bernard Fergusson’s The Trumpet in the Hall (1970).36 On the American side, the diaries of James Hagerty and Emmet Hughes’s account of the Eisenhower administration cast light upon a publicity-conscious President’s use of rhetoric, while Wilbur Eveland’s account of his involvement with US intelligence in the Middle East is a valuable source for those seeking information on the CIA’s propaganda projects in the Cold War Middle East.37 Perhaps even more interesting is the Egyptian perspective on the conduct of propaganda in the Middle East to be found in the memoirs of Abdel-Kader Hatem, Nasser’s Minister of Information.38 Far more historical research has been done on British and American diplomatic policy and the dynamics of the Anglo-American political relationship in the Middle East, an indication, perhaps, of how historians have traditionally treated propaganda as a peripheral element of Western policy. In recent decades, a body of work has emerged, examining, to adopt Ritchie Ovendale’s phrase, the ‘transfer of power in the Middle East’. The term is not entirely satisfactory as a means of encapsulating the wide variety of arguments that have been put forward, but it does provide a useful organisational concept for categorising many of the recent scholarly contributions. On one side of the debate there is a school of thought that sees the period, particularly the Eisenhower years, as marking a concerted American effort to replace Britain as the dominant Western power in the region.39 The argument that British decline in the region was accelerated by clumsy American anti-colonialism and misplaced sympathies for anti-Western nationalists has, however, proved difficult to sustain in the face of some convincing counterattacks,40 but it is nevertheless clear that the partnership in the Middle East was far from harmonious. The result has been the emergence of a body of work characterised by its appreciation of the complexities of British and American policy objectives and its view of the AngloAmerican relationship as an intriguing patchwork of friendships and rivalries, conflict and co-operation.41 The conclusion that Anglo-American regional rivalries could, however uneasily, co-exist with the requirements of the Cold War alliance, provides a fascinating dynamic for investigating the psychological dimension of Western policies towards the Middle East and informs much of this book’s analysis of the Anglo-American response to Arab nationalism. It is precisely because of the complex nature of the Anglo-American relationship in the Middle East that this book sets out to compare British and American rather than, say, British and French propaganda strategies in the region. To a great extent, and much as it may have irritated both

Introduction

9

British and American officials at times, the regional propaganda efforts of the two nations were bound together by necessity and design. Cold War objectives, the collective identity of ‘the West’, mutual economic and political interests as well as mutual economic and political rivalries make the separation of British and American propaganda policies a rather arbitrary and senseless enterprise. Indeed, the study of British and American propaganda in the Middle East has much to tell us about the nature of Anglo-American relations in the post-war era, both with specific reference to the Middle East and in the broader sense of the ‘special relationship’ itself. Defty thus makes an important point in observing that there has been ‘a certain myopia with regard to the relationship between British and U.S. anti-communist propaganda’,42 although one can argue that he does not go far enough. There is clearly a need to consider Anglo-American propaganda co-operation beyond the Cold War framework. An exclusive focus on anti-communism is liable to produce a distorted impression, since it seizes upon an issue where there was general Anglo-American agreement, thus invariably neglecting some of the thornier, and in many ways more interesting issues in post-war Anglo-American relations. This subject is addressed in more detail in the final section of Chapter 1 as part of a general survey of the development of the British and American propaganda ‘machines’ in the post-war era and their adaptation for Middle Eastern conditions. The theme of conflict and co-operation within Anglo-American propaganda policy towards the Middle East is also dealt with in some detail in Chapter 6, when the analysis turns to the psychological challenge posed by the growing appeal of Arab nationalism. One of the major themes of this book is the extent to which British and American officials misunderstood their Middle Eastern audiences and subsequently pursued psychological objectives that were fundamentally unsuited to the prevailing climate of opinion in the region. In part, this can be explained by the acceptance of Western policy makers of an analysis of the region and its peoples that was steeped in an ‘Orientalist’ tradition which attributed characteristics to the ‘Arab mind’ that had little to do with the everyday issues that politically conscious Arabs deemed important. This theme is investigated in more depth in Chapter 2. A second factor was the tendency of both British and American officials to impose a strategic agenda upon a region that was often unwilling or genuinely unable to recognise it. The result was the development of British and American psychological strategies for the Middle East that played up the threat of communism and Soviet imperialism, investing

10 The Failure of American and British Propaganda

enormous amounts of time and money in regional Cold War propaganda campaigns, but which fundamentally failed to address the key issues that dominated Middle Eastern politics – the Arab–Israel dispute and the conflict between Arab nationalism and foreign ‘imperialistic’ interference in the region. These themes form the central part of this book. Chapter 4 investigates the often futile efforts of Western propagandists to awaken the Middle East to an alleged communist threat and to involve the region in the Cold War struggle. Chapter 5 examines Western propaganda policy towards the Arab–Israel dispute, arguing that the dominant characteristic of this policy after 1948 was a tendency to avoid and marginalise rather than address the question of Israel in publicity output directed at the Arab world. Chapter 6 looks at the development of British and American psychological strategies for dealing with the ‘problem’ of Arab nationalism, noting how the questions of nationalism and imperialism constituted a severe (if not intolerable) strain on AngloAmerican partnership in the region. The final chapter examines Western propaganda to the Arab world in the 1955–57 period when the shortcomings of British and American diplomatic and propaganda strategies over the previous decade were effectively exposed and the Arab world shifted markedly away from the Western camp. One further clarification is required. The ‘Middle East’ is a term that, by its very nature and history is open to numerous interpretations and definitions. The main focus of this book is upon Israel and the Arab states stretching from Egypt in the south-west, through the Levant and the Fertile Crescent, to the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula. Occasional references will be made to events and sources in the peripheral states of North Africa, Turkey and Iran. It is particularly regrettable that I have been unable to devote more attention to the conduct of Western diplomacy and psychological strategy in Iran, which provides a fascinating field for further research and analysis. It is an area to which I hope to turn my attentions in subsequent work.

1 ‘The Men and Machinery’ Building the Middle Eastern Propaganda Instrument

Anybody of average intelligence can think up a propaganda line to suit a particular situation. But the line will be of no value unless there exist the men and machinery to put it across. Robert Marett, Through the Back Door (1968), p. 177 The British and American propaganda machines that emerged after 1945 were sprawling and complex entities. Indeed, the number of governmental and private actors involved makes any analysis of Western propaganda during the Cold War impossible without first presenting an overview of the responsible agencies. This chapter examines how the transition from the Second World War to the Cold War transformed the West’s approach to mass persuasion and dictated the shape and organisation of the post-war propaganda instrument in the Middle East. The first section examines the changing role of propaganda after the end of the Second World War and the renewal of large-scale overseas propaganda programmes in the early Cold War. The second examines how these post-war propaganda machines were adapted for operations in the Middle East. A final section investigates the extent to which British and American propagandists succeeded in pooling their resources and engaging in joint operations in the Middle East.

From total war to Cold War: American and British propaganda machines after 1945 The transition from war to peace was not an easy one for American propagandists. Confronted with deep public and Congressional scepticism 11


about the conduct of peacetime propaganda, President Truman abolished the Office of War Information (OWI) on 31 August 1945, and responsibility for overseas publicity was vested in an Interim International Information Service (IIIS) while, over the winter of 1945–46 the machinery for a new Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs (OIC) was assembled within the State Department’s Office of Public Affairs under Assistant Secretary of State, William Benton. These reforms were accompanied by major cuts in funding and personnel. In July 1945, the American propaganda agencies had employed a combined total of 5963 personnel. By mid-1946, Benton had just 2648 OIC staff at his disposal.1 The Congressional assault, inspired by the belief that ‘responsibility for telling foreigners about the U.S. should be left to private agencies of information’,2 intensified, when conservative Republicans with little time for Benton’s fledgling OIC gained control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. At its wartime peak, OWI had operated on an annual budget approaching $80,000,000. In 1946, Congress allocated just $13,025,000 for OIC activities in the second half of the year and the House of Representatives responded to Benton’s 1947 request for $26,000,000 by slashing the allocation to just $10,000,000.3 It seemed for a time that the very survival of the programme was at stake and OIC’s Pat Allen later complained that even this post-war ‘holding operation’ had been ‘practically junked’ in 1947.4 The American overseas propaganda services may have escaped death, but as Scott Lucas has written, they remained ‘close to comatose’.5 Wilson Dizard has argued that the turning point in the post-war fortunes of the information programme came when a 1947 tour of overseas information posts led several Congressional critics to reconsider their attitude.6 A visit to the Middle East convinced the Ohio Republican, Frances Bolton, of the unfortunate consequences of neglecting the overseas information programme. In the Middle East, Bolton observed, there was ‘a tragic lack of information about America. … Penny-wise and pound-foolish have we been at a time when all the world wants to know of us’.7 The first real signs of revival came when Congress passed the Smith– Mundt Act in January 1948, in overdue recognition that The job of conducting U.S. relations with foreign countries consists not only of carrying out traditional diplomatic negotiations with other Governments but also of furnishing foreign peoples direct, through mass information media, with information about our policies and about the American way of life.8

‘The Men and Machinery’ 13

The Smith–Mundt Act cleared the way for a major extension of American propaganda activities. Benton was eased out, replaced by George V. Allen, and the informational and educational responsibilities of the OIC were split between an Office of International Information (OII) and an Office of Educational Exchange (OEX), collectively forming the United States Information and Educational Exchange programme (USIE). British diplomats noted in October 1948 that a sustained American propaganda effort was at last ‘beginning to get underway’.9 The Smith–Mundt debates marked the beginning of a process characterised by Shaun Parry-Giles as Cold War ‘militarization’.10 Certainly, the Act foreshadowed the boost given to the propaganda programme by NSC-68 and the launching of the ‘Campaign of Truth’ in 1950. State Department officials later argued that before 1950, many overseas posts had been barely capable of performing the most basic informational tasks and that Truman’s new commitment to Cold War propaganda was vital in bringing ‘increased field staffs [and a] new program emphasis on awakening the world to the dangers of Communist aggression’.11 ‘The new propaganda offensive’, Emily Rosenberg argued, ‘gained punch and money from NSC 68’s strong formulation of cold war dangers. … NSC 68 and the institutions of post-war cultural diplomacy were part of the same strategic discourse’.12 Within eighteen months, USIE officials could boast of the new scale of their operations. In November 1951, Richard Brecker published an essay announcing that the propaganda and cultural relations programme now accounted for approximately a third of the State Department’s annual expenditures, employed 7632 staff and maintained 146 information and 31 binational centres across the world.13 On 4 April 1951, Truman established a Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), charged with co-ordinating the propaganda activities of various government agencies and departments,14 and at the beginning of 1952, the State Department reformed its Public Affairs departments once again, establishing an International Information Administration (IIA) responsible for overseas propaganda. In the event, neither the PSB nor the IIA would long outlive the Truman presidency and even in the last months of the Truman administration there were signs of dissatisfaction with the existing system. The PSB came in for particular criticism, with the State Department’s Charles Marshall noting contemptuously that Naivete has led … [PSB] … into the pursuit of such intellectual wild geese as attempting to make an inventory of all cold war


instrumentalities in the United States (I shall never forget the initial paper which listed the Yale Glee Club as one of our cold war weapons). ‘The quality of work done has simply not been good,’ Marshall concluded, ‘The best conceivable thing to do about this Board would be to abolish it.’15 When Eisenhower appointed William Jackson (former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)) and Nelson Rockefeller (later to succeed C.D. Jackson as the President’s psychological warfare adviser) to chair, respectively, presidential committees on overseas propaganda and governmental reorganisation, he initiated a series of important reforms. The Jackson Report called for the centralization of US propaganda activities under the direction of the White House and the National Security Council (NSC).16 Beyond expressing its own preference for keeping propaganda operations within State, it failed, however, to give a clear lead on whether responsibility for overt propaganda operations should be removed from the State Department.17 It is possible that, aware of White House support for the Rockefeller Committee’s preference for the establishment of a new propaganda agency outside the State Department, the Jackson Committee simply decided not to press the issue.18 Thus, under the terms of Eisenhower’s ‘Reorganisation Plan No. 8’, the State Department was relieved of its overseas propaganda responsibilities and a new, autonomous United States Information Agency (USIA) became operational on 1 August 1953. The Jackson Committee was clearer about the fate of the ‘feckless’ PSB, which was to be replaced by a new Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) accountable to the NSC. The OCB remained at the heart of propaganda policy for the rest of the Eisenhower years. Its permanent membership included, under the chairmanship of the Under-Secretary of State, the Director of the CIA, the President’s Special Assistant on Psychological Warfare, the Deputy Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Director of the Mutual Security Agency. USIA staff also attended regularly, although USIA’s Director only became a permanent member in 1955. There has been a tendency on the part of some commentators to play down the significance of the OCB–USIA relationship. According to Sorensen and Dyer, USIA never played more than a passive role in the NSC set-up and the main information and cultural relations agencies remained outside the highest levels of the system.19 Dizard makes a similar point, claiming that State Department reluctance to incorporate publicity considerations into the policy-making process reduced the USIA’s role to a bit-part one at


‘the lowest level of the [NSC’s] operations’, while also claiming that ‘the agency’s influence at the highest level of policymaking – the White House – was at best sporadic’.20 These are reasonable criticisms, and it would be naive to assume that the Eisenhower reforms put an end to the uncertainties of the Truman era. Bureaucratic infighting was by no means eradicated and USIA had particular cause to bemoan the activities of the CIA and the State Department. The latter, USIA staff complained in 1954, ‘oversteps the line of information policy [and] bypasses [USIA] in releasing news’. More seriously, CIA operatives were charged with ‘working at crosspurposes with USIA’ and dismissed as ‘totally incompetent’ in the information field.21 Nor can it be said that the creation of USIA put an end to the strained relationship between American propagandists and their Congressional critics. Eisenhower may have had ‘a soft spot for the information program’22 but, as Dizard has noted, ‘Given their longtime suspicions about the information program’s alleged role as a haven for liberal Democrats, conservative Republicans regarded USIA as a prime candidate for budget cutbacks.’ The result was ‘a jolting reversal for a program that had built up a considerable momentum in recent years’23 and that programme, which had enjoyed an appropriation of some $123,000,000 in 1953, was reduced to just ‘$77,000,000 of operating funds in fiscal year 1954’.24 Nevertheless, one should be wary of stretching the point too far. At the end of the 1950s, a second presidential committee investigating the performance of the overseas information services observed that ‘The confusion which the Jackson Committee said existed in regard to the precise mission of the Information Program is no longer as evident as it was in 1953’,25 and Parry-Giles has concluded that, under Eisenhower, the propaganda programme ‘became a more stable and institutionalized force in U.S. foreign policy’.26 Even if USIA representatives made few direct contributions to the OCB or NSC, the very fact of their presence at the high table of the national security establishment is not to be ignored. USIA, in its semi-annual reports to the NSC, consistently stressed the value of the intra-governmental co-operation that the OCB–NSC system facilitated. ‘Greater familiarity with highest national security policy’, USIA reported in early 1955, ‘has proved of great value to the Agency in attempting to bring its varied operations more squarely into line behind the national purposes they are designed to support.’27 Eighteen months later, USIA stressed that ‘continued participation in the activities of the NSC and the OCB’ had been ‘utilized to provide rapid and authoritative translation of NSC decisions into informational


operations’.28 USIA’s founding director, Ted Streibert, recalled in a 1970 interview that the OCB had proved to be ‘a very effective device for the propaganda and information activities to mesh in with the other foreign activities of the government … [which] … permitted [USIA] to get a word in as an equal on anything going on’.29 For British propagandists, adjustment to a peacetime role was comparatively straightforward and the Cabinet indicated its willingness to support a peacetime information programme as early as 1943. The one major dislocation came after Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin’s assertion that ‘foreign publicity is an instrument of foreign policy, and … the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs must be responsible for it’, a thinly veiled call for the abolition of the Ministry of Information (MOI).30 Unsurprisingly, Minister of Information, Edward Williams, took a different view, claiming that the ‘whole of our war-time experience has shown that efficiency as well as economy has best been served by bringing together planning, production and execution’.31 Attlee, however, agreed that it would be ‘politically dangerous’ to retain ‘a Minister with no other responsibility but the conduct of publicity’ and the Cabinet concluded in December 1945 that ‘the Ministry of Information should not continue as a separate Department’.32 The MOI was formally wound up on 31 March 1946 and the web of departments that made up the post-war British information services began to emerge. As Bevin had demanded, MOI’s responsibilities were divided between the Foreign Office, Commonwealth Relations Office, Colonial Office, the Board of Trade and a new service organisation, the Central Office of Information (COI). As expected, the Foreign Office emerged as the dominant force, with American observers noting that While planning and operation of the British program is lodged in four separate and distinct agencies, policy control is perforce vested in the Foreign Office as the agency primarily responsible for the conduct of all relations with foreign countries, and as the agency accountable for the financial responsibility of the entire program.33 The Foreign Office responded to its new responsibilities by increasing the number of its information departments from two (News Department and Cultural Relations Department) in 1945 to nine by 1947.34 Of these, News Department, Cultural Relations Department (CRD), Middle East Information Department (MEID), and Information Policy Department (IPD) had significant roles to play in the Middle East. IPD (after a reorganisation in 1949 that saw the Regional Information Departments


abolished and their heads appointed Regional Advisers within IPD) emerged as the key agency in the overt propaganda system, co-ordinating the work of the majority of Britain’s overseas information officers. This network of information offices, attached to British Consulates, Legations and Embassies, worked to cultivate links with foreign opinion leaders through whom the British message could be introduced into appropriate media channels. IPD issued these offices with day-to-day publicity guidance and could commission detailed background briefs from the Foreign Office Research Department or the COI on major issues. The COI was created when the dissolution of the MOI made it necessary to establish a new agency to provide technical and production services. The COI did not have ministerial status and played no role in the policy making or the information dissemination processes. Instead, its primary responsibility lay in the provision of production services to those branches of government that had inherited the MOI’s policy responsibilities. To this end, the COI was divided into a number of media sections including Films and Television, Overseas Press and Radio, Reference, Publications and Photographs. Of the services it provided for the benefit of overseas posts, which tended to be sceptical of the efficiency of the organisation as a whole,35 perhaps the most highly valued was the London Press Service (LPS). LPS was attached to the Overseas Press and Radio Section and was the descendent of the pre-war ‘British Official Wireless’, supplying information officers with an up-tothe-minute government news service. Parsimonious post-war Chancellors did target the overseas information services but British propagandists did not suffer to the same extent as their American counterparts.36 A comparison of the British and American propaganda machines in 1947 is instructive in this regard. US statistics compiled for the 1948 budget revealed not only that the British information services employed 8011 personnel against just 3885 American operatives, but also that with an estimated budget of $42,588,452, the British had spent 40 per cent more on propaganda in 1947 than the $30,123,086 that the State Department had requested for its own programme in 1948.37 The demands of the Cold War persuaded Britain’s Labour government to establish a separate agency specifically dedicated to anti-communist propaganda. This was the Information Research Department (IRD), founded as a Foreign Office department in 1948 but funded through the secret vote and closely connected to the intelligence establishment.38 IRD’s establishment was not without its difficulties and Christopher Warner,


Assistant Under-Secretary responsible for the Foreign Office’s information departments, noted in June 1948 that ‘the path of the antiCommunist propagandist here is not an easy one, as the Powers that Be are rather uncertain and are from time to time subject to qualms’.39 Largely to appease Labour Party sensitivities, IRD was charged with the task of providing a vigorous defence of British social democracy (a role increasingly neglected as IRD fell under the control of conservative elements in the diplomatic and intelligence services).40 Nevertheless, it should be noted that the identification of IRD as a straightforward anticommunist organisation is not altogether satisfactory, because it fails to acknowledge an important distinction between anti-communist and anti-Soviet propaganda and underestimates the extent to which IRD could serve as a weapon against non-communist targets. As John Peck, a former Private Secretary to Churchill and Ralph Murray’s successor at the head of IRD, explained in 1951, It is not so much Communism that we seek to counter, since Communism and Communists by themselves are not expected to achieve very much; it is the aggressive aims of the Soviet Government using the Communist Parties and Communist-controlled organisations for the purpose and exploiting ‘Communism’ (whatever that may mean) for its own political ends.41 By the mid-1950s in the Middle East, IRD had developed enough flexibility to shift its primary operational focus away from Soviet communism in order to concentrate on the more immediate challenge to British interests represented by Nasser and Arab nationalism. IRD was split into two sections; the ‘Desks’, responsible for the meticulous research upon which IRD material was based, and an ‘Editorial’ section, which converted that research into propaganda material. Regular output included ‘Basic Papers’ (factual memoranda containing no ‘propagandistic’ argument or comment), ‘Basic Booklets’ and ‘Facts About … Books’ (similar to Basic Papers but including elements of comment and persuasion). IRD distributed a monthly paper exposing the activities of Communist front organisations, accompanied every other month by a survey of the Soviet press. A weekly ‘Digest’ was distributed to overseas posts and consisted of a selection of topical stories detailing the miseries of life under Communism. Three more monthly offerings issued to overseas posts included a ‘Religious Digest’ concerned with the question of Communist religious persecution, ‘The Interpreter’, which provided analysis of Soviet policy and the ‘Asian Analyst’, which examined


Communist (particularly Chinese) policy in Asia. In addition to the composition of its own material, IRD also commissioned articles and books by leading intellectuals, academics, politicians and journalists for commercial publication.42 Although IRD possessed no independent operational capability, its relationships with the other Foreign Office information departments and their overseas representatives, the intelligence services, the COI and the BBC ensured that a steady stream of its material reached overseas posts to be used as they saw fit.43 One consequence of the decentralised nature of the British propaganda instrument was the dispersal of authority and the absence of a powerful voice at the highest levels of government. Split across the overseas Departments of State, the information services were represented by politicians, who did not necessarily share the same concerns as the professional propagandists. Apart from an inter-departmental Ministerial committee and a number of temporary committees of inquiry, there was no easy way to ensure that informational and psychological operations were kept on the Cabinet agenda. This relegation of the propagandists to the policy-making periphery necessitated the hasty creation of an Information Co-ordination Executive (ICE) during the Suez Crisis and even then, the propaganda departments were not consistently informed about the true policy direction. It might appear, therefore, that, by the early 1950s, American propagandists were incorporated more effectively into the foreign policy machine than their British counterparts. An April 1951 Congressional evaluation of the USIE programme noted that the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs ‘now participates in the formulation of policy of the Department … [and] … specialists from the Public Affairs Area have been placed in the functional or geographic divisions of the Department. All this has brought information far closer to policy-making than ever before’.44 The removal of overt propaganda responsibilities from direct State Department did bring new risks and USIA’s tendency to recruit from the communications and public relations industries often led to its staff being considered ‘outside the club’ by members of the Foreign Service.45 Nevertheless, USIA’s place within the NSC and OCB system allowed it to play a more active role within the strategic policy-making apparatus than the British information services. Streibert’s appreciation of his privileged position in this respect makes for an interesting contrast with the description by IPD head, Robert Marett, of the annoyance displayed by the Foreign Office’s political desks whenever they believed IPD to be ‘interfering’ in their affairs. The only ways for Foreign Office propagandists to get their voices heard at what Marett revealingly called


the ‘stratospheric’ levels of policy making were to ‘solicit’ higher-ranking officials or to ‘push their way in uninvited’. The British information departments continued to be seen as the ‘poor relations’ of the political departments and Marett recalled that It was much easier said than done to secure the required degree of co-operation. … Apart from the difficulty of the time factor, we were up against the obstacle that the average young man on a political desk in the Foreign Office is not publicity-minded. … Why bother to bring in those interfering publicity chaps in IPD?46

Methods and media in the Middle East This section presents an examination of the most important means by which British and American propagandists went about their business in the Middle East. To that end, it looks at conventional ‘information’ work including press management techniques, magazine publishing, book distribution, library and reading room programmes as well as the socalled ‘oral propaganda’ networks established by the British Embassy in Egypt. It then turns its attention to the use of broadcasting media and the key agencies of cultural diplomacy in the Middle East before investigating the extent of (or more accurately the limits to) Anglo-American co-operation in the region. Having taken control of overseas information policy, the Foreign Office inherited an extensive network of information offices attached to its posts across the Middle East. By the 1950s, IPD was administering information offices in Egypt, Iran (closed between 1952 and 1954 as a result of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) nationalisation dispute), Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, Libya and Sudan, with plans to open new offices in the Persian Gulf states and Saudi Arabia. At the end of the war, the central production and administrative office for Middle East posts was the British Information Services Middle East (BISME). After 1945, the Foreign Office saw BISME as ‘a relic of the days of the Ministry of Information’47 and in 1947 the decision was taken to ‘transfer to M.E.I.D. and the C.O.I. all of those services hitherto provided by B.I.S.M.E. which in practice could be taken on in London’.48 Within the year, MEID was able to report that ‘BISME has now been incorporated into the Information Section of the Embassy in Cairo and ceased to exist as a separate body with effect from the middle of September.’49 Thereafter, the Cairo Embassy and the British Middle East Office (BMEO)


assumed responsibility for regional information policy, an arrangement that survived until 1953 when a new Regional Information Office (RIO) was opened in Beirut. Central to RIO Beirut’s work was the provision of Arabic material to information officers for insertion in the local press. Although the success of this programme was dependent upon political factors beyond the control of either the RIO or individual information officers, it was generally possible to place a remarkable quantity of material into local newspapers. In August and September 1955, the information office in Amman successfully placed 291 articles into the Jordanian press,50 and reports from Baghdad indicated that 71 British articles on anticommunist subjects alone had been planted in Iraqi newspapers during January 1954.51 The bulk of the IRD material that found its way into circulation in the Middle East did so through local newspapers and journals. During the first four months of 1953, 87 anti-communist articles translated were successfully inserted in the Egyptian press,52 while in November 1954, 27 articles based on IRD material appeared in Syrian newspapers.53 Reports from Iraq at this time tended to be more pessimistic, one telegram stating that ‘the press in Iraq is not very ready to print our anti-communist articles’.54 Even so, it was still recorded that some 77 anti-communist articles of British inspiration appeared in the Iraqi press that month.55 To secure results, information officers were not above using financial incentives. IRD chief, John Peck, was not enthusiastic about bribery, arguing that ‘the fact that an editor has to be bribed before he will print a particular article suggests that the article is not one which is likely to interest his readers’. Officers in the field had fewer qualms, however, and the Information Department in Baghdad informed IRD in January 1954 that [W]e shall not scorn the cash nexus. There is a streak of venality in every Arab editor and there are few who would be so high-minded as to refuse our articles if we could offer some material inducement to set against the risk of diminished sales which acceptance of them might entail. … A greater concentration of effort would be well worth a reduction of total output. One article in the press is, after all, worth a hundred in the waste paper basket.56 Audience resistance to any material that was obviously inspired by official sources or was overtly ‘propagandistic’ led information officers increasingly to rely on local intermediaries through whom


material could be discreetly projected into the public sphere. As Peck explained, There are some arguments which cannot be used at all by a foreign information service in the Middle East without evoking the charge of interference in the internal affairs of Arab countries. … However valid our arguments may be the fact that they are our arguments makes them suspect to the Arabs. We can only overcome this difficulty by presenting the same arguments through an Arab intermediary.57 US planners had reached a similar conclusion and in February 1953 the PSB’s strategy paper for the Middle East argued that a desired expansion in the scale of US psychological operations should be brought about ‘mainly by increasing the use of indigenous instruments and local channels’.58 British information officers had for some time been recruiting local journalists, who could be persuaded to pass off British propaganda as their own work. As early as 1948, the British Embassy in Egypt claimed to have ‘21 of these journalists, who write for 24 different newspapers and magazines including the most important Cairo ones’.59 The Embassy was particularly pleased with the work of a journalist employed by the high-profile Akhbar el Yom newspaper, who had published a series of interviews with high-profile Egyptians, including one with former Prime Minister, Ali Maher. ‘These interviews’, Embassy staff revealed, ‘were based on questions which were discussed with our press contact before he went for the interview, and were designed to elicit answers favourable from a British point of view.’60 By early 1949, the Information Department was in regular contact with 40 Egyptian correspondents, including a Muslim Brotherhood journalist and the Foreign Editor of the respected ‘Al Misri’ newspaper.61 Until the end of the 1940s, the US information effort in the Middle East, as elsewhere, was limited by budgetary constraints. OIC-Cairo reported in 1947 that its press activities were being ‘sharply curtailed’ and that it could no longer act as a regional supply centre for other Middle East posts.62 A more general survey revealed that ‘OIC work cannot be said to be more than 10 per cent effective. There is an embryonic staff in Cairo and another one in Beirut. With the exception of one man in Baghdad this comprises the entire operation in an area of over 30,000,000 people’.63 Middle East posts benefited from the Campaign of Truth’s injection of money and purpose. Turkey, Iran and Syria were all identified as ‘priority’ target countries, and through some bureaucratic


chicanery, the State Department was able to redistribute resources allocated to Syria more evenly among the other Arab posts in the area.64 In 1953, therefore, USIA inherited a network of United States Information Services (USIS) offices across Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Turkey and Libya. After concerns about the unstable political situation in Egypt led the State Department to consider alternative locations for a ‘Regional Media Services Center for the Arab States’, a Near East Regional Service Center (NERSC) was established in Beirut in 1953. The provision of articles and copy for local newspapers formed the mainstay of the American press management programme. The State Department’s Wireless Bulletin (subsequently, USIA’s Wireless File) provided an American equivalent to the London Press Service, and USIS operatives were no less successful than their British counterparts in getting their material into local newspapers. At some posts, demand for USIS materials far outstripped supply, and Gillespie Evans, reporting from Cairo in 1948, complained that he was ‘not as yet receiving a fifth of the material needed to support the feature and special article program of which the Cairo Press Section is capable’.65 USIS material found its way into some unlikely places. When, in September 1948, the Muslim Brotherhood newspaper, Ikhwan al Mouslimoun, fired a fearsome broadside against USIS, urging local newspapers to ‘unveil these wicked imperialist devices’ and ‘destroy such poisonous propaganda’, staff in Cairo remarked with some amusement that On the day that this attack was published, Ikhwan carried, as usual, a goodly quantity of USIS Press Section material. For months this paper has been – and since this attack it remains – one of our best ‘customers’. It publishes up to three or four columns of USIS copy every day.66 The nature of these press operations often brought government propagandists into contact with the commercial news agencies. In fact, co-operation between state agencies and private actors was a consistent feature of Western propaganda strategy, a phenomenon which, over time, contributed to the development of Cold War ‘state-private networks’ in both Britain and the United States.67 ‘Private enterprise cooperation’ was built into the US post-war propaganda instrument, not least because of Congress’s insistence that overseas information work was a task for private business not government. In 1948, George V. Allen told the inaugural meeting of the US Advisory Commission


on Information that The Government’s role in the information job should remain supplemental to that done by private industry. … I shall be happy if both Government and private industry can improve the work they are doing at present to make the U.S. better known and better understood abroad.68 The US propaganda machine was set up to maximise private sector cooperation. Information officers at a 1952 conference in Beirut agreed that One of the least known and most effective phases of the International Information and Educational Exchange Program is that which is conducted by the Private Enterprise Cooperation staff. … It is specifically charged with bringing into the USIE program the active participation of private agencies, business firms, non-profit organizations and individuals.69 In June 1953, the Jackson Report would again urge that Far greater effort should be made to utilize private American organizations for the advancement of United States objectives. The gain in dissemination and credibility through the use of such channels will more than offset the loss by the Government of some control over content.70 USIA’s 1953 Country Plan for Egypt listed a number of corporations contributing to the public relations and propaganda effort, including TWA, Pan-American Airways, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, several major film distributors, the Ford motor company and General Motors.71 On the British side, Warner’s predecessor as Assistant Under-secretary responsible for information activities at the Foreign Office, Ivone Kirkpatrick, identified several private companies as playing an important propaganda role in the Middle East. ‘With a view to keeping them informed of our policy requirements and enlisting their support,’ Kirkpatrick noted, ‘I have seen representatives of the following British companies: Anglo-Iranian Oil Company; Iraq Petroleum Company; Shell–Mex; I.C.I.; British American Tobacco; B.O.A.C.; Ottoman Bank; Barclay’s Bank; Balfour Beatty Ltd. They have promised full co-operation and I think that valuable results will accrue.’72


In the early 1950s, the State Department’s Private Enterprise Cooperation staff involved TWA and Pan-American airlines in a project to bring Middle Eastern journalists to the USA, where they were given placements with press and media corporations.73 Nevertheless, the relationship between the official information services and the commercial news agencies was not always an easy one. Roy Howard (director of Scripps–Howard Newspapers and a former President of the United Press) was among USIA’s sharpest critics, complaining to Eisenhower that the Agency’s news service was ‘a menace to the great asset inherent in the world-wide reputation for independence and freedom from propaganda taint that is the priceless and exclusive possession of the American agencies’.74 An enraged C.D. Jackson responded by tearing into Howard’s ‘appalling display of selfishness, ignorance, and arrogance’, telling Eisenhower’s secretary, Ann Whitman, that If you or the President ever want a real laugh, get the United Press to furnish you copies of their international file to the smaller countries – about 250 words a day of the most unutterable below-thebelt tripe which even a third-rate tabloid would not publish in this country. … If the President would like me to give Roy Howard the facts of life in monosyllabic terms, I will be delighted to do so.75 In fact, USIA often went out of its way to assist the private news agencies and in the 1950s, even delayed planned improvements to its own news service to facilitate a deal between the Associated Press and the Jordanian government.76 By the end of the 1950s, it was standard practice for USIS posts to ‘take any steps necessary to adjust local activities so as to eliminate causes for charges of competition wherever private American news agencies operate’.77 The Foreign Office developed its own connections to the Reuters news agency. During the Second World War, the Special Operations Executive had run an anti-Nazi ‘Britanova’ News Agency and established the Arab News Agency (ANA) as a branch office in Cairo. After 1945, ANA expanded its activities into all the main Arab countries, providing services to ‘nearly every Arab newspaper as well as Sharq-al-Adna … and the BBC’.78 Close links to British intelligence were maintained in the post-war era and in 1948, the head of MEID, A.J.C. Pollock, noted that official policy guidance to the ANA (and the secretly controlled British radio station, Near East Arab Broadcasting Station (NEABS or Sharq al-Adna)) was handled ‘through the office of Colonel Rea … [whose] … representatives


(in the guise of “MI.6”) attend the fortnightly meeting at the Foreign Office under the chairmanship of the Eastern Department’.79 Benefiting from government subsidies of around £150,000 a year, ANA was able to offer its material at artificially low prices, enjoying a huge advantage over commercial agencies. Reuters was among the agencies finding it difficult to compete, and Sir Christopher Chancellor, Reuter’s general manager, complained to the Foreign Office about ‘sham’ news agencies in the Middle East as early as 1946.80 Even so, it was not until 1954 that a deal between Reuters and ANA was struck under the terms of which ANA, for an annual fee of £28,000, became the agent for the distribution of the Reuters’ service in the Middle East.81 ‘Reuters’, as Donald Read points out, was now ‘accepting British Government help’, while ‘pretending not to know that it was doing so’,82 a reminder of the importance ascribed by the Foreign Office to keeping Reuters ‘free of any real or imagined taint of propaganda’.83 The use of local intermediaries to carry the British propaganda message was advanced by the Cairo Embassy’s ‘oral propaganda networks’, which developed from the wartime creation of the ‘Landale Organisation’ and the Ikhwan al Hurriya. The Landale Organisation (named after the Embassy Publicity Section’s R.T. Landale) was based upon the cultivation of an extensive contact list to which a current affairs bulletin, the ‘Talking Point Letter’ was distributed. Landale, convinced that ‘hospitality’ had come to play ‘an increasingly important role in our propaganda’, argued that In common with the rest of the East, the Egyptian understands and appreciates social contact more probably than other forms of propaganda, because this, more than the others, affects him personally and pays tribute to him as an individual. The old Arabic custom which forbids a man to harm a friend who has broken bread with him is still psychologically valuable to us.84 Landale’s efforts provided British propagandists with a receptive audience for the British perspective on world affairs. Anthony Haigh, head of the Cairo Publicity Section, subsequently sought to insert ‘more purely political news and propaganda’ into the Talking Point Letter and worked to expand its circulation, arguing that ‘we could push distribution through the Landale organisation to anything up to 20,000 copies’.85 In 1949, when Landale was transferred to another post, Haigh acknowledged his departure had been accompanied by ‘manifestations of goodwill and regret from many hundreds of Egyptian friends’ and paid


tribute to ‘the excellent work which he has done for the department, many of whose channels have been provided entirely by his initiative and enterprise’.86 While Landale was developing his own network, the famous travel writer, Freya Stark, used her own Ministry of Information and British Intelligence connections to set up the Ikhwan al Hurriya (‘Brotherhood of Freedom’). At the end of the war, the Palestinian and Iraqi wings of the organisation were allowed to wither away, but the Egyptian branch survived into the post-war era and continued to act as a valuable instrument of British propaganda. Described by Kirkpatrick as ‘a remarkable British organisation’,87 it consisted by June 1948 of 5105 committees and 52,863 members (augmented by another 2926 members in an auxiliary women’s branch),88 which met regularly to discuss a weekly bulletin designed to stimulate debate on political and social affairs. A 1947 membership booklet illuminates the working practices and key principles of the organisation. ‘The Brotherhood works by personal contact and word of mouth’, it stated, proclaiming the chief duties of its members to be as follows: (a) to counter, orally, anti-democratic and anti-United Nations talk; (b) to awaken those of their countrymen who do not realise that, in order to take their proper position in the civilised world, they cannot remain indifferent to world affairs; (c) to make themselves fully acquainted with the ideals and principles of democracy and to disseminate these.89 Stark had been keen to stress that the Ikhwan’s success depended on the fact that its propaganda was ‘not only spread but conceived by the people of the country in which it was to act’. In 1948, however, the organisation’s British director, Ronald Fay, admitted that ‘the whole bulletin is under our control. … To all outward appearance [it] is written by our Egyptian members … but in actual fact it contains what we want it to contain’.90 Stark was less coy about how the seemingly neutral dissemination of pro-democracy material served as a cover for pro-British propaganda. ‘To obtain a band of really useful co-operators requires a cause which inspires enthusiasm’, she argued, but the cause of Britain cannot be expected to do so except among British subjects and among a very small number of others: it is not a good ‘cry’ in foreign countries. We have therefore chosen the name of the Brotherhood of Freedom, so that being out to support Freedom and


Democracy we can take whatever local tinge appears to be most helpful, while, in effect, the results are exactly the same as would follow a purely pro-British gospel. The fact that Freedom and Democracy are rather hackneyed words in our ears should not blind us to their potency among less sophisticated people.91 US propagandists had nothing like the Landale Organisation or the Brotherhood of Freedom at their disposal. There was some talk in the 1940s about the possibility of mobilising private American citizens behind an ‘American Committee for Democracy’ in Egypt.92 The PSB later announced that it was drawing up ‘a central and coordinated plan’ to maximise the use of personal contacts in American propaganda, seeking ‘to indoctrinate and utilize Americans serving in the area in official or private capacities’.93 Perhaps the nearest American equivalent to organisations like the Brotherhood of Freedom were private foundations dedicated to fostering closer relations with the peoples of the Middle East. Maybe the most important of the private American foundations and societies active in the region was the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME). Founded in June 1951, AFME existed, in its own words, ‘to further and intensify relations – especially cultural relations – between Americans and Middle Easterners’.94 To that end, its activities ranged from some cultural relations and exchange programmes to some more explicitly political anti-Zionist and anti-British propaganda. Initially, one of AFME’s founder members told British representatives that the new organisation was ‘not in any way directed against British interests’ or intended to be ‘damaging in any way [to] Anglo-American cooperation in the area’.95 Under the direction of Dorothy Thompson and Garland Evans Hopkins, however, AFME quickly showed its true political colours. Hopkins was dismissed by British representatives in Syria as an unimpressive individual whose attitudes towards ‘colonialism’ were informed by ‘a mix of ignorance and emotion’.96 Thompson, during a 1952 visit to Baghdad, contrived to unleash a minor diplomatic quarrel when she described Britain as an ‘over-populated island struggling for her existence and looking around for friends to keep herself alive’.97 Incidents such as these prompted Foreign Office protests to the State Department98 and some American officials, sympathetic to British concerns, suggested that ‘the Department should re-evaluate its contacts with AFME’.99 Nevertheless, since the State Department and USIA could point out that they had no responsibility for AFME, the organisation was allowed to go about its business relatively unhindered. Indeed,


several historians have claimed that the organisation received financial support from the CIA.100 Both British and American propagandists devoted significant efforts to news and current affairs magazine production for Middle Eastern readers. By the early 1950s, however, the winding up of Britain’s wartime publishing activities and the BBC’s decision to terminate its Arabic Listener magazine had left something of a gap in the British propaganda effort. The COI responded in June 1952 with Al Aalam (‘The Globe’), a Picture Post-style Arabic monthly designed to compete with the ‘nationalist, trashy, but attractively produced pictorial magazines printed in Egypt’.101 While presenting itself as the commercial product of an independent company in Beirut, Al Aalam was heavily subsidised by the British Government as its cover price of just 6d (intended to undercut the Egyptian competition) never enabled it to recover its production costs. IPD described the main sources of the magazine’s funding in May 1952: The major Oil Companies with interests in the Middle East are sufficiently interested to contribute nearly one-third of the cost of production of the magazine. This fact should on no account be divulged outside official circles as the Oil Companies are most anxious not to be associated publicly with the magazine. The remainder of the cost is being found from the Central Office of Information and HMSO votes.102 British officials remained ‘anxious to conceal for as long as possible the official British connection with the magazine’ in order to ‘keep up the fiction that it is being published for the commercial distributors, Messrs. Farajalla of Beirut’. ‘We hope,’ IPD admitted, ‘that the magazine will be established and popular before our enemies succeed in labelling it publicly as British propaganda.’103 The COI hoped to use Al Aalam to promote themes facilitating the emergence of ‘a stable and prosperous Middle East, ready to co-operate with her traditional friend Britain, and sufficiently healthy in the social and economic fields to withstand Communist penetration’.104 Initially, however, the magazine sought to attract readers through a heavy emphasis on entertainment and by avoiding overtly ‘propagandistic’ content. The first issue, adorned with a cover photograph of Joan Collins and a centre spread featuring colour photographs of glamorous Iranian and Spanish models under the title ‘Oriental and Western Charm’, set out the magazine’s stall in none too subtle terms. With the magazine’s diplomatic and corporate sponsors pressing for more features on social,


economic and political themes, however, the COI agreed to ‘inject propaganda into the magazine earlier and faster than was at first envisaged’.105 Links with IRD were established and by December 1954, COI staff were ensuring that ‘every issue carries 2–3 items of an antiCommunist nature in the shape of shorts gleaned from the “The Digest” ’.106 In a progress report sent to British oil company representatives, it was pointed out that in the first six months of the magazine, ‘useful features … from the propaganda point of view’ had included articles on NATO, British support for social and economic development in the Middle East, the educational experiences of Arab rulers in British schools, British assistance to Middle Eastern farmers and the flourishing of Islamic communities in Britain.107 From a circulation of just under 28,000 at the end of 1952, Al Aalam was regularly selling over 50,000 copies by 1956.108 During a March 1957 tour of the region, the COI’s John Mcmillan could barely contain his enthusiasm, claiming that The slick, glamorous, sophisticated Al Aalam is nothing short of sensational. … I have hardly found a single person who doesn’t recall some feature of Al Aalam. … it is currently the biggest thing in Arabic publications here. Most important, its discreet pro-British slant seems to produce no resentment; and indeed, so far as I can judge, is positively welcome to our well-wishers … even when they know that the magazine is a British ‘plant’.109 Al Aalam’s success encouraged British posts in the region to press on with similar, if smaller-scale, projects and both the Cairo and Baghdad Embassies issued their own current affairs publications. The first major post-war American propaganda magazine in the Arab world (if one discounts an Arabic translation of America magazine, produced in the US primarily with European audiences in mind) was the Cairo Embassy’s The Week in America, the first issues of which appeared in 1948. Its creators described its chief objectives as being: (1) Projecting the American way of life through articles on scientific, medical, cultural, educational and technological subjects; (2) presenting and emphasizing United States policy on international issues such as control of atomic energy and the struggle between democracy and totalitarianism.110 The Week in America was warmly received by Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) across the region. Even from Saudi Arabia, something of an information


policy desert as far as British and American activities were concerned, came the report that ‘The Week in America’ obviously represents the fruit of much careful planning and a great deal of thought. We have shown the first issue of it to local Arabs and they are enthusiastic. It is believed that this is the finest way of presenting informational material that has yet been devised in the Middle East since OWI began operations back in the early days of World War II.111 Under USIA, the American magazine programme in the Middle East was dominated by two publications, News Review/Al Akhbar and Al Sadaka, produced in Beirut and Cairo, respectively. News Review/ Al Akhbar, published in both English and Arabic, was launched in 1950, and with a readership concentrated in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq, saw its Arabic circulation rise from 17,500 in 1952 to around 80,000 by early 1956. The magazine’s mailing list distribution system did prove somewhat vulnerable to exploitation, however, as was the case with the ‘enterprising paper bag manufacturer’ in Amman who contrived to secure for himself a plentiful source of raw material by subscribing for multiple copies under different names at the same address.112 Al Sadaka (‘Friendship’) was launched in July 1952 and focused on the Egyptian market. USIS Cairo described it as ‘a weekly Arabic language tabloid, 12 page newspaper … which defines official American attitudes, reports Egyptian–American co-operative programs, and prepares the way for future acceptance of American policies’.113 The political content of the magazine, and anti-communist material in particular, was ‘sugar-coated’ with a question-and-answer page, sports features and extensive use of USIA photographic material. Within months of its establishment, Al Sadaka had a circulation of 55,000, a level it maintained into the second half of the 1950s.114 In early 1952, the State Department identified a need to ‘neutralize and overcome the effects of communist activities in the book publishing and distribution field, especially in the critical areas of the Near East and Asia’ and endorsed the establishment of a ‘private, non-profit US corporation which will translate, publish and distribute commercially those American or other books which explain and further the true aims of the US on the one hand, and expose and explode the communist aims and myths on the other’.115 By June, ‘Franklin Publications’ had opened for business.116 As a government-sponsored ‘front’ company, Franklin Publications did not advertise its connections to the State Department


and was keen to avoid being seen as an overtly propagandistic or anticommunist enterprise. From a regional headquarters in Cairo, and in co-operation with ‘indigenous industry’ and ‘local leadership groups’, it set out to provide Arab readers with educational texts in the technical and social science fields.117 By 1954, Franklin Publications was being commended for its work in the Middle East118 and a 1956 NSC report noted that Nasser himself had praised the company for one of the educational titles it had made available.119 USIA certainly valued the company’s work, noting that ‘In the field of Book Translations, the operations of the corporation and USIA are closely allied and it is important to the smooth functioning of the book translation program of both elements that the Agency be kept currently, and fully informed of the corporation’s activities, requests, problems and achievements.’120 The British information services also made use of the private sector in their book translation and distribution programme. In the late 1940s, the Foreign Office worked closely with W.H. Smith & Son in order to stimulate the British book trade in the region. In January 1948, the MEID reported that W.H. Smith’s representative, who arrived in Cairo in October, intends to start operations on the 1st February. These operations should in time extend to other Middle East countries than Egypt and discussions are now proceeding in Cairo about the possibility of Smiths handling the commercial distribution of British Council and HMSO material. It is to be hoped that the import of British books to the Middle East will now greatly improve.121 Within a year, officials in Cairo were able to report that ‘In the opinion of the Manager of W.H. Smith & Son, Cairo … the British Book Trade in Egypt is flourishing’. Diplomats were particularly pleased that ‘The trade appears to be quite unaffected by the vagaries of the political situation. … This is particularly apparent in the Universities, always in the forefront of political demonstrations, where about 90% of the textbooks used, except in the Faculty of Law, are British standard works’.122 In addition to these publishing programmes, books and magazines were made available through the libraries and reading rooms attached to diplomatic posts and information offices across the Middle East. Contemporary investigations produced mixed evidences of the value of British information services reading rooms. An IPD questionnaire elicited an especially pessimistic response from the Cairo Embassy which declared that its own reading room was hard to find and made inaccessible to


members of the general public by excessive security checks. In response to the question, ‘How many books are borrowed by local nationals?’ the press office could only reply ‘Very few, and then mainly by influential Egyptians through members of staff’. IPD’s enquiry as to whether the building was air-conditioned produced the somewhat cynical retort, ‘No, but it is extremely draughty.’123 Other offices responding to the survey admitted that reading rooms were more frequently used by British Embassy officials than locals. There was no reading room in Beirut (or indeed, anywhere in the Lebanon), and few Foreign Office libraries held many volumes in Arabic, an immediate disincentive to local readers. In a typically dismissive remark, Embassy staff in Iraq observed that the reading room in Baghdad was ‘not very effective’ and that in any case ‘the Iraqi public is not much given to reading’.124 US officials received more encouraging feedback. As early as May 1946 it was reported that the formal opening of the USIS Library in Cairo in January 1946 had proved to be ‘one of the most significant developments in information and cultural relations’ with the library attracting a ‘flood of eager readers, borrowers and inquirors’.125 By January 1954, USIA operated 40 USIA libraries across the ‘Near East’ area (this total included libraries in South Asia and the Indian sub-continent as well as the Middle East), each containing an average of 7500 to 10,000 volumes. The PAO in Jordan recorded in March 1953 that new library facilities in Amman had been afforded an ‘astounding and enthusiastic welcome’ by the Jordanian public. Two hundred and fifty four visitors had visited the library on one day alone, while the British reading room in the area seldom attracted more than 20–30 people a day.126 Positive reports continued to flow from Cairo and USIS staff described their facilities as ‘the model for many Egyptian libraries’, producing an influence that has ‘extended far beyond the cumulative impact of its books and loans’.127 USIS libraries were not immune to the odd mishap and one embarrassing mistake (involving the discovery of the Israeli national song in a USIS library songbook in Damascus) produced angry Syrian demands for an official investigation.128 British and American newsreel propaganda provides further examples of the close relationship between state agencies and private media corporations. British officials co-operated with Gaumont, Paramount, M.G.M. and 20th Century Fox in the production and distribution of newsreels for the Middle East. In September 1948, the editor-in-chief of the Paramount newsreel told IRD representatives that ‘he wanted to make his newsreel of positive value to British interests’129 and the COI and IPD also combined to distribute a version of the Gaumont–British


newsreel in the Arab world. Although its content was essentially the same as the domestic British version, unsuitable material was deleted on the advice of IPD’s Middle East Regional Adviser before the newsreel was despatched to Cairo for the addition of an Arabic commentary. The final product was augmented by local footage filmed by British officials in the Middle East.130 Despite these efforts, British newsreels struggled to make an impact upon local audiences, largely because their content was so far removed from regional concerns. Information officers in the field complained regularly about this, pressing for a greater proportion of newsreel items to be filmed locally. It should not have been necessary for Britain’s information officer in Baghdad to remark that ‘the Chelsea Arts Ball was hardly a suitable subject to show in the rural areas of Iraq and cannot have enhanced our reputation’.131 By the end of the 1940s, representatives in the Levant had concluded that ‘British newsreels are far from popular here. Exhibitioners complain that there is not sufficient variety in the British newsreels which seem to conform to a standard pattern of subjects … which are neither understood nor popular in the Lebanon’.132 Not all feedback was so pessimistic, and staff in Iran reported that in the years before the oil nationalisation crisis, ‘British Movietone Newsreels were shown to approximately 300,000 people in Teheran [sic] and Abadan, and were also shown at the Imperial Court, the Officers College and at all British Consular Posts.’133 US propagandists developed their own film industry contacts. By the early 1950s, the State Department could claim that its supervisory role in the production of the Associated Newsreel for Iran had provided one of the ‘most important contacts with theatre-going public’,134 and the Department was also involved in the distribution of a Persian version of the Universal–International Newsreel.135 Contacts with Darryl Zanuck’s 20th Century Fox corporation also proved profitable. Zanuck had written to the Jackson Committee in March 1953, recalling his antiNazi propaganda work with Anthony Eden and Brendan Bracken in the 1930s and his ‘series of special War Department films … designed for the Home Front’ during the Second World War. ‘I have the definite feeling,’ Zanuck promised the Committee, ‘that if I cannot make a contribution in this particular area then certainly someone from the motion picture industry should be able to make a worthwhile contribution.’136 Before long, USIA was working with Fox Movietone on the News of the Day newsreel, which was distributed across the Arab world in English, French and Arabic editions. News of the Day, OCB staff noted in June 1955, was ‘an unattributed USIA newsreel, the content of which is wholly governed by the Agency’.137 An OCB memorandum of December 1956


refers to another non-attributable newsreel, ‘KINGFISH’, which reached an estimated weekly audience of some 575,000 viewers across the Bureau of Near Eastern, South Asian and African Affairs (NEA) region.138 A 1957 report for the NSC indicated that USIA had also begun to operate a weekly newsreel attributed to the Iraqi government in 1956.139 Given the high Middle Eastern illiteracy rates, radio was seen as a particularly valuable medium. Naturally, the External Services of the BBC with their reputation for honesty, independence and integrity were at the heart of British broadcasting operations in the region. The Arabic Service, launched in January 1938, was the first regular BBC foreign language transmission and by 1946, the ‘Near East Services’ included broadcasts in Arabic (three hours daily), Turkish (one hour daily) and Persian (thirty minutes daily).140 Programme schedules balanced regular news bulletins and daily political commentaries with ‘projection of Britain’ material, religious readings, and musical and dramatic light entertainment ‘designed to attract and hold the audience’.141 The reputation of the news services was the BBC’s greatest asset, however. As Donald Stephenson pointed out in 1946, ‘It is beyond dispute that the greatest single factor contributing to whatever success BBC foreign broadcasts have achieved, is the unimpeachable integrity of the news content.’142 In addition to its reputation for reliability, the BBC also enjoyed an advantage over its competitors in terms of the amount of time it was on the air. By 1953, daily Arabic broadcasts had been extended to four hours and Persian to one hour with a new Hebrew Service broadcasting for thirty minutes daily. Of its major rivals, the Soviet Union broadcast in Arabic for just one hour a day, the French for three hours and Egypt for two hours.143 The expansion of Egyptian and Syrian broadcasting, however, seriously challenged the BBC’s pre-eminence. Soon, both Cairo and Damascus were broadcasting on medium wave for more than 40 hours a week and it was in vain that BBC officials, worried about ‘the growing competition we are up against’, asked the government for funds to develop BBC medium wave broadcasts.144 The BBC was not the only important British broadcaster in the Middle East and many listeners regarded the NEABS or ‘Sharq al-Adna’ as Britain’s greatest radio asset. By 1945, Sharq al-Adna was established as an ‘independent’ station based in Palestine. In reality, as Douglas DoddsParker later admitted, the station was ‘secretly operated by Her Majesty’s Government’ with the objective of presenting British policies ‘from a standpoint sympathetic to Arab audiences’.145 Until, Nasser launched the ‘Voice of the Arabs’ in 1953, Sharq was probably the most popular station in the region. Britain’s information officer in Syria reported in


1947 that ‘no other broadcasting system and no individual newspaper in the Middle East reaches so widely-dispersed and so varied a public,’ and pronounced Sharq to be ‘the strongest single publicity agency in this area.’146 BBC officials also recognised the success of their ‘commercial’ competitor, with Evelyn Paxton, after a tour of the region in 1949, describing it as ‘one of the most popular Arabic broadcasting stations. I heard nothing but praise for its programmes wherever I went’. Paxton ascribed the station’s success ‘to the great number of hours it is on the air and the high proportion of music broadcast’. Sharq al-Adna, he observed, was ‘to a great extent the Light Programme of the Arab World’.147 Some worried about the low proportion of ‘political’ content (only two out of 16 hours a day were dedicated to news and politics148), but most accepted that this political content remained a valuable ‘daily pill for which the British taxpayer provides money to buy fourteen hour layers of expensive sugar’.149 In 1948 officials in Iraq admitted that British sponsorship of the station was ‘fairly common knowledge’150 and the head of RIO Beirut accepted in 1955 that ‘most Middle East listeners think … Sharq has British official backing’.151 Nevertheless, Sharq was often used as a means of ‘getting tough’ with regional rivals to a much greater extent than was possible with the ‘official’ voice of the BBC. Kuwaiti listeners told British diplomats in 1956 that as the station ‘sometimes broadcast things which were later found to be untrue’, Sharq’s news bulletins ‘did not have the same reputation as the BBC’152 while BBC staff asserted that ‘to Sharq is attached a definite suspicion of intention, and as a result, more weight is attached to BBC news’.153 In this respect, it is arguable that Sharq’s star was on the wane even before the ham-fisted policies of the Eden government during the Suez Crisis put an end to its usefulness once and for all. The Voice of America (VOA) passed under the control of the State Department’s International Broadcasting Division in 1946. While the BBC had been broadcasting in Arabic since the 1930s, US plans to begin broadcasting in Middle Eastern languages fell victim to post-war budget cuts and it was not until February 1948 that George Marshall informed staff in the Middle East that ‘the Department is once again giving consideration to the inauguration of shortwave broadcasts in Turkish, Persian and Arabic’.154 Until 1949, official listeners to VOA in the Middle East could receive only English-language broadcasts, the impact of which was negligible. British observers were typically contemptuous of the post-war VOA and IPD staff reacted with horror at proposals for BBC co-operation with a station whose broadcasts they regarded as


‘inaccurate in substance [and] tactless and hectoring in tone’.155 VOA finally began broadcasting in Persian on 21 March 1949, followed by Turkish on 19 December, while the first Arabic broadcast was made on New Year’s Day, 1950.156 The new Arabic service consisted of just thirty minutes of daily programming (increased to one hour in 1951). America’s entry into the field of Middle East radio propaganda was thus both inauspicious and belated. An assessment of VOA’s Hebrew service, launched on 15 April 1951, produced the acid comment that ‘On the Hebrew program we have no problem, as no one is listening’.157 It came as no surprise when in 1953, after just two years, the service was discontinued, leaving the American Chargé d’Affaires in Tel Aviv to comment that ‘it is not believed that the effectiveness of the United States information program has been significantly diminished because of the discontinuance of broadcasts in that language’.158 VOA’s Arabic broadcasts were perhaps fortunate to escape a similar fate. British listeners in Egypt declared that VOA had stimulated ‘no local interest whatsoever’ and that because of Britain’s ‘greater propaganda experience in the Middle East’, it would be best if VOA broadcasts were abandoned in order to leave the field clear for the BBC.159 Such sentiments were echoed by British officials in Iraq, who stated that [T]here can be no comparison between the respective popularity in Iraq of the ‘Voice of America’ and the B.B.C. Even Americans would probably agree that were the former to cease operating no appreciable gap would be felt the ordinary listener; whereas any reduction in the latter’s services would not only deprive a great number of Iraqis of their favourite station, but would adversely affect British prestige.160 Such attitudes could be dismissed as British resentment at growing American influence in the region were it not for the fact that many US observers were similarly critical. USIS staff were almost unanimous in regarding VOA as ‘too propagandistic’ and a gathering of Middle Eastern PAOs in 1952 agreed that the BBC’s Arabic Service had the advantages of ‘seniority, experience and talent’.161 This conclusion was echoed by officials in Iran who stated that, as far as Persian broadcasts were concerned, the ‘BBC is the most popular. It has the best voices, the best talent, the best news and dramatic shows’.162 Poor reception left Egyptian listeners complaining that VOA was ‘barely intelligible’ at times163 and many Egyptians found the accents of announcers ‘strange’ and ‘hard to understand’.164 In May 1954, US Ambassador in Damascus dismissed the broadcasts with the comments that ‘VOA programs have a small and


unresponsive audience and achieve little’,165 while as late as July 1956, it was still thought that VOA was ‘guilty of presenting too much of what the Arabs call “propaganda” and too little entertainment’.166 Despite these concerns, few officials called for an end to VOA’s Arabic broadcasts. The State Department’s Richard Sanger argued that ‘every well-dressed country must have a radio voice it can use when needed’167 while the USAF’s Brigadier General Dale Smith summarised official attitudes when he told the Operations Co-ordinating Board (OCB) in August 1954 that although VOA’s Arabic service was in need of ‘extensive improvements and adjustments’, they remained ‘too valuable to eliminate’.168 Western propagandists also sought to manipulate local radio broadcasters. Wilbur Schramm’s report into the effectiveness of American overseas broadcasting, conducted at the request of the NSC in 1954, concluded that in the Middle East ‘it is the considered opinion of our observers that no direct foreign broadcast, including BBC, has a substantial proportion of listeners’ and recommended that more use be made of locally controlled radio.169 In fact, the use of foreign radio station was already well-advanced by 1954 and few opportunities to forge links with Middle Eastern broadcasters were ignored in this period. The risks of a major commitment to and involvement in the affairs of a foreign radio station can be seen from the post-war British experience in Egypt. Until 1947, British officials enjoyed an extraordinarily privileged position within the Egyptian State Broadcasting (ESB) service, stemming from the fact that ESB was effectively run by British managers from the Marconi Company. This enabled British propagandists to use ESB as one of their own channels. Officials noted that until 1945, the Embassy Publicity Section had been ‘able to get what it liked on the air’ and that even after a new five-year agreement signed in that year created an Egyptian Programme Board in full control of ESB programmes it remained possible, ‘thanks to the co-operation of British Marconi Managers to get some of our material across’.170 As the Embassy later recalled, ‘When British Marconi managers were in charge of ESB it was comparatively easy to get across a particular line.’171 Predictably, British manipulation of Egyptian radio provoked a nationalist backlash. Developing Egyptian editorial independence led in 1947 to unwise protests by Embassy officials about the ‘improper use’ of ESB by the Arab League. Sensitive to high-handedness of this kind, the Egyptian Government reacted by cancelling the Marconi contract and effectively nationalising the station. The Embassy was left to ponder the fact that ‘In the present temper of the Egyptian Government it is impossible for us to get anything across on the ESB.’172


ESB had been co-operating with American propagandists since the war. Until September 1946, USIS–OIC Cairo provided a weekly fifteen minute radio talk, broadcast by ESB every Friday, and constituting ‘a continuation of the wartime “Projection of America” type operation’.173 The ‘nationalisation’ of ESB in early 1947 put an end to close USIS–ESB collaboration for some time, and Public Affairs Attaché, Noel Macy explained that the Egyptians were reluctant to ‘be in the position of giving us something they won’t give anyone else, and they don’t want to give time to one or two others I could mention’.174 By 1950, however, USIE noted that ESB was, once again, ‘looking for outside help’ from USIS officers in Cairo.175 This marked the beginning of a productive relationship with Cairo Radio which eventually persuaded the State Department to endorse plans for a ‘forward programming center in the Middle Eastern area’ and led to the establishment of the ‘Cairo Packaging Center’ in 1953.176 USIA reports indicate that, over 1953–55, this centre furnished as much as half of all the foreign language material broadcast by ESB. These were not always, as Ambassador Caffery admitted, ‘propaganda programs in the strictest sense’, but they did contribute to the building up of ‘good will with ESB for use when we have an important policy statement which we wish to publicize’.177 By 1957, USIA regarded the Packaging Center as an important element of its regional propaganda strategy and a report for the US Advisory Commission on Information pointed out that around 80 per cent of the material produced in Cairo was destined for broadcasting stations outside Egypt. American involvement with and support for Cairo Radio carried its own risks, however. Wilbur Eveland has described how Miles Copeland boasted to him that the broadcasting equipment that the CIA had provided would make Cairo Radio the most powerful station in the Middle East. Under Nasser, however, Cairo Radio and its ‘Voice of the Arabs’ broadcasts could hardly be regarded as a political asset. It did not escape Eveland’s sense of irony that the CIA’s ‘success’, if measured according to the volume of Egyptian propaganda about ‘Western Imperialism’, eventually forced the US to finance a number of other Middle Eastern stations in order ‘to counter a gift that had been turned against our interests’.178 British and American experiences in Egypt exposed the dangers of relying upon foreign radio stations. Nevertheless, it is clear that USIS officials did succeed, at least until US–Egyptian relations began to deteriorate in the autumn of 1955, in maintaining levels of co-operation with the Egyptian radio authorities to a degree unmatched by their British counterparts. Indeed, after the ‘loss’ of ESB in 1947, the main British effort was made in Iraq. Britain’s Information Office in Baghdad


reported its first effective contacts with the local Broadcasting authorities in July 1948179 and although initial progress was slow, this was ascribed to ‘the inefficiency of Iraqi organisation and not to lack of effort on our part’.180 By the mid-1950s, it was clear that Baghdad Radio was gravitating into a British rather than American sphere of influence. As Iraq replaced Egypt at the heart of the British regional position, enthusiasm for the development of a strong Iraqi propaganda capability increased. When British sponsorship of Iraqi claims to regional leadership exacerbated Iraqi–Egyptian rivalries, the British regarded Baghdad Radio as a stick with which to beat Nasser. The mobilisation of Iraqi radio as an instrument of British propaganda formed an important part of British political warfare against Egypt during the mid-1950s. In contrast, US officials were frustrated by their inability to develop closer links with Iraqi radio. At first, their failures were blamed on Iraqi concerns about ‘whether the radio station should or should not play “Western” music’181 but it was not long before the Palestine crisis effectively doomed American attempts to gain access to Iraqi radio. In 1953 USIS staff were still frozen out, stating bluntly that ‘no opportunities for … co-operation with Radio Baghdad exist’,182 although the following year it was claimed that ‘USIS-Iraq does not stress the use of local radio as a medium of communication, in part because the Iraqi radio system is so underdeveloped’.183 By 1956, however, US strategists were considering fresh efforts to move in on what had previously been regarded as British turf. When Eisenhower and Dulles authorised the anti-Nasser ‘OMEGA’ plan in 1956, they endorsed the proposition that ‘the possibility of offering to Iraq expanded radio facilities to counter Egyptian broadcasts should be studied at once’.184 By November 1956, the OCB had convened a special committee on Middle Eastern propaganda to discuss the possibility of making greater use of Radio Baghdad, as a means of weakening Nasser’s position in the Arab world.185 In Jordan, Anglo-American competition for access to official radio channels was more evenly balanced. While British officials gained privileged access to the Jordanian media as a result of the traditionally close relations between Britain and the Hashemite regime, USIS officials were still able to gain access to the state radio network. The Hashemite Broadcasting Station made use of scripts and programmes from the Cairo Packaging Center, as well as the service provided by the USIA Wireless File. USIA also ensured that Jordanian radio received American news and comment through the commercial American news agencies. Other examples of Western involvement with state-controlled radio stations involved British and American co-operation with broadcasting authorities in Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and Libya.186


In the field of cultural diplomacy (discussed in more detail in Chapter 3), the key British agency was the British Council. Established in 1934, the Council, rather like the BBC, was sensitive to the charge that it engaged in ‘propaganda’, and succeeded, in the face of Foreign Office pressure, in preserving its non-official status after 1945. As Ivone Kirkpatrick noted, ‘The British Council enjoys one great advantage to the Middle East. Its representatives are outside the political arena and their relations with the natives do not suffer in the same way from current events.’187 Behind the scenes, the government exercised right of appointment for nine of the 30 members of the Council’s Executive Committee, decided in which countries the Council was to operate and funded its activities through an annual Foreign Office grant-in-aid.188 Nevertheless, the Foreign Office recognised the advantages that nonofficial status bestowed upon the Council, observing that It removes the taint of political propaganda; it permits access to groups and institutions (e.g. universities, professional associations, trade unions) which would be much less accessible to an official body; and it enables the Council to stand aloof from the political estrangements which from time to time beset the course of official international relations.189 The vast majority of the Council’s resources was dedicated to educational projects, particularly English language teaching, exchange schemes and library programmes, with only 10 per cent of the Council’s 1951 budget set aside for the kind of artistic, dramatic and musical activities that attracted such disproportionate criticism from the Council’s political enemies.190 In 1952, the Council was active in Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, the Lebanon and Syria (political issues having forced the temporary suspension of operations in the Sudan and Iran) and reports from the heartlands of the Arab world were consistently enthusiastic as to the Council’s value as an arm of British diplomacy. There was no equivalent of the British Council within the American cultural affairs programme, which was comprised of a patchwork of state and private agencies. Locating responsibility for cultural affairs within the cash-starved OIC in 1946 was not immediately successful and one retired State Department official, commenting on OIC’s cultural programme in the Middle East, noted in a March 1946 report that ‘field officers feel themselves thoroughly out of touch with the Washington offices [and] that the information program far outweighs the Cultural Affairs program’. Cultural diplomacy, he complained, was too often thought of as ‘a minor appendage to Information, with little value or


significance in itself’.191 When USIA was created in 1953, problems emerged regarding the appropriate division of responsibility for cultural diplomacy and eventually led Dulles’ press secretary, Carl McArdle, to call for a clarification of the distinction between the cultural activities of USIA and the State Department.192 As will be shown in Chapter 3, the problems encountered by the official US cultural diplomacy agencies were offset to some extent by an extensive network of private organisations, particularly the activities of private educational institutions.

Anglo-American co-operation and its limits In October 1947, Foreign Office staff noted that ‘There has not, hitherto, been any close co-operation between His Majesty’s Government and the United States Government regarding publicity in the Middle East.’193 An insightful article by Andrew Defty makes the case for 1950–51 as the period in which meaningful co-operation was established,194 although Edward Barrett, George Allen’s successor as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, however claimed that efforts to institutionalise AngloAmerican propaganda co-operation had begun as early as 1948.195 Initially, US diplomats were wary of close association with the British, informing USIS officers in 1948 that while there was ‘no objection to the exchange of views with corresponding British offices’, they should not ‘enter into any arrangement which gave the appearance of joint action … joint policy or unified approach’.196 State Department propagandists were also at first reluctant to authorise the exchange of policy directives and guidance reports, although by 1949 it had been accepted that selected policy papers could be exchanged through the Washington and London Embassies.197 By the autumn of 1949, USIE staff had concluded that a ‘more intimate relation, involving a more frequent exchange of propaganda policy lines between the Department and the Foreign Office may now be required’198 and an agreement was subsequently reached over the exchange of ‘information policy guidances’.199 The details of Anglo-American co-operation were thrashed out in a series of meetings between Barrett and Christopher Warner in the spring of 1950, and although the pair confirmed that there should be a ‘continuous exchange of ideas’, they stopped short of endorsing ‘joint information operations’. Warner offered to post an officer to the Washington Embassy to act as liaison officer to the American propaganda agencies, and IRD’s Adam Watson was selected to fill the post. Barrett responded with the formation of a ‘US–UK Information Committee’, which met for the first time on 17 October 1950.200


Defty has identified the Middle East as an area where there was general Anglo-American agreement on questions of propaganda policy and asserts that the region represented an exception to the rule of partnership stopping short of combined output.201 Discussions between Barrett and Warner in early 1950 did indeed produce a commitment to the staging of ‘periodical demonstrations of solidarity in the information field … to impress upon the natives that we are in all essentials working in harmony’.202 In practice, however, the post-war decade was characterised more by mutual suspicion than harmonious co-operation. Matthew Jones comes closer to capturing the spirit of Anglo-American relations in the Middle East when he quotes John Foster Dulles’ remark that the ‘genuine, intimate and effective cooperation’ between Britain and the United States over covert action in Syria in 1957 was ‘the first instance in his service as Secretary wherein we have had anything like this attitude’.203 A number of factors contrived to work against easy Anglo-American co-operation in the Middle East. Foremost of these, particularly in the late-1940s, was the situation in Palestine. Warner made it clear in May 1948 that Britain was ‘not yet in a position to make available to the American Government its considered views on information policy in the Middle East because of Palestine’.204 He reinforced this point in June, arguing that ‘the Palestine issue … makes a close tie-up with the Americans on publicity rather awkward at the moment’.205 A second factor was the feeling among many British diplomats that the Middle East was ‘their patch’ and their subsequent resentment of any American bid to encroach upon a specifically British sphere of influence. For their part, American propagandists suspected that British requests for closer co-operation were aimed at limiting the US capacity for independent action. In 1948, John Devine, the USIS Films Officer in Cairo, identified increasing British uneasiness about the expanding USIS programme in Egypt and argued that the fledgling American propaganda effort in the region ‘should be built up considerably more by our solitary effort before we undertake any partnership arrangement’. Devine also pointed out that co-operation between British and American propagandists in Egypt could work against US interests on the grounds that it would provoke an ‘almost certain unfavorable Egyptian popular reaction’ were it to become public knowledge.206 Efforts to establish Anglo-American co-operation in the Middle East thus tended to remain limited to basic consultation and informal contacts. From Cairo in 1950, the State Department was informed that ‘Exchange of Information with British counterparts has been useful


to USIE but no appearance of joint action has been given’.207 Staff in Tel Aviv reported that no formal co-ordination of the American and British information programmes was planned. USIS staff clearly felt that the ‘considerable residue of hatred’ that persisted for the British in Israel made it ‘unwise at this time for the American information and cultural services to become identified in the public mind with the similar British services’.208 From Baghdad, American propagandists observed that ‘General British and American cooperation in the information field is good without being obvious,’ but criticised the British effort as being afflicted by ‘conservative leadership and old-fashioned methods’.209 Doubts about the wisdom of open collaboration with the British continued into the mid-1950s. Adam Watson had felt it necessary, at the first meeting of the US–UK Information Committee to express concern about US public statements on the ‘question of colonialism’.210 In early 1951, USIE staff, responding to British requests for discussions on joint approaches to the Middle East, suspected that they had been sold ‘a bill of goods’ and that ‘an effort is being made to get us to pull some British chestnuts out of the fire’.211 Anglo-American differences over key Middle East issues meant that Watson was forced to limit his efforts to seeking co-operation on technical matters only since ‘we had not reached agreement on political policy’.212 Defty accurately identifies the Foreign Office’s refusal to allow the VOA to develop radio facilities in the Persian Gulf as part of its project for encircling the Iron Curtain bloc with broadcasting transmitters (the ‘Ring Plan’) as another problematic issue.213 In March 1951, the Americans were informed that Britain would not agree to the construction of VOA facilities in Kuwait214 because, as Eastern Department’s C.N. Rose pointed out to US officials on 24 May, ‘the United Kingdom had to consider the consequences of burdening the Ruler of Kuwait with the responsibility of acting as an agent of the Western Powers in the cold war’.215 IRD saw things rather differently. Watson informed his American contacts that he was disappointed that Warner had not taken ‘a stronger stand with his colleagues and one which was more helpful to the United States’.216 The following month, both Watson and Peck, met with VOA’s Foy Kohler, to be told that the Foreign Office’s position was ‘unjustified in this day and age’. Kohler believed that the IRD men were sympathetic to his arguments but recorded that Peck had indicated, through a reference to ‘difficulties with the political departments’, that IRD could not speak for the Foreign Office as a whole.217 The ‘Ring Plan’ disagreement, as well as exposing the limited nature of IRD’s influence, reinforces the suspicion that the Foreign Office was reluctant to permit a project that


might increase US influence in an area regarded as a British sphere of influence. In the summer of 1951, therefore, difficulties in formulating a joint Anglo-American approach to regional policy eventually persuaded the State Department that it might ‘be better to allow the question of greater coordination of British and U.S. information work in the Middle East to rest for a while’. Adam Watson cabled the Foreign Office to report that Though the Americans feel the need for doing something more in the Middle East than is being done at present in this field, they are so vague about the technical and political factors involved that they are not at all clear about just what expansion and intensification can be undertaken. It will be easier for them to talk to us when their minds are clearer.218 Over the following year, little progress was made in bringing British and American approaches to the Middle East into an alignment that would facilitate closer propaganda co-operation. On 9 September 1952, Watson informed his State Department contacts of increasing British unhappiness at what the Foreign Office saw as ‘a divergence between Departmental policy and Departmental statements with regard to three situations involving the Near and Middle East’. The issues causing concern were plans for a Middle East Defence Organisation (MEDO), the oil dispute in Iran and the political situation in Egypt.219 Questions of imperialism, nationalism and the respective images of Britain and the United States among the peoples of the Middle East had come to play a major role in defining the limits to Anglo-American co-operation. It was this concern about being tarred with the brush of British imperialism that inspired Foster Dulles’s June 1953 speech contrasting the ‘American traditional dedication to political liberty’ with ‘the old colonial interests’ of Britain and France. Remarks of this kind caused great bitterness in Whitehall, Eastern Department’s John PowellJones stating that the speech ‘can do nothing but harm to our interests and policies’.220 In this sense, Dulles’ comments simply reinforced British beliefs that the Americans were ‘sniping at the British’ in order to improve their own standing in the Arab world. Eastern Department’s Paul Falla interpreted Dulles’s speech in precisely this light. ‘The Americans,’ he argued, ‘incline to belittle our achievements in the area and to attribute their lack of success to having become too closely associated with ourselves in the eyes of local peoples; Mr. Dulles’ speech exemplifies this attitude.’221


A distinct mood of anti-Americanism settled upon the Foreign Office in the summer of 1953, to the point where the London correspondent of the New York Times felt it necessary to remind British contacts that ‘American policy was directed to the promotion of American national interests, not British ones’.222 Eastern Department even embarked upon a project to collect evidence of American policy failures and unpopularity in the Middle East. This inevitably produced the stereotype of the ‘ugly American’, Sir Alex Kirkbride explaining American failure in the following terms: (a) there is the constant suspicion of Jewish influence; (b) they are too well off and inclined to flaunt their affluence; (c) they are too sans façon in a society in which even close relations maintain a degree of formality in their intercourse; (d) their demonstrations of personal friendship are too obviously artificial in their nature to deceive their very astute objectives; (e) lastly, but not least, they are impatient and cannot conceal the fact.223 It took the Assistant Under-Secretary of State, Sir Roger Allen, to point out that it was not, in the circumstances, psychologically very sound for us to set about trying to prove to the Americans, by chapter and verse, how unpopular they are in the Middle East. It will certainly not tend to endear us to them, or make them more receptive to our point of view.224 Eastern Department eventually agreed, Falla conceding that ‘I doubt whether a general remonstrance with the Americans on the basis of the foregoing enquiry would produce useful results or promote understanding.’225 Such a climate was not one in which ‘close and continuous’ propaganda co-operation was likely to flourish. From Beirut, Chapman Andrews reported in July 1953 that it was ‘remarkably difficult to persuade the Americans to cooperate closely with us over publicity and propaganda’.226 A year later, British officials in Cairo remarked similarly that ‘Co-operation with the Americans is difficult because the Americans are under the impression that many Egyptians prefer them to the British and regard the British as their main enemies. The Americans do not wish to be tarred with the imperialist brush’.227 Aside from the American reluctance to risk association with the unpopular British, both the British and the Americans continued to express professional disdain


for the other’s information work in the region. Chapman Andrews ascribed a portion of the American reluctance to collaborate with British information officers to ‘the feeling that the Americans are better publicity agents than we are and that they should not tie their hands to our plodding and less successful methods’.228 British officials in Cairo, meanwhile, viewed the ‘enormous quantities’ of American anti-communist material with some scepticism. ‘Some of it is good,’ they conceded, ‘but much of it is sensational and consists of opinions rather than facts. … Co-operation with them would bring our own anti-communist campaign more into the open, to its detriment’.229 Through the mid-1950s, therefore, British and American propagandists operating in the Middle East maintained contacts with each other, but never committed themselves to a genuine partnership or joint activities. The determination of American information officers to keep their distance from the British was reaffirmed in USIA guidance notes issued in 1954 and 1955. These reminded staff that co-operation should ‘not involve overt joint operations, except in exceptional circumstances’230 and stressed that in areas where British policies were ‘disliked by the local government and/or people … close association … in field activities or in similarity of output … would not necessarily be to our advantage’.231 Adam Watson was an unusual British representative in that he did not resent this American reluctance to openly associate with the British in the Middle East or even regard it as unduly problematic. The Cold War interests of the West as a whole, he believed, justified the ‘US tendency to fight shy of co-operating with our information officers or with the British Council in places like the Middle East … [because]. … In places where one of us is labelled “imperialist” the effectiveness of the other’s job depends upon not being directly associated in the local mind with the objectionable imperialism’.232

2 ‘Western Voices, Arab Minds’ Orientalism, Stereotypes and Propaganda in the Middle East

The Arabs have a favourite proverb – ‘The dogs bark, the caravan passes’. … In the present context we are the caravan. … Instead of going on our way we run after and fall over ourselves in trying to placate the barking ‘dogs’, the latter wag their tails and seem pleased. In fact they lose respect but learn the lesson and bark the louder for more favour. The caravan does not pass on its way. It halts and tries to placate all the ‘dogs’ at once. They want different things and remain unsatisfied. At the same time the onlookers despair of the caravan. They believe that we control the ‘dogs’ and that these are obedient to our commands or at least that they would not dare to do anything contrary to our wishes. Moreover they know that the ‘dogs’ are dependent on us – as indeed they are in varying degree. I do not suggest that we should punish or be unkind to the ‘dogs’. We must by all means treat them kindly – but also positively. They will from time to time need reminding that we and not they are the leaders of a team working together and that they must conform to the general line. … Thus and only thus, shall we have the respect which is an essential ingredient in oriental friendship. Knox Helm, British Representative in Tel Aviv, 21 July 1949 Underlying all diplomatic relations with the Middle East is the centuries-old struggle between Eastern and Western civilizations. USIA intelligence memorandum, ‘Notes on talk by Bernard Lewis’, 19 December 1955 48

‘Western Voices, Arab Minds’ 49

International historians should need no reminding of the importance of ‘unspoken assumptions’ behind the policy-making process. Recent years have seen a remarkable upsurge of interest in the role of ‘culture’ in international relations, and within this rapidly expanding field the analysis of Western cultural assumptions about the Middle East provides the diplomatic historian with an extraordinarily rich area of study. The student of Western propaganda in the Middle East has particular reason to interest himself in this literature, since images of ‘the Arab mind’ exerted a powerful and often unhelpful hold over British and American propagandists. It will be argued here that many Western officials were influenced by a set of racial and cultural assumptions about ‘Islam’ and the Arabs that was recognisably ‘Orientalist’, and that this had a direct impact on the conceptualisation and communication of propaganda in the Middle East. Historians wishing to tease out the racial and cultural assumptions influencing the formulation of Anglo-American policy in the post-war Middle East invariably find themselves drawn to the work of Edward W. Said. Said’s political radicalism and his outspoken criticism of the American intellectual community has not always endeared him to academic historians. The result, as Andrew Rotter noted in an influential article in the American Historical Review, is that while ‘American diplomatic historians may not be interested in Edward Said … he is interested in them’.1 Many scholars, particularly those at the receiving end of Said’s polemical barbs, proved reluctant to confront the challenge. If they acknowledged criticism at all, they did so with thinly veiled references to ‘writers uncritically committed to the radical-leftist point of view of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’2 or, in the case of David Pryce-Jones, a largely incomprehensible assault on Said’s indulgence of ‘Islamocentric fantasies in defense of tribal-religious identity’.3 Bernard Lewis, more plausibly, accused Said of setting up a ‘straw man’ by attacking an arbitrarily selected body of orientalist literature in order to caricature and misrepresent a diverse modern discipline for his own political ends.4 Others, such as the American University of Beirut’s Malcolm Kerr, accepted that Said’s analysis of the modes of Western representation of the Arab world was a valuable contribution but rejected the implication of a consistent or direct relationship between academic scholarship and the exercise of political power. As one commentator subsequently put it, ‘the persistence of racial stereotypes is readily conceded, but not the indictment of the Orientalist tradition as a whole of being complicit with Western power’.5


This allegation was at the heart of Said’s attack on the ‘Orientalists’. Said was quite clear in his belief that From at least the end of the eighteenth century until our own day, modern Occidental reactions to Islam have been dominated by a radically simplified type of thinking that may still be called Orientalist. The general basis of Orientalist thought is an imaginative and yet drastically polarized geography dividing the world into two unequal parts, the larger ‘different’ one called the Orient, the other, also known as ‘our’ world, called the Occident or the West.6 ‘Orientalism’ was thus defined as ‘the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it’7 – and was, as a result, inextricably bound up with Western imperialism. Identified and condemned as ‘a discourse of domination, both a product of European subjugation of the Middle East, and an instrument in this process’,8 Orientalism was, in short, ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’.9 Investigating Orientalism’s defining characteristics, Fred Halliday identified three key ‘components’. The first was the belief that the region and its inhabitants must be understood through the consideration of their languages and literature, a position that led easily to the absurdity of ‘etymological reductionism’; the bid ‘to explain the meaning of words in today’s discourse by reference to their classical roots’.10 The second characteristic was the emphasis upon the ‘supposed difficulty or even impossibility of change’.11 Orientalists depicted the world of Islam as a civilisational backwater, incapable of modernisation and reform, and an epitome of social, political and intellectual ‘stagnation’ or ‘backwardness’.12 For Said, the central myth of twentieth-century Orientalism was the idea of the ‘arrested development’ of an Arab world consistently characterised as ‘uncreative, unscientific, and authoritarian’, in a word, ‘backward’.13 The most popular explanation for Arab backwardness lies in the third of the key Orientalist characteristics, the identification of ‘Islam’ as an all-consuming ideological system which, in denying Arabs an effective distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘society’, has served to thwart the development of modern methods of thought. Orientalists, therefore, concentrate on the ‘holistic culture’ of Islam derived from its claim of ‘jurisdiction over a wider range of social activity than other, comparable religions’.14 Orientalist scholars have thus chosen to identify Islam as


the key to understanding the social, economic, political and psychological structures of the Arab world. As Raphael Patai stated categorically, ‘Religion was not one aspect of [Arab] life, but the hub from which all else radiated.’15 The prevalence of anti-Arab stereotypes in mainstream American culture has inspired numerous surveys and studies by media analysts and cultural commentators.16 By the 1990s, however, a growing number of historians of American foreign relations were also beginning to explore the ways in which racial attitudes and cultural images had contributed to the development of a particular set of American beliefs about and policies towards the Middle East. Michelle Mart and Mary Ann Heiss, for example, both set out to investigate the manner in which historically specific notions of race and gender had influenced American policy towards the Middle East. For Mart, the emergence of a gendered view of a ‘masculine’ Israel in the early Cold War provided a valuable insight into American policy towards the Jewish state and illustrated how ‘From the late 1940s to the late 1950s, Jews and Israelis were increasingly depicted as tough, pragmatic, masculine fighters similar to Americans.’ ‘Ultimately’, Mart concluded, ‘the foundation of the close political and military relationship between the two countries was reinforced by the emergence of masculine Israelis and their status as insiders in American political culture’.17 Adopting a similar approach, Heiss sought to interpret the ‘gendercoded language’ of American and British policy makers during the Iranian oil crisis. ‘Western cultural prejudices were apparent throughout the oil dispute,’ she argued, ‘because Anglo-American officials consistently used what Edward W. Said has termed orientalism when dealing with their Iranian counterparts.’18 Heiss demonstrated how nationalist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq was dismissed by Western leaders as ‘irrational’, ‘emotional’, ‘childlike’, ‘weak’ and ‘feminine’, explaining how such views absolved Western statesmen ‘of the need to deal with him as an equal’. Extending her analysis to the broader influence of Orientalism upon Anglo-American diplomacy in Iran, Heiss described how Western officials dismissed Mossadeq’s supporters as ‘little more than “mad and suicidal … lemmings” who needs to be saved from their folly by Western benevolence’. Such analyses, Heiss suggested, meant that Western ideas about the ‘Iranian mentality’ and the ‘Oriental mind’ had exercised an important if indirect role in the policies that led to the Anglo-American coup that overthrew Mossadeq in August 1953, installing a repressive, pro-Western dictatorship that survived until the revolutionary upheavals of 1979.19


Similar themes emerge in a recent study of American entanglement in the politics of the Arab–Israel dispute, Peter L. Hahn making the point that A powerful bias in US culture created an anti-Arab frame of reference in the minds of some U.S. leaders. Inspired by Edward W. Said’s suggestion that Western culture enhanced imperialism by lacing a racial bias and a sense of exceptionalism into Western perceptions of Arab peoples, recent scholarship suggests that U.S. news media, Christian churches, and other cultural mediators cast Jews in a favorable light but spoke rarely and negatively about Arab peoples.20 This alleged tendency has undergone its most lengthy analysis in Douglas Little’s American Orientalism (2003). Beginning with the assertion that ‘Few parts of the world have become as deeply embedded in the U.S. popular imagination as the Middle East’, Little argued that early American contacts with the region fostered ‘a romanticized and stereotypic vision of some of the Old World’s oldest civilizations’ whilst at the same time producing a sense of disgust at ‘the despotic governments and decadent societies’ encountered ‘from Constantinople to Cairo’. For Little, ‘the diplomats, oil men, and soldiers who promoted and protected U.S. interests in the Middle East during the twentieth century converted these earlier stereotypes into an irresistible intellectual shorthand for handling the “backward” Muslims … whose objectives frequently clashed with America’s’. Little’s claim is for nothing less than a direct relationship between ‘something very like Said’s orientalism’ and an American policy towards the Middle East that worked against the interests of the region’s Arab inhabitants. ‘Influenced by potent racial and cultural stereotypes, some imported and some homegrown’, he concluded, ‘policymakers from Harry Truman through George Bush tended to dismiss Arab aspirations for self-determination as politically primitive, economically suspect, and ideologically absurd.’21 Drawing upon evidence that the National Security Council (NSC) staff ‘routinely attended academic conferences and collected scholarly papers on the contemporary Middle East’, Nathan Citino has developed a more precise analysis of the relationship between academic Orientalism and the policy-making process.22 He has examined the links between the worlds of academia and government, looking in particular at Eisenhower’s bid to build up King Saud as a regional rival to Nasser, a policy Citino declares to have been inherently flawed as a result of its having ‘borrowed misconceptions about Islam from


European Orientalism’.23 Citino’s important contribution is to circumvent the sterile and politically entrenched debates about Said and Orientalism and move the debate on by exposing how American policy towards the Middle East was founded upon ‘a blending of Orientalist expertise with postwar social science [which] did not reflect the waning of the tradition Said examines but was instead part of the long-term evolution of Orientalism’.24 Arguments about the influence that anti-Arab stereotypes have asserted over American strategy and diplomacy towards the Middle East cut to the heart of an important debate about the relationship between Orientalist visions of the Middle East and the policies that were actually pursued by Western statesmen. In the midst of the seemingly irresistible drive to expose the cultural foundations of Western policy making, a number of voices have demanded that this ‘cultural turn’ in diplomatic history be treated with caution. Salim Yaqub, in his excellent consideration of Eisenhower administration’s ‘containment’ of Arab nationalism, is among those to challenge the claim that what he calls ‘cultural antipathies’ should be regarded as central to the development of US Middle East policy and the course of Arab–American relations. While conceding that such interpretations became harder to refute when applied to recent decades, Yaqub argued that the cultural approach was ‘of limited value with respect to the 1950s’.25 Considering Little’s exposure of widespread anti-Arab views among American officials, Yaqub questioned whether such examples held great significance for the policymaking process. Yaqub accepted that ‘The documentary record from the 1950s is full of disparaging remarks made by US officials about Arabs’, but also remarked that ‘What is less clear is the extent to which such antiArab sentiment actually explains the Eisenhower administration’s policies toward the Arab world.’26 This is an important point and one that demands a response. An immediate observation might be that Yaqub is in danger of equating ‘Orientalism’ with anti-Arab prejudice in order to make the case that the latter was peripheral to the main directions of policy. Focusing narrowly upon ‘disparaging remarks … about Arabs’ makes it substantially easier to argue that race and gender stereotypes were marginal factors often disconnected from the real factors driving US policy towards the Arab world. One might question, however, why one has to prove that antiArab prejudice was a defining influence upon Western policy makers in order to gain acceptance for the more general principle that ‘Orientalist’ conceptions of Arab ‘psychology’ and society did exercise a tangible influence upon Western policy. The crucial distinction to be drawn is


that between simple manifestations of anti-Arab racism and a careful application of the Orientalist critique of Western representations of Middle Eastern cultures and societies in particular ways. The question, therefore, becomes one of whether and how cultural, social and psychological assumptions drawn from the Orientalist tradition influenced Western propaganda output in the Middle East. In this sense, we might draw upon the observation put forward in Joseph Frankel’s analysis of post-war British diplomacy, that In foreign policy, as in all other areas of social behaviour, the assumptions are legion; most of them remain hidden not only from those people who analyse behaviour from the outside but also from the people directly involved.27 A valuable line of analysis in this regard has been developed by Matthew Connelly. Connelly accepts that the ‘increasingly frequent forays’ of diplomatic historians into cultural studies ‘all too often replicate the problematic aspects of postcolonial scholarship’, particularly the tendency of numerous authors to ‘stake out bold claims for the power of cultural representations and practices unsupported by the scope of their research’. Connelly suggests instead that what is required is for the critique of Orientalism to ‘recover its original focus on the exercise of state power’ in order to examine whether ‘the construction of “us–them” categories … actually affected high-level decisions’.28 This approach seems well suited to the analysis of propaganda in the post-war Middle East. An essential part of the propagandist’s task was to appreciate, understand and define both the individual and group characteristics of his target audience. As John Bagot Glubb observed in his 1959 book, Britain and the Arabs, ‘When presenting the British case to any particular country, the first step is to study the audience. To a commercial advertiser or a theatrical producer, this would doubtless be instinctive.’29 So it was for British and American propagandists in the Middle East. If ever there was an appropriate case study for assessing the influence of Orientalist thinking upon Western policy making, it is surely to be found in the study of Western propaganda designed for the Middle East. It is to the question of how propagandists imagined their Middle Eastern audiences and whether Orientalist conceptions of ‘Islamic society’ and ‘the Arab mind’ did indeed have a significant influence upon propaganda policy that the remainder of this chapter will be addressed. The distinction between ‘Orientalism’ and more straightforward racial attitudes is an important one, but one might well argue that in varying


degrees, both can be detected in the workings of the British and American ‘official minds’. Glubb, on the one hand, provides us with an example of the kind of theorising about national characteristics more usually associated with nineteenth-century imperialism and the construction of the racial hierarchies that underpinned it.30 ‘Every nation has a collective “personality” of its own’, he wrote, ‘Such race individualities are obviously far above modern political factors, for they have taken thousands of years to create.’31 For Glubb, the ‘race individualities’ of the Arabs were of a kind that effectively legitimised Western imperial domination in the guise of paternalistic beneficence. ‘The Arabs,’ Glubb wrote in a revealing section of his 1945 memorandum to the Foreign Office, show all the instability and emotionalism of the adolescent. Passionately enthusiastic at some new idea, they tire of it and turn elsewhere before bringing it to fruition. But the characteristic which most affects us … is their touchiness and their readiness to take offence at any sign of condescension by their ‘elders’. Slights give rise to outbursts of temper and violent defiance. Like children they will sometimes be rude, and sometimes plunged in despair and selfdepreciation. Like big schoolboys they glory in their new freedom, but when things go badly they like to feel that father is in the background, available to be appealed to and sure to be helpful. The wise parent will neither attempt continually to enforce his authority, nor will he disown his children in a fit of resentment, nor be deceived by their assumption of manly airs, into forgetting their real helplessness in the face of a hostile world. It is the parent’s role to view indulgently the children’s independent defiance, but always to be ready to receive them back, with sympathy and not with reproaches, when their over-exuberance has led them into some extravagant scrape.32 Glubb’s comments belong to what Connelly has identified as ‘a tradition among Westerners of imagining others as smaller, childlike versions of themselves’33 and he spoke as a representative of a generation for which the notion of the ‘White Man’s Burden’ was remarkably unproblematic.34 Perhaps more surprising is the continuing hold of such ideas over the minds of a younger generation of British Conservatives. In the Victorian imperial imagination, the Irish – the troublesome colonial ‘other’ closest to home – had been most commonly subjected to racial categorisation and stereotyping. It is, thus, interesting to note the comparison drawn by Anthony Nutting (the Foreign Office Minister whose


Suez Crisis resignation terminated a promising political career) in his 1964 book, The Arabs. ‘Arabs’, he wrote, like probably no other people in the world except the Irish, are irrational and emotional to a point where they think only with their hearts, never with their heads. … Not only do the Arabs have the same overwhelming charm and humour as the Irish, but they are also as quick-tempered and unstable, and equally incapable of seeing people or issues in any shade between jet-black and snow-white.35 Nutting had perhaps assimilated views that were commonly expressed within diplomatic circles. Indeed, his remarks bear a striking resemblance to an expression of concern about the ‘Arab mind’ made by Britain’s ambassador in Iraq in 1946. ‘To an undeveloped people,’ argued Sir Hugh Stonehewer Bird, ‘a picture full of half-tones is less understandable than one of brilliant contrasts, of shining highlights and black shadows and in this important respect, I fear that communism has the advantage over us.’36 Among British propagandists, such views slipped easily into something approaching contempt for the Arab masses. MajorGeneral Pollock, head of the Foreign Office’s Middle East Information Department (MEID), identified the primary ‘defects of the effendi character’ in Egypt as ‘arrogance, cupidity, cowardice, ingratitude and hostility’. Considering the possibility of appealing directly to the Egyptian ‘fellahin’ peasantry over the heads of the ‘effendi’, Pollock commented sourly that, It is very doubtful if this illiterate, inert and supine mass (whose main consideration is how they can scrape a living from the squalid condition of their lives) could be usefully mobilised to put pressure on the ‘effendi’. As things are and have been over many centuries in the Middle East, it would appear that the masses can be only too easily directed by a very small number of the middle (effendi) class, which really consists of the near relatives who have been lucky enough to secure some veneer of education and as a result have gained the admiration of their poorer relatives.37 US officials could display similar expressions of distaste, even for Arab ruling elites. ‘With few exceptions’, the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) argued in 1953, Middle Eastern leaders were ‘characterized by political opportunism, and a lack of social consciousness and public responsibility. … They are self-seeking, evasive, procrastinating,


capricious, and lacking in self-discipline’.38 At their most extreme, such views degenerated into crude expressions of racism. Stephen Dorril has examined the beliefs of George Kennedy Young, the MI6 officer responsible for Middle Eastern Operations, in some detail. Young, Dorril asserts, believed that Arabs had failed to evolve beyond the level of ‘a tool-making animal’ and once told his staff that that the chief characteristic of the Arab race was ‘a simple joy in destruction which has to be experienced to be believed. … There is no gladder sound to the Arab ear than the crunch of glass, and his favourite spectacle is that of human suffering. … While the European has been building, the Arab has looted and torn down’.39 It would be unfair to suggest that racism of this kind was common among British officials or that it constituted the defining influence upon either British or American policy. One might argue that the effort to counter perceptions of Western racism was a more important influence upon propaganda output in the Afro-Asian world. British officials in Cairo summed up the problems that could develop from racial prejudice in an expression of concern about the presence in Egypt of what they termed ‘the wrong type of Englishman’. Examples occur of people arriving in Egypt finding themselves … in a more privileged social position than would be the case in England, and this has sometimes ‘gone to their heads’ and has resulted in an attitude of superiority to the ‘wogs’ … and a general display of bad manners which is quickly noted and resented by the Egyptians and the majority of the British community.40 Similarly, News Department’s P.E.L. Fellowes argued in 1952 that The infuriation produced by the Western assumption of mental and moral superiority … has been the most important barrier to understanding and will continue to be until we learn how to behave towards – and indeed how to think about – the people of these countries. … Until ‘wog-mindedness’ has been eliminated from all those who come into daily contact with them, we run the risk of totally undoing what good we may do in other ways.41 The Eisenhower administration’s concerns about the Western image in Asia, Africa and the Middle East have also been well documented and Connelly has argued convincingly that Eisenhower was capable of viewing ‘Cold War crises through a lens ground from racial anxieties, not the


other way around’.42 A 1956 United States Information Agency (USIA) report to the NSC, which identified ‘the underlying distrust of the white man’ as an ‘important ingredient of the basic problems with which our information programs must deal in colonial and ex-colonial areas of the world’, suggests that a similar argument can be made with respect to the US propaganda agencies.43 Concerns about the adverse publicity generated by civil rights issues at home led to direct efforts to tackle America’s overseas ‘image problem’. The cultural activities undertaken as part of this campaign are discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. The characteristics of Orientalist scholarship associated with Said can be detected with some regularity in the American and British archival records. In particular, notions of Arab irrationality, emotionality and backwardness, together with an explanatory reliance on the stultifying effect of Islam were commonplace in the official minutes and memoranda of Western officials. In response to a critical article by the Egyptian journalist, Mohamed Heikal, US ambassador Jefferson Caffery, declared that The fact that, despite his avowed intention to stick to the facts, Mr. Heikal’s article has a rather high emotional content may serve as a fresh reminder that the Egyptian approach to politics is universally an emotional one. This is a fact which may be deplored but must be reckoned with in any attempt to deal with the Egyptians. The comment would seem to apply to the other Arab peoples as well.44 Even the State Department planning staff responsible for the December 1955 draft of a paper produced for the NSC on US objectives in the Middle East proved capable of such nonsense as ‘Arab hostility towards Israel is based primarily on emotion’.45 British propagandists were capable of breathtaking inconsistency on this subject. Gordon Waterfield, head of the BBC’s Eastern Service, began a consideration of Western broadcasting in the Middle East with the observation that the ‘average Arab or Persian is a shrewd, hardheaded individualist who has come to learn through the centuries that little faith can be placed in what his government tells him or what the newspapers say’. A few pages later, however, Waterfield could assert that ‘The Arabs are not taught by their past history and culture to appreciate truth for its own sake; but they are interested in it as a western import which seems to have paid dividends.’46 In his 1908 history of ‘Modern Egypt’, Lord Cromer had argued that The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity, he is a natural logician … his trained intelligence


works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently lacking in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description. Although the ancient Arabs acquired in a somewhat higher degree the science of dialectics, their descendants are singularly deficient in the logical faculty.47 Half a century later, Waterfield echoed these remarks, drawing on the scholarship of Hamilton Gibb to declare that Whereas in Europe the subjectivism of the Romantic Revival was offset by two other important developments – scientific determinism and the growth of historical method – these two developments found no response in Muslim minds to act as a corrective.48 For officials like Waterfield, Western propaganda was characterised as ‘logical and rational’ while Arab rhetoric remained (even the vocabulary is Cromer’s) ‘picturesque and colourful since it is often invented’. It was this formulation that enabled Waterfield to move seamlessly from a discussion of the shrewd, hard-headed rationalism of the individual Arab or Iranian to the conclusion that the main problem confronting Western broadcasters was that they were dealing with highly ‘impressionable’ people who found it ‘difficult to be objective’ and were ‘for a great part of the time, in a state of high emotion’.49 Lest it be thought that such views were unrepresentative of mainstream official opinion, Waterfield’s conclusion was effectively a straight repetition of a 1952 Foreign Office paper, which had argued that ‘The Middle Eastern peoples are excessively subjective, find it difficult to face facts and are unduly swayed by emotion.’50 This was itself drawn from an Eastern Department paper entitled ‘Some Features of Political Psychology in the Middle East’, which had argued that Middle Easterners as a whole … are more impervious to facts and to reasoning based on facts, and more accessible to emotional appeals than Northern Europeans. This means that they will often reject policies that are in their interest in favour of attitudes dictated by emotion … . In so far as they recognise facts … it is the facts and interests under their noses. … In dealing with political, including international, questions, therefore, in so far as they give weight to interest at all, as opposed to emotion, they are likely to consult above all the interest of themselves, their families or their political associates.51


This British problematisation of Arab emotionalism and backwardness bore a striking resemblance to the conventional American analysis. In 1955, the NSC produced a paper on regional Cold War policy, which argued that ‘The countries of the Near East are not yet mature or strong enough to follow a genuinely independent or “neutral” policy in the larger East–West struggle.’52 This emphasis on Arab ‘immaturity’, echoing the thoughts of paternalistic British imperialists like Churchill and Glubb, was drawn from an earlier PSB paper that had concluded simply that ‘The Arab states are immature’.53 In 1953, the PSB produced an influential paper on the Middle East. The paper was the work of an inter-departmental panel, chaired by the PSB’s Coordination Officer Henry Maclean, and including among its members the State Department’s Richard Sanger and the Pentagon’s James W. Anderson as well as a representative from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).54 In terms similar to those of the BBC’s Gordon Waterfield and Gibb and Cromer before him, the PSB panel argued that Underlying many of the factors causing instability is the impact of Western ideas regarding political independence, economic selfdetermination, and the rights of man, plus the impact, however belated, of the industrial revolution. These ideas and forces have created irresistible desire for change yet they have fallen in a territory where neither the social machinery or [sic] the leadership have been adequate or sufficiently experienced to utilize or direct them. These explosive forces of unrest have, therefore, been largely directionless, finding outlet primarily in the profitless channels of xenophobic nationalism and religious fanaticism with their appeal to emotion and mob rule. The net result of all these factors is that the area is in essence a military vacuum, an economic slum, a political anachronism, and a house divided against itself. The resulting analysis of the deficiencies of Arab society was classically Orientalist. The paper went on to speak of a ‘failure … to make a successful adjustment between their heritage from the past and the demands of the present’ and argued that Arab educational institutions, far from acting as a force for modernisation, tended to ‘perpetuate the traditional atomistic, discrete, and subjective thought pattern which is as characteristic of the modern Iranian or Arab nationalist as of his medieval forbears’. ‘While much has been taken from the West in the way of material culture and institutions,’ it declared, ‘the intangible


Western attributes of logical, objective, and analytical thinking and the cultural atmosphere which produced these things have not been transplanted.’55 Turning to an examination of ‘the Arab mind’, the panel produced a selection of alleged Arab ‘psychological traits’ among which it counted ‘psychopathic suspicion’, a ‘poor sense of discipline, self-sacrifice and security’, a ‘lack of social consciousness which makes them calloused’ and ‘incapacity for organization’. By way of explanation, it was argued that The Arab has traditionally thought of himself not as an individual, but as a member of his immediate family group or clan. … The individual personality of the Arab is therefore little more than a reflection of the personality of his clan or family. … The Arab’s relation to the larger social group is a function of the fact that his primary loyalty is to his family or clan. Such bonds of interest as he feels with the rest of society are confined largely to those factors which closely affect his family or clan. Thus he feels a vague general sympathy with the Arab community as a whole, particularly as opposed to non-Arabs, and with Muslims in general, since his family are Arabs and Muslims.56 For both British and American propagandists, such visions of Arab society, and the marginalisation of the role of the individual within it, led easily to an interpretation of Western political and economic relations with the Middle East grounded in the idea of a civilisational culture clash. The head of the British Middle East Office (BMEO), Sir John Troutbeck, argued in 1948 that the economic problems that beset the Arab world could be explained by the ‘mentality’ of Arab Muslims. ‘Before economic development can make much progress in the Arab states,’ he announced, ‘Moslem Arabs will have … to learn to do the patient, honest, plodding work instead of looking only for quick profits and results.’57 In a similar fashion, a 1952 Eastern Department memorandum explained the absence of social welfare programmes in the region with the suggestion that Middle Eastern countries had made ‘no attempt to import the fundamental Western conception of a social conscience’.58 ‘Islam’ was frequently invoked as the root cause of Arab ‘backwardness’. Sir Hugh Stonehewer Bird’s comment that ‘Neither a Cabinet Minister nor a factory hand can … pray five times a day without serious loss of efficiency’, was typical in this respect.59 The PSB’s Middle East paper placed great emphasis on ‘the inertia of Islam’, arguing that ‘No consideration of the traditional Arab mind is possible without taking


into consideration the all pervading influence of the Muslim faith on Arab thinking … it has governed his entire outlook on society and politics’. For the PSB, Islamic thinkers had been unsuccessful in ‘reinterpreting the core of Islam’s traditions in the light of the experience of the Islamic community in the present world setting’ and the result had been a ‘conflict between the Islamic faith and the problems imposed by the modern world’.60 Such views led Western propagandists to imagine their Arab audience as a unitary mass, intoxicated by superstition and ritual. The PSB spoke of the difficulties of formulating persuasive material for an Arab mob ‘hypnotised’ by Islamic mysticism, which had lost its sense of individual identity through ‘mass chanting and bodily movements’.61 The Orientalism of Western policy makers was clearly drawn from the academic world of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. In fact, the connections between the worlds of academia and government provide some fascinating insights into the way in which scholars specialising in Middle Eastern ‘area studies’ were able to bring a direct influence to bear on the Cold War policy-making process. Nathan Citino’s work, cited earlier, has identified a number of points of contact between scholarship on the Islamic societies of the Middle East and the Cold War concerns of the NSC. The body of work contained in lectures and papers by academics such as H.A.R. Gibb, Albert Hourani, Halil Inalcik and Bernard Lewis was, Citino points out, ‘not merely academic’; it held ‘implications for policy’.62 The records of USIA and the Foreign Office indicate influential links between the world of the university academic and that of the Cold War propagandist. In 1954, for example, IRD’s J.H. Lewen wrote to the Regional Information Office (RIO) Beirut’s Leslie Glass, revealing that the Information Research Department (IRD) had been seeking to employ Bernard Lewis to assist in its bid to draw up a ‘basic study of Islam and Communism’. In the event, Lewen conceded that ‘we were unable to get Bernard Lewis to help and we have not yet found anyone else with similar qualifications’.63 US officials were also keen to take advantage of the expertise that Lewis was willing to make available. In December 1955, intelligence staff at USIA made careful note of what Bernard Lewis had to say about the susceptibility of the Middle East to Soviet pressure and prospects for democracy in the region. Lewis’s starting assumption was that the Arab states were inherently predisposed to suspect and resent the West while acclaiming and appearing sympathetic to the Soviet Union. This disparity between the way Western and Soviet actions were viewed was identified as the ‘outstanding fact of diplomacy in the Middle East’. For Lewis, the idea that contemporary political grievances (namely the Israeli and North African


questions) bore some responsibility for this unhappy state of affairs was unsatisfactory. These issues were, he argued, ‘more symptomatic than causal’. Instead, Lewis saw a civilisational clash at the heart of the crisis in relations between the Arab states and the West. ‘Underlying all diplomatic relations with the Middle East,’ he pronounced solemnly, ‘is the centuries old struggle between Eastern and Western civilizations. … Current Middle East attitudes have been conditioned by the domination of Arab Islamic society by European Christianity’.64 From the interested standpoint of the Cold War clash between Western and Soviet communist ideologies, therefore, ‘the outstanding feature of Middle Eastern domestic politics is the disrepute into which democracy increasingly is falling’. By way of explanation, Lewis declared that Despotism, which we hate and fear in the USSR, is familiar to the peoples of the Middle East and arouses no strong, emotional, negative response. While despotism is not necessarily admired, at least it is intelligible. Democracy, he continued, had increasingly acquired the image of a failed experiment. Arab states had begun to adopt ‘the outward forms’ of democracy in the late nineteenth century, partly as a result of the assumption that democratic government was the key to Western superiority. Unfortunately, Lewis observed, Democracy has neither worked well in the Middle East, nor has it created the expected prosperity. This has been regarded as a Western failure. … Hence democracy is in disrepute, and there is a growing tendency to abandon it altogether, as in Egypt, in favour of statism, which apparently has demonstrated its ability to bring about technological change rapidly.65 This interpretation was widely shared among Western diplomats and propagandists in the Middle East. The PSB spent some time considering the question of leadership and governance in the region, identifying a ‘trend toward the more familiar pattern of authoritarianism, as giving security from the uncertainties and difficulties of an alien and not understood Western political democracy, which has failed to fill the gap left by the decay of the feudal structure’.66 Glubb had been quick to comment on this theme, arguing in his 1959 book that ‘Many Arabs believe, and their history would seem to confirm their view, that so emotional and mercurial a people cannot be governed by assemblies or


committees after the Western model. Only strong military rule will curb their turbulence and compel them to channel their considerable intellectual energies into co-ordinated and constructive work.’67 More general comments to the effect that ‘We have to face the innate Arab admiration for ruthlessness and violence and their capacity for heroworship’68 were commonplace among British and American officials working on Middle Eastern issues. If it is relatively simple to identify the views about the ‘Arab mind’ that had developed among Western officials by the early 1950s and to expose the intellectual influences behind them, it is less easy to demonstrate how these views contributed to the actual conduct of propaganda campaigns. Nevertheless, there is evidence that Orientalist concerns remained at the heart of the debates that took place as to the best means of channelling propaganda into the Arab world. In 1954, the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) explicitly endorsed the defunct PSB’s paper on psychological objectives and strategy in the Middle East, announcing that ‘the OCB reaffirm in general terms the validity of this paper for use in connection with the preparation of general plans and operations in the Middle East area’.69 British information officers in Cairo noted in 1947 that ‘posters, photographs and the simpler forms of pictorial display’ were best suited for the conduct of propaganda in Egypt, these being, it was argued, ‘more easily understood by the Egyptian mind’.70 Three years later, Britain’s Cairo-based propagandists informed IRD of their belief that In deciding the lines of propaganda to be employed, account must be taken of the ‘slave mentality’ of the average Egyptian … they seem to lack the confidence in themselves and the determination necessary to run a modern state. They realise their inability to exist without the support of a great power, and tend therefore to admire armed strength and ruthlessness.71 In statements such as these, we can detect the signs of a contradiction that was to tax the minds of both British and American propagandists in the 1950s. In 1952, a working group attached to the State Department’s International Information Administration (IIA) identified the dilemma more precisely. One member of the group observed that We express ourselves in cold and logical terms without the colored words that catch the attention of the Arab. He is emotional. He does not reason with logic, and although you say illogical things, it does not strike him that way. You have to cater to his prejudices.72


It had become clear to British and American propagandists that there existed a contradiction in the dissemination of persuasive material based on reasoned, rational argument among a population supposedly defined by its childlike mentality and inability to reason logically. As Chapman Andrews noted from the British Embassy in Lebanon, his information officers in Beirut were ‘dealing with people who for the most part are incapable of appreciating close argumentation. Logic never convinces the Oriental. It’s hearts not heads we need to win out here’.73 The resolution of this dilemma was sought in a concentration upon elite leadership groups rather than a continuing attempt to engage in mass persuasion. In this respect, the recommendations of the two major 1953 reports into the British and American overseas information services, the Drogheda and Jackson reports respectively, had particular relevance to the conduct of propaganda in the Middle East. In arguing that overseas propaganda should be formulated for, and targeted at, the ‘influential few’ rather than a mass audience, the Drogheda Report formalised the distinction in the Middle East between an educated, ‘Westernised’ Arab elite and the backward Oriental mob. PSB D-22 had explicitly argued that ‘the more Western the Arab, the less these traditional basic attitudes apply’74 and from this perspective, logic dictated that it made more sense to focus on appeals to the educated elite rather than to the ‘Arab Street’. Mass propaganda in the ‘emotional’ style was occasionally attempted, most often through the medium of clandestine radio, but the elites remained the primary target. A major objective of British and American exchange programmes, English language classes, school and university projects was to assist in the development of an Arab elite familiar with, and favourably disposed towards, the culture and values of the West. It was for precisely this reason that diplomats called for more Western schools in the Middle East, since it was these institutions that would produce a future generation of Arab leaders better able to understand and acknowledge the wisdom of the Western position. The belief that Arab political culture was defined by subservience to West and, consequently, by a sense of ‘insecurity’ in the face of contact with Western superiors was at the heart of an important aspect of both British and American psychological strategy in the region. As American officials argued in PSB D-22, the Arab feeling of inferiority and its resultant sense of insecurity had created a form of nationalism ‘hypersensitively hostile to Western political, economic, or military control and Western assumption of superiority’.75 The logical response was for Western propagandists to take the greatest possible care in their propaganda


output to take into account the obsessive Arab desire for ‘dignity’ and ‘equality’. An example of how this influenced policy in practice (to be examined in more detail in Chapter 6), is the manner in which British propagandists attempted to present the restructuring of Anglo-Arab relations in the post-war era as part of the forging of a new era of co-operation and equal partnership. The Orientalist influence on Western policy makers dealing with the Middle East had one further unfortunate side effect. The tendency of British and American politicians to ascribe Arab hostility to a supposedly inherent state of ‘irrationality’ allowed them to downplay or overlook the political sources of that hostility. In consequence, they were able to avoid the real issues at the heart of the growing tensions between the West and the Arab world. If the defining characteristic of Arab society was deemed to be ‘backwardness’, it was natural that the Arabs should feel a great degree of insecurity and inferiority in terms of their relationships with the advanced West. ‘Insecurity’ of this type could easily translate into envy, hostility and ‘spite’. As the PSB put it, the Arabs had substituted ‘emotional symbols such as imperialism as targets for attack instead of acting on the basic internal evils of the area’.76 It seems reasonable at this point to return to Frankel’s analysis of the hidden assumptions behind foreign policy, if only because of the relevance of his assertion that It is one of the recurrent themes of political argument that politicians not only perceive what they wish to perceive, but that they hide their preferences in seemingly objective and generally unarticulated assumptions, either through ignorance, or in order to deceive others, or to spare themselves the trouble and often the pain or shock of a more realistic appraisal.77 It was not, of course, the case that British or American officials were invariably incapable of a more ‘realistic appraisal’ of the causes of Western–Arab tensions. The experience of actually working alongside Middle Eastern editors and journalists, and living amongst real, rather than imagined, Arab communities, produced a constant stream of valuable assessments of Western propaganda, its themes, methods and shortcomings from information officers in the field. From Baghdad, in 1949, for example, Humphrey Trevelyan informed Christopher Warner that British information officers had discovered that ‘the local press is remarkably interested in Western European affairs such as items about the Council of Foreign Ministers, Council of Europe, the new Trade


Union International, the dollar situation and the new West German State’.78 Such observations rarely registered with officials committed to the Orientalist vision of the parochial Arab unable to see past his own individual, family or religious interests. It should also be noted, before moving on, that the Arabs were not the only Middle Eastern peoples to be reduced to stereotypes. Images of the Iranian ‘Persian mind’ and the Israeli ‘Jewish mind’ also played an important role in shaping Western propaganda output in the region. PSB D-22, for instance, presented Iranians as similar to Arabs in their manifestation of ‘Oriental’ psychological traits. Iranian national character, it was argued, was ‘lacking in perseverance, energy, and willingness or ability to undertake sustained, constructive effort in the public or national interest, except under the influence of fanaticism’. These failures were attributed to an ‘Iranian mind’ characterised as emotional, volatile, and susceptible to demagoguery. … Incapable of self-discipline, it is highly responsive to the effective exercise of authority. It indulges in hero worship. … The Iranian is inured to hardship, exploitation, and autocratic rule. Together with a callous indifference to human suffering outside of his family, he is capable of great physical endurance.79 British stereotypes developed along similar lines. In 1948, Britain’s Ambassador in Tehran, Sir John Le Rougetel, identified the character traits of ‘the Persian’ in the following terms: Being immature, they are impatient, being Orientals, they respect force and abhor reason, being Persians, they are unable to believe in other people’s good intentions; they are, in fact, ideal grist for the totalitarian mill and correspondingly allergic to the aims and tenets of social democracy.80 PSB D-22’s examination of Israelis makes for an interesting contrast with the earlier analysis of the Arab and Iranian political psychology. Where tens of millions of Arabs could be lumped together as a monolithic psychological entity, which scarcely admitted the concept of Arab individualism, the section on the ‘Israeli mind’ opened with the observation that ‘The Israeli mind of today is an extremely difficult thing to describe because of the widely diverse origins, cultural levels, and backgrounds of the present population of Israel.’ The Israeli attitude towards Arabs was described as similar to ‘that of the Western settlers in the US towards


the American Indians’ and to ‘the Jew’ was ascribed the belief that ‘the Arab is a colorful survivor of an age that is past’. Arab backwardness – the product of a civilisational resistance to the methods and values of the West – was also contrasted with the image of a Westernised Israeli mentality. ‘The techniques of the West that the Western European Jews have picked up in their wanderings means that they feel and actually are far more advanced than the Arabs’, the paper argued before concluding that Through the operation of economic forces, parts of the Arab world will become agricultural ‘colonies’ of industrialised Israel. … His expertise in the West has taught the Jew the need for communal discipline and cooperation while the Arab still tends to be largely individualistic or clannish. … Most basic of all the Jew believes in the Western philosophy that man can and should dominate his environment while the Arab for the most part accepts the thesis that man should accept the lot of God as given him on earth.81 Israel occupied a less favoured status in the British imagination, which was prone to stereotypes of a rather different kind. Of Tel Aviv, in contrast to the Arab world, Sir William Strang, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office could write ‘There is no stagnation here’. Nevertheless, the Israeli city was still ‘a terrible place, noisy, tawdry, vulgar’ and the Jews, ‘for all their European culture’ remained ‘an Eastern people, at home in Palestine’.82 In rather more sinister language, Britain’s Ambassador to Israel in 1954, Jack Nicholls, envisaged Israel as ‘the centre of infection in the region’ and, placing a psychoanalytical twist on classical Orientalist themes, announced that We must treat the Israelis as a sick people. Their illness is psychological. Almost every individual Israeli bears the traces of the past 2,500 years of Jewish history – unsureness, over-confidence, emotional instability, fierce intolerance, superiority complex, inferiority complex, guilt complex – one or more of these characterizes most Israelis, and there is invariably added a deep conviction that the world is in their debt. It is not reasonable to expect that a nation made up of individuals so psychologically unstable should be capable of a mature foreign policy, though their superior intelligence tempts one to expect it of them.83 How far such views influenced British propaganda policy is open to question although we shall look further at the relationship between


anti-Semitism and British propaganda vis-à-vis the Arab–Israel dispute in Chapter 5. For the moment it is perhaps enough to note that even the most trivial stereotypes might affect policy decisions, as can be seen from the advice offered by MEID in 1949 to the effect that ‘We should not give anything to the Israelis gratis. The Israeli mentality is such that it does not appreciate, or consider of value, anything supplied free.’84 Orientalism, racism, anti-Semitism and other stereotypes did not necessarily dominate the formation of propaganda policy in the Middle East. At various times and in various degrees, however, these forces were capable of exercising an important and singularly unhelpful role in the process of formulating persuasive material for the region. These are themes that will re-emerge in the chapters that look at British and American approaches to the questions of Arab nationalism and the Arab–Israeli dispute. In the meantime, however, they provide an appropriate springboard for an analysis of British and US cultural diplomacy and in their efforts to create a sense of friendship and goodwill towards themselves among the populations of the Middle East.

3 ‘National Projection’ Cultural Propaganda and the Cold War

The question is whether or not it is desirable to have in Iraq machinery which provides access to British ideas and ways of life, and to the British contribution to the arts and sciences. Though it is impossible to evaluate in precise terms the advantages derived by Her Majesty’s Government from the existence of this machinery, I am personally convinced that it plays a distinctive and useful part in our effort to maintain and to strengthen the foundations of British influence in this country. Harold Beeley, British Ambassador to Iraq, 26 June 1952 The study of cultural diplomacy in the Middle East presents a number of problems for the historian. One is the paucity of existing research in the field, for while there is a growing literature on the waging of the cultural Cold War in Europe, the Middle East (despite J.M. Lee’s claim that it was the challenge of Arab nationalism that forced British policy makers to appreciate the importance of cultural diplomacy1) has not featured in the majority of these accounts. A major problem has been the difficulty experienced in locating the cultural element of international relations and this has led to a profusion of overlapping and interwoven categories of analysis of which ‘cultural diplomacy’, ‘national projection’, ‘cultural relations’, ‘public diplomacy’, ‘cultural transmission’, ‘intellectual relations’, ‘the diplomacy of ideas’ and ‘cultural exchange’ are merely among the most common. Some scholars have deployed these terms more or less interchangeably, using them to denote the long-term processes ‘intended to promote a better understanding of the nation that is 70

Cultural Propaganda and the Cold War 71

sponsoring the activity’.2 The preferred term here is ‘cultural diplomacy’, which is understood as referring to a government’s employment or appropriation of cultural and educational activities in the pursuit of foreign policy goals. In this sense, there is case to be made for drawing a distinction between ‘cultural diplomacy’ and the altogether more amorphous processes of ‘cultural relations’ which, as Jessica Gienow-Hecht suggests, represent a much wider and often less politically tangible set of transnational cultural connections.3 The Middle East offers the student of cultural diplomacy a fascinating field of study, not least because of the increased scale of British and American cultural activities in the region after 1945. The State Department, even during the post-war period in which its information and cultural activities departments were subject to severe cuts, recognised the value of its cultural activities. One report from Baghdad in 1946 argued that it would be ‘folly to slash American cultural efforts’ on the grounds that ‘the Arab world’s leading statesmen and spokesmen have been and for the present will continue to be products of American cultural influences’.4 The British, meanwhile, desperate to counter perceptions of national decline, embarked upon their own project to ‘project’ positive images of Britain to the area. In this environment, the ideological struggle with the Soviet Union, in which both West and East fought to prove the superiority of their distinctive value systems and ‘way of life’, merely provided fresh justification for an expanded programme of cultural activities.

Education and exchange Among the many Orientalist visions of the Middle East and its inhabitants held by influential Western officials, the notion that the Islamic societies of the Middle East were in a state of irreversible decline in the face of Western modernity was particularly common. Such beliefs directly influenced British and American educational projects in the area. Indeed, the ‘decline’ of Islam and the penetration of the region by Western educational methods were seen as inter-related processes. Britain’s Ambassador in Baghdad, Sir Hugh Stonehewer Bird, argued in 1946 that It is, I think, universally true that modern education has the effect of weakening belief in revealed religion. … The young Iraqi, by the very fact of receiving an education, is to some extent separated from his uneducated Moslem brethren. The framework of his thoughts is


disturbed and his basic assumptions challenged. The education he receives is of necessity western, its roots are in Christianity not in Islam, and its existing tradition is secular and materialist. It is not, therefore, surprising that, in general, educated Iraqis have lost their faith in Islam.5 Perhaps the most startling version of this thesis came from Peregine Fellowes, a Foreign Office Arabist who, conceptualising Middle Eastern nationalism as ‘an approaching locomotive’, observed that ‘we – that is Western civilization – set it going, we taught the driver his trade, we still supply much of the motive power. We cannot leave it now, even if we were confident that it was in good hands, if only because there is another waiting to leap aboard and take control.’ Fellowes argued that the ultimate objective was to ensure that Islamic society should be integrated into Western civilization, wholly in the fields of economics and defence, and so far as possible socially and culturally also. … No one who has seen the words ‘Coca-cola’ in neon-lighted Arabic script, or heard the voice of the imam calling the faithful to prayer through the public-address system mounted on his minaret can doubt that this process is already well advanced. For Fellowes, the basic forces driving this process of integration were the political drive towards democratisation and the economic drive towards industrialism. Any Islamist reaction to these forces, he confidently asserted, would be mere ‘religious fanaticism … unlikely to survive the society’s progress towards integration’. It was in this context that Fellowes concluded that ‘our encouragement must be of a fundamental and long term character – the spread of Western education’.6 One would not claim that Fellowes’ views were universally accepted within the policy-making establishment, but his belief that education was an important tool of cultural diplomacy was widely shared. In this context, the notion of Islamic ‘decline’ was an important motivating force. ‘There can … be no doubt’, argued Stonehewer Bird, ‘as to the force which must fill the gap of retreating Islam. In the world-wide experience of Englishmen, nothing has been found more suitable than the British ideal of moderation, toleration, social progress and individual freedom’.7 As Glubb concluded in his July 1945 memorandum, ‘the Arabs are as intelligent as we. Their failing is their lack of devotion to duty. … Education is of vital importance. Every effort must be made to place first class British educationalists at the disposal of Arab governments.’8


The influence of this kind of thinking upon British educational establishments in the Middle East is clear. British officials in Egypt argued in 1952 that the ‘cultural and intellectual background of the Egyptian is so far removed from that of the Westerner, that it is only possible to influence him by starting from the very beginning and giving him the basis of a Western education’. Egyptian parents, it was stated, ‘realise that their own traditional form of culture fits them ill for a place in a highly competitive modern world. … Consequently, any foreign school which opens its doors in Egypt will almost immediately find itself full, and obliged to turn pupils away’.9 US educationalists espoused similar views. On a fund-raising tour of the United States in 1947, John Badeau, President of the American University in Cairo, was quick to make the point that What is needed is some force that can deal with national and personal ideas, that sets the scale of moral values and orients the developing personal and social life toward the goals we feel are essential for a world of freedom and progress. To this task Christian education has a peculiar relevance, for it deals directly with the problem of values and seeks to transmit the spiritual basis on which our democratic world order is built.10 This obsession with ‘character’ could lead to some amusing moments of self-doubt. In 1947, British diplomats in Cairo were particularly aggravated at the thought of the harmful influence that might be wrought in Egypt by a certain kind of British academic, warning that A few of these people are not the right type to teach Egyptian youth. Many of the Egyptian professors … point out that the Egyptian idea of the Englishman is the ‘sportsman, fond of exercise and pipe-smoking’ and they are anxious that this should be the type of man whose influence should be impressed upon the Egyptian students. Their complaint, however, is that they sometimes get the Englishman with long hair and brilliant ties, who likes to talk about modern art and poetry in terms which are incomprehensible to the average Egyptian.11 Nevertheless, officials continued to regard British schools as a most valuable arm of cultural diplomacy. By the mid-1950s, Britain’s Ambassador in Beirut was convinced that the establishment of a British school in the Lebanon would be ‘the best single contribution we could make to the future of the Middle East’.12 The British Council admitted that the


propaganda value of its schools lay in the fact that ‘their character building reputation’ enabled them ‘to attract the children of important families and to build up understanding of Britain both by their impact upon the pupils and by their contact with the parents’.13 Given its status as the most powerful Arab nation and a centre of Arab cultural and intellectual life, Egypt was at the heart of the British Council’s educational work. The belief that ‘education in a foreign school predisposes the former pupils to adopt an attitude of friendship towards the country whose culture they have absorbed’ led diplomats conclude that it would be ‘a disaster if the extent of our educational effort in this country was considerably reduced’. The value of university placements for Egyptian students was considered in similar terms, it being argued that ‘Egyptians seem particularly impressionable at the age at which they attend university and few of them fail to develop a sincere admiration and affection for Britain as a result’.14 In early 1956, there were six British Council schools in Egypt: the British School, Suez; the British Boy’s School, Alexandria; Victoria College, Alexandria; Victoria College, Cairo; the English School, Heliopolis and the British Girl’s School, Alexandria. All were considered to play an important role in building goodwill, and the Council was forthright in demanding the increases in funding that would enable it to maintain its educational programme in Egypt at the desired level.15 In Iraq, nursery and primary education formed the mainstay of British Council operations. A visiting diplomat, in 1947, described the Council’s nursery school in Baghdad as ‘the most practical and successful piece of publicity work which I have seen so far in the Middle East. … I do not think it would be possible to exaggerate the excellent atmosphere of this school and the good which it must inevitably do in cementing AngloIraqi good relations’.16 By the mid-1950s, 82 children, the great majority Iraqi, were enrolled at the Ta’assissia Primary School in Baghdad described by the British Council in 1953 as one of its ‘best investments in Iraq’.17 A year later, impressed inspectors noted that The education given is British in character, in that activity methods of all kinds are successfully used to develop the children’s own initiative and interests and to wean them from over-reliance on bookishness and didacticism which characterises the Iraqi tradition of education.18 Such was the high regard in which the school was held that plans to establish a complementary secondary school were well advanced by the time of the Suez Crisis.


In 1945, the United States could look back on a distinguished history of involvement in Middle Eastern education dating back to the establishment of missionary colleges in the nineteenth century. The establishment of the Robert College in Istanbul in 1863 was followed by the inauguration of several other educational institutions, of which perhaps the most important were the American University at Beirut (founded in 1866 as the Syrian Protestant College) and the American University at Cairo (founded in 1919). At the San Francisco conference to establish the United Nations Organisation in 1945, it was noted that ‘Twentynine of 40 Arab delegates … had attended American schools in the Near East’.19 When the State Department came to consider US educational efforts in the region in 1946, it concluded that if American schools could adapt to the climate of post-war nationalism, ‘they will continue to be the best American cultural influences in the Near East’.20 Impressed Foreign Office staff noted in 1952 that ‘there are said to be about 7000 Middle Eastern students in American educational institutions in the area’.21 The American University of Beirut (AUB) was the jewel in the crown of these American institutions. Enrolling nearly 3000 students from across the Middle East by the early 1950s, it represented a cultural asset that American propagandists could hardly fail to recognise. In 1956, the Operations Co-ordinating Board (OCB) described AUB as ‘an important instrument for the advancement of American interest and influence in the Middle East’,22 and the work of the university and its staff featured regularly in the United States Information Agency’s (USIA’s) publicity output. The American colleges in the Middle East formed part of the legacy of nineteenth century missionaries, but private foundations and cultural organisations continued to play a major role in the twentieth century. Organisations such as the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME) provided funds and facilities for educational exchanges and visits to the United States for Middle Eastern students and scholars. British observers drew particular attention to the Near East Foundation (which supported ‘a substantial programme of public health, sanitation, education, home and family welfare and agricultural training in Syria, the Lebanon and Persia’) and the Rockefeller Foundation (said to engage in ‘educational and health projects in Turkey, Egypt, Persia and the Lebanon’).23 When the US Government looked to expand its own educational programmes in the region, there were firm foundations upon which to build. By the early 1950s, the State Department’s bid to extend the Fulbright educational exchange programme to the Middle East was well underway. In its first series of ‘country papers’ produced in 1950, the


United States Information and Educational Exchange Program (USIE) noted that The inauguration of the program in Syria has been so successful as to prompt a request from the Syrian Government for two additional American experts in the field of education for the coming year. … The careful selection of potential leaders for P.L. 402 grants will contribute substantially toward winning friends for America. High priority should be given to this aspect of USIE activities.24 USIE’s country paper for Iraq also noted that ‘the expected successful negotiation of a Fulbright Agreement in 1950 strengthens hope for a substantial exchange program’.25 Even before the extension of the Fulbright scheme to Iraq, it was estimated that over 500 Iraqis were studying in US schools and colleges. In Iraq, the United States Information Services (USIS) staff attempted to cement the academic and social bonds that these students had forged by publishing ‘Amgrad’, a fortnightly magazine ‘designed to keep alive the ties which Iraqi graduates of American universities have with the United States and to provide means of publicizing the contributions which this group is making to Iraq’s development’.26 The developing scale of the American exchange program in Iraq caused some consternation for British officials. Harold Beeley wrote to Eden from Baghdad in 1952 to express concern that failure on Britain’s part to match American efforts would result in the growth of American influence at Britain’s expense. If places for Iraqi students could not be found in Britain, he warned, large numbers would turn instead to the United States and ‘come back with American ideas and tend to encourage the use of American equipment. This is bound to weaken our own position and that of British experts serving the Iraq Government’.27 Egypt signed a Fulbright Agreement with the United States on 3 November 1949, leading to the establishment of a United States Educational Foundation for Egypt and the setting aside of $1,500,000 for educational exchange grants. The agreement led to a rapid increase in the numbers of Egyptian students receiving official sponsorship for studies in the United States. As the scheme began to get underway in 1950–51, 25 Egyptians received Fulbright grants, a number that quickly rose to 43 in the first full year of the programme in 1951–52 and 56 in 1951–53. In total, 269 Egyptians received Fulbright grants between 1950 and 1955 and 146 Americans received funds for studies in Egypt during the same period. In its 1956 report to the State Department, the


United States Educational Foundation for Egypt stated that The Fulbright program has been successful in contributing toward better understanding between Egypt and the United States. Prior to the program, there were no American professors in teaching positions in Egypt outside the American-sponsored institutions; today, American professors are not only accepted, but in demand. … The diffusion of knowledge and the personal friendships made by both Egyptian and American grantees are the major contributions to international understanding made by the Fulbright program in Egypt.28 In 1946, Office of Information and Cultural Affairs (OIC) had argued that ‘exchange of persons, and of students even more than those of mature age, is the most effective means of establishing understanding and sympathetic contacts with future moulders of opinion in other countries’.29 A decade later, in the face of Congressional threats to cut funding, Eisenhower declared himself willing to ‘fight, bleed and die’ for the educational exchange programme.30 Such determination resulted in the maintenance of an extensive Middle Eastern exchange programme throughout the 1950s. USIA reports indicated that students from Iran, Israel, Turkey and every Arab State except Libya were present at colleges and universities in the US during the mid-1950s. Numbers ranged from just two Sudanese students during 1950–55 to 1958 Jordanian and 4478 Iranian students in the same period.31 US academic institutions also provided opportunities for educational propaganda of a rather different kind. In September 1953, the Library of Congress and Princeton University joined forces to stage a major conference on Islamic Culture in the modern world attended by both American and Middle Eastern scholars. The conference provided a welcome publicity opportunity for USIA and News Review ran a four-page feature describing it as ‘primarily an occasion for increasing American knowledge of Islam, strictly on the non-political level’.32 In fact, American propagandists had been closely involved from the very outset. In April 1953, the International Information Administration (IIA) described how On the surface, the conference looks like an exercise in pure learning. This in effect is the impression desired. The ostensible purpose is to promote good will and to further mutual understanding between Islamic peoples and the United States. The International Information Administration promoted the colloquium along these lines and has given it financial and other assistance because we consider that this


psychological approach can make an important contribution to United States political objectives in the Moslem area at this time.33 At various points, the State Department had tried to interest the ArabAmerican Oil Company (ARAMCO), Pan-American, TWA and American Export into providing funding and travel facilities for delegates, and Franklin Publications was successfully persuaded to pay for and undertake the translation and printing of the conference papers.34 IIA and, later, USIA also made substantial efforts to publicise the conference through their Middle Eastern media channels.35

Prestige, culture and the arts The ‘projection’ of Britain and the United States in the Middle East after 1945 encompassed a wide range of informational and cultural activities as well as a variety of themes and subjects. For the British, the business ‘national projection’ was a particularly important task, not least because of the fear that foreign opinion was increasingly viewing Britain as a ‘second division’ power in the post-war world. ‘Our main information task’, British diplomats in Cairo argued in 1952, ‘is to proclaim that Britain is still strong and a Power … whose friendship is well worth having’.36 Domestic politics had an important bearing on the kind of material incorporated into British national projection propaganda in the post-war decade, and one can see a clear distinction between the approaches of the 1945–51 Labour government and its Conservative successor. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the comparison of a 1946 Foreign Office memorandum titled ‘The Projection of Britain’ with a version of the same paper revised in 1952 after Churchill and Eden had returned to power. In its recommendations for the kind of images of Britain to be popularised overseas, the 1946 document began by stressing British political and social democracy, arguing that From trade unions and working men’s clubs to cultural societies and parish councils, and from town and county councils to Parliament itself, the democratic institutions of Britain are innumerable, and there are few, if any, other countries in which the opportunity for direct participation by the ordinary citizen are as great. The memorandum went on to focus upon the welfare reforms of the Attlee government, drawing attention to the bid to establish ‘a comprehensive


system of social services and industrial welfare second to none’. Britain, it was claimed, ‘has embarked on the greatest experiment in a planned economy in a free society that the world has ever known’. In the field of foreign affairs, dealt with in the final section of the memorandum, the emphasis was upon the notion of the British Commonwealth as ‘the centre of a world-wide association of peoples’ and the theme that ‘British “Imperialism” is dead in so far as it ever existed, except as a slogan used by our critics’. Colonial policy was presented as one of progressive development. ‘The British approach to the … Colonial Empire is both liberal and dynamic’, it was argued, ‘On the sound foundations now established Britain pushes forward with schemes for the enlightenment and welfare of the Colonial peoples and for giving them an ever-increasing measure of self-government’.37 Comparisons with the 1952 document are instructive. The new version emphasised Britain’s international role above domestic social and economic reforms. Eden’s Foreign Office was keen to stress British strength, purpose and rearmament. Britain’s world-wide commitments, it was argued, ‘demand that Britain’s military strength be deployed in areas as far distant from each other as central Germany and the Suez Canal, the Malay Peninsula and Korea’. Later in the memorandum came references to Britain as a ‘bulwark of democratic freedom’ but the Attlee government’s enthusiasm for the ‘planned economy’ had predictably disappeared. The Conservative vision of Britain would claim only that Britain has every intention of retaining and perfecting these social welfare schemes within the limits of the economic possibilities of the present time. … It is the aim of our economic planning to secure these objectives without prejudicing the essential liberties of every British citizen. The 1946 document’s references to the death of ‘British imperialism’ had also gone, replaced by an acknowledgement of the benefits to be gained from Britain’s presence in overseas territories. ‘British knowledge and experience in the Middle East’, it was stated, ‘contributes to the welfare of those countries not only in the commercial sphere but also in the advice and collaboration freely given to their governments through the British Middle East Office’.38 If British politicians and propagandists worked to promote positive images of Britain in their overseas propaganda, their American counterparts set about the task of identifying and communicating the meaning of ‘the American way of life’ with equal vigour. Pinckney Tuck, head of


the American Legation in Cairo, was especially forthright in his efforts to persuade the State Department of the importance of this task in Egypt and the Middle East. ‘In my opinion’, he argued in 1946, ‘we would be making a tragic error should we fail to use the valuable knowledge gained during the war through OWI activities in interpreting America to Egypt’.39 Concerned at the apparent running down of the information and cultural relations programme in 1947, Tuck drew attention to the fact that the ‘major European countries are making far greater efforts to … win friends in Egypt than we are’ and claimed that ‘much of this effort is directed in a pointedly derogatory sense to the United States’. Tuck concluded that much of this European propaganda ‘conveys by implication the impression that the United States is a country of selfish misers and uncultured “dollar chasers”, and argued that ‘it would be suicidal to our foreign policy to permit such impressions to be spread unhindered’.40 The prevalence of anti-American stereotypes prompted the State Department to respond. By the early 1950s, the idea of an ongoing ‘American Revolution’ was incorporated into the USIE programme, and the State Department announced that the Voice of America (VOA) and other USIS media were concentrating on ‘the dynamic nature of the American system and the continuing progress made in our economy and our political and social life’.41 News Review picked up the theme in July 1951, arguing that American conceptions of national identity differed from the European tradition. The American citizen, it was argued, possessed an ‘unspoken assumption that his nation is something more than a nation; that it is an experiment permanently evolving into something new; that it embodies an ideal’. The American way of life was thus characterised as a ‘universal proposition’ representing not merely an American, but a human revolution applicable for liberty-loving peoples the world over’. News Review seized on this vision of American identity and values to counter the familiar European and Soviet condemnations of American materialism and ‘dollar imperialism’. Announcing that ‘Main Street has replaced Wall Street’, News Review declared that ‘American capitalism today is a system in which all Americans have a share.’42 Another form of positive propaganda employed in the Middle East was the dissemination of material designed to illustrate bonds of friendship between Arabs and Westerners. Frequently, this amounted to little more than outright flattery, a tendency which can be traced back to Glubb’s 1945 reminder that ‘thanks and praise can scarcely be overdone to such an emotional people as the Arabs’.43 A fine example of this


approach can be seen in USIA’s assertion in February 1955 that These many peoples who make up the Arab world are peoples of genius. Their past proves that any Arab, given the chance, will come bursting into the twentieth century. The Arabs have the potential of making contributions to modern civilization just as the people who now call themselves Arabs created many ancient civilizations.44 A favourite American technique was to draw attention to the lives and achievements of Arab-Americans and particular individuals were held up as proof of the existence of a special bond of friendship and understanding. Arab-Americans could be presented as the personal embodiment of that bond, providing a unique opportunity for American propagandists to demonstrate the friendship of the United States for the Arab world. The Korean War provided several opportunities for propaganda of this kind. In May 1953, the US Ambassador in Beirut, Harold Minor, congratulated the State Department on the publicity treatment given to the story of George Matta, a Lebanese-American Army Sergeant recently released after 26 months as a prisoner of war. Matta’s testimony was invoked as an indictment of alleged communist ‘brainwashing’ techniques,45 as a defence of American conduct in Korea and as an example of a brave Arab-American doing his bit to make the world safe for freedom and democracy. As Minor put it in his despatch to the State Department, This story is the best of its kind we have yet received. In one package this story (1) exploded the myth of germ warfare (2) stirred the pride of the Lebanese (3) brought the far-away Korean conflict home to Lebanon and (4) was a fascinating, readable story to boot.46 Matta’s story was subsequently reported in News Review under the sensationalist headline ‘I Survived!’47 but his was not the only story of Lebanese-American heroism in the Korean War to be disseminated by USIS staff in the Middle East. James Jabara, a Major in the US Air Force and the first air ‘Ace’ of the Korean War, was despatched on a goodwill tour of the region in early 1952. Sponsored by the ‘Syrian–Lebanese American Federation’, Jabara’s visits to Beirut and Damascus were deemed to have been enthusiastically received and resulted in heavy USIS media coverage.48 The story was still receiving attention eighteen months later, when Jabara was the subject of a major feature in News Review.49


Arab-American military figures proved especially popular in the USIA campaign, but News Review was also quick to publicise stories about the ‘everyday lives’ of Arabs and Muslims in America. ‘Who is the American Muslim?’ asked the magazine in July 1954, answering its own question with a description of ‘a California farmer, a New York businessman, an automobile worker in Detroit. … Unless you see him entering a mosque, you probably cannot tell him from his countrymen’.50 Here, then, was the ultimate embodiment of Arab-American unity; the Arab and the American, one and the same man, physically indistinguishable. The ‘successful immigrant’ theme featured strongly in the pages News Review. In January 1954, the front cover featured the image of Elia Abu Mady, a successful newspaper publisher in Brooklyn, under the headline ‘25 Years of Arab-American Goodwill’.51 Similar stories hailed the Chicago contractor, Ahmed Dellich, the Michigan tobacco distributor, Joseph A. Nejem, and the Jersey City entrepreneur, Ali Mahadeen. All were presented as classic examples of Arabs living out the American dream.52 British propagandists had rather less scope for this kind of material, but they made the most of the opportunities that presented themselves. The Arabic Service of the BBC devoted several broadcasts to descriptions of Muslim communities in Britain and a weekly programme, ‘London Letter’, was dedicated to the thoughts of an Arab commentator on life in the British capital. In 1947, the Foreign Office commissioned and distributed throughout the Middle East a film entitled ‘Arab Tour of Britain’53 and in the mid-1950s, Al Aalam ran articles presenting the story of the Arab community in Manchester, the experiences of the Arab head of the London Islamic Centre at Cambridge University and the interchange of British and Arab industrial methods.54 The editorial policy of Al Aalam was designed to ensure that a set proportion of articles presented a positive image of Arab history and culture. Between May 1956 and October 1957, Al Aalam ran articles on the impact of Islamic culture on Europe, archaeological discoveries at sites of historical interest in the Arab world and the history of Al Azhar, the ‘world’s oldest university’. Attention was also drawn to Arab achievements in the modern era in terms of technological, scientific and social development. For reasons that will be investigated in Chapter 7, Al Aalam came to pay particular attention to the social, economic and technological modernisation of Iraq.55 Both Britain and the United States sought to develop their cultural, artistic and sporting relations with the Middle East. In 1946, Foreign Office guidelines for ‘projection of Britain’ propaganda had stressed that ‘British culture is alive as ever. The world has owed much to Britain’s


cultural exports, and British ideas, institutions, literature, sports etc., have exerted a major influence on modern civilisation’.56 The British Council, in addition to its educational projects, was assigned the role of organising British cultural and artistic exchange programmes and tours, while the United States, through the efforts of the State Department, USIA, and numerous private actors, sought to puncture the myth (often perpetuated in European propaganda) that the United States possessed no distinctive cultural offerings of its own. The bid to establish British and American feature films in the region provides another important example of state–private interaction. In the 1940s, British information officers worked closely with Alexander Korda’s Eagle-Lion Company and the J. Arthur Rank Corporation in order to promote British films in the Middle East.57 They soon realised, however, that Middle Eastern audiences tended to dismiss British films as ‘dull and unimaginative’.58 British information staff in Baghdad complained in 1947 that ‘the lack of entertainment value in our own films prejudices their popularity amongst proprietors of commercial cinemas’.59 One Tehran cinema, having placed an order for 15 Eagle-Lion films in 1945, showed only the first four before a marked absence of box office success led to the cancellation of the contract.60 Statistics compiled in Baghdad for the first quarter of 1948 indicated that not one British film had been screened in a period in which 66 American and 46 Egyptian films had been shown in Iraqi cinemas.61 The situation was not as consistently bleak as it appeared to some, and British films seem to have been rather more popular among the cultural elites of Cairo and Beirut. Staff in Egypt reported that Anthony Asquith’s The Winslow Boy had overcome Arab resistance to ‘films with a particularly English flavour’ and been ‘a great prestige success’.62 In Beirut, during the final quarter of 1947, only six British films were shown (as against 66 American and 21 French features), but it was nevertheless felt that ‘British films have made a good start in this country and that ‘the old complaints such as “British films are too slow” or “They are made for the British people only” have become noticeably fewer’. Jack Howes, the local information officer, went on to claim that these criticisms had been replaced by remarks such as ‘When I hear that there is an English film on I go and see it without asking questions and if James Mason is in it, I also take a friend with me.’63 Nevertheless, it was still felt that British films were considered to be ‘class films’ appealing to intellectual elites, and in 1949, officials in Beirut reported that while ‘There is no doubt that the quality of British films is now appreciated … more action and less dialogue would make British films more acceptable to the Lebanese public.’64


By the mid-1950s, British information officers had lost interest in commercial film as a channel for British propaganda in the Middle East. A half-hearted attempt to stage a British film festival at the 1955 Damascus international fair foundered when Information Policy Department (IPD) staff, initially keen to show ‘any exciting cops and robbers film with plenty of motor car chases [and] any sexy musical comedy’, could suggest only The Dam Busters and The Tales of Hoffman before conceding that ‘The trouble is that the … [Syrians] … will not be interested in domestic comedy or drama, at which we excel, but in display, which is largely left to the American industry with its greater resources.’65 Those American resources were put to consistent use in the Middle East, and particularly in Egypt, which became the centre of a substantial US film propaganda programme. Even in 1947, the low-point in the post-war fortunes of the State Department’s information agencies, the films officer in Cairo could still report that in June alone the total audience reached by his films was an impressive 95,234.66 By December 1948, USIS Cairo was able to report that ‘USIS film audience figures for Egypt surpassed all previous records with a total of 336,062 persons. … The new record results from intensification of film work by Egyptian Government agencies in cooperation with USIS’.67 These audience figures referred not to commercial Hollywood features, but to USIS educational and documentary films, one of the outstanding successes of the USIS programme in Egypt. In October 1946, it was reported that USIS films had gained a reputation for ‘being a highly interesting, educational medium’ and that the USIS Cairo Film Section was working with Wendell Cleland, a former Office of War Information (OWI) operative now based at the American University in Cairo, ‘in bringing both film strips and motion pictures into the classroom’.68 USIS completely outperformed the British Council in this field. At a meeting on Egyptian education held in Alexandria in November 1946, British and American information officers discussed the use of film in Egyptian schools and colleges. Professor Green (a British Professor of Psychology of the Higher Institute of Education in Alexandria) expressed deep dissatisfaction with British Council productions, observing that ‘very few British Council films could be classified as strictly educational because most of the films contained obvious propaganda’.69 It was not long before the British were actively seeking American assistance. The USIS Film Section reported in July 1947 that an agreement had been reached with the British-owned J. Green and Company, which possessed a monopoly on the commercial showing of 16 mm films in Egypt.


‘On several occasions since the first OWI film operations began in this area’ USIS staff observed, ‘Green has attempted to secure exclusive rights to the showings of U.S. Government films and be paid by the U.S. for this service. Things have now reached a point where Green is so starved for new educational product that he is willing to show our pictures on our terms. He is not able to get delivery on educational subjects from England nor dollars to buy American films.’70 The USIS documentary film programme was not without its difficulties and drawbacks. ‘Projection of America’ features in Iraq were said to ‘fail at times due to Iraqi lack of understanding freedom and democracy’ and one example, ‘Portrait of an American Family’ apparently backfired when its message that Americans were free to change employment whenever they pleased clashed with the Iraqi tendency to ‘value the stability and security of single job’.71 Another problem faced by both British and American mobile film units in the Middle East was their vulnerability to hostile receptions. Even private companies active in the film propaganda business were at risk, particularly when political tensions were running high. USIS Cairo reported in February 1948 that The Coca Cola Company which has been showing its two reel color film and USIS films in schools has had to suspend showing in Egyptian Government boys schools. Its projectionists have been attacked with Coca Cola bottles in several schools midst anti-American outcries.72 One highly successful use of film as Cold War propaganda came at the 1954 Damascus fair. Concerned about the possibility of a communist propaganda success, USIA, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) prepared ‘a spectacular U.S. cinerama exhibit, to compete for prestige with an exhibit expected to be set up by Russia’.73 In the event, the Public Affairs Officer (PAO) in Damascus was able to report that the ‘Fair officials and other important Syrians as well as leading diplomatic observers have expressed opinion [that] CINERAMA is [the] fair’s most popular attraction’ and that ‘demand for tickets [was] far in excess [of] supply’.74 USIA staff proclaimed that the ‘dramatic success of the exhibition of CINERAMA at the Damascus Fair has far exceeded all hopes and expectations’75 and reported that in attracting ‘thousands of persons from the entire Arab world’, ‘Cinerama’ had succeeded in ‘eclipsing communist exhibits at the fair’.76 Amid rumours that the ‘Communists will attempt to stop CINERAMA by sabotage’ and reports of Soviet complaints that the US exhibit was ‘unfair competition’,77 Henry Byroade (the State Department’s Assistant Secretary


of State at the Near East desk) described Cinerama as a ‘glowing … U.S. victory in the Cold War’.78 If the official American film programme was relatively successful, Hollywood provided a stream of cultural exports to dwarf the output of the British film industry. As the 1953 Jackson Report acknowledged, ‘Seventy-five percent of the free world’s screen time is held by American commercial films.’ Noting approvingly that ‘the American film industry, working with CIA and FBI, has cooperated in removing communists from production units’, the report went on to assert that There is evidence that the film industry is prepared to cooperate with the Government, and every effort should be made by the latter to increase the positive contribution of commercial film to the United States propaganda and information program.79 In subsequent years, the State Department and USIA worked closely with the representatives of major Hollywood studios. In 1954, C.D. Jackson wrote to Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, Sherman Adams, observing that One of the ideas that has been kicking around since Daryl [sic] Zanuck was a witness before the Jackson Committee has been the right way to get Hollywood to understand the propaganda problems of the US and to insert in their scripts and in their action the right ideas with the proper subtlety. The USIA developed its own plan to bring its influence to bear upon the Hollywood moguls and Jackson requested that the President host a dinner for the key figures in the major Hollywood studios (including Cecil B. DeMille, Darryl Zanuck, the Warner brothers and Walt and Roy Disney) at which the plan would be outlined to them. Jackson’s only real concern, was that the press might ‘state that the motion picture industry was being taken over by USIA’, and he suggested inviting ‘two or three other Administration characters’ in order to forestall this possibility’.80 Wilson Dizard is perhaps rightly sceptical of the value of the contribution made by Cecil B. DeMille in his role as Chief Consultant to USIA,81 but it would be wrong to ignore the Hollywood factor in American propaganda to the Middle East. Roosevelt recognised the propaganda potential of Hollywood films in the Middle East as early as March 1945, enquiring ‘if American moving pictures were being furnished in the Near East’ and suggesting ‘taking over at least one small theatre in


various cities where American films of various kinds might be shown’.82 Even if this project did not materialise, there is evidence that USIS staff worked closely with representatives of M.G.M., 20th Century Fox and RKO Pictures in the Middle East.83 In contrast to the mixed fortunes of British films, American propagandists were able to report that ‘Disney cartoons’,84 ‘westerns and slapstick humour of the Abbot and Costello variety’ were extremely popular with Arab audiences.85 British observers agreed, and staff in Iraq reported in 1948 that ‘Baghdad at night resounds to swing and wild west shootings from the various open air cinemas.’86 American popular culture and the Hollywood star system provided the spark for a State Department scheme to use celebrities as informal American ‘ambassadors’. In 1951, USIE suggested arranging tours of the Middle East by ‘important US personages of a non-political character’. In this connection, USIE appear to have been especially keen to acquire the services of Bing Crosby, arguing that if Crosby were to make ‘a USO-type tour of NEA countries, the reception he would receive would be enormous’. An additional advantage to the recruitment of a celebrity like Crosby to the USIE programme was that ‘he would not be suspected of political chicanery. A few words about the world situation dropped strategically by him would have immeasurable effect’.87 Other movie stars suggested as possible collaborators included Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Clark Gable, Lana Turner, Myrna Loy, Judy Garland, James Stewart and Gary Cooper. Hollywood could, on occasion, prove to be more a liability than an asset. The US Legation in Cairo was among the overseas posts to report an unfavourable response to the Congressional investigations into Communist influence in Hollywood. ‘As hearings opened’, USIS staff observed, ‘the press handled the stories as a matter of grave import … but later swung over to give wide space to critics of the investigation’.88 The incident foreshadowed McCarthy’s later assault on the State Department’s own information and broadcasting agencies. The reaction of nervous USIS posts to allegations that ‘questionable’ or ‘objectionable’ texts were held by American overseas libraries (which saw works such as Dashiel Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Theodore Huff’s biography of Charlie Chaplin removed from the shelves) led to predictable attacks both at home and overseas. Dr Robert Johnson, as head of the State Department’s IIA, was eventually forced into an embarrassing denial of American ‘book burning’.89 The Jackson Report also expressed concern that ‘the impact of American commercial films on foreign audiences is not always to the


advantage of the United States’ and observed that ‘Many films have been damaging to United States interests’.90 Some Hollywood films were apt to embarrass British as much as American sensibilities. One 20th Century Fox drama about Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, Three Came Home (1950), with its depiction of ‘British prisoners bowing to Japanese sentries, our women being beaten up and raped … Australian troops being shot down and so on’ was identified by one British diplomat in Egypt as ‘a most unfortunate film to show in the Middle or Far East’. ‘It is true that it all comes right in the end’, he concluded, ‘but apparently in a very wishy-washy fashion and there are no compensating shots of the Japanese being knocked about.’91 Music, whether classical or popular, Western or Arabic, was often used by British and American broadcasters as a means of attracting an audience and ‘sugaring the pill’ of more overtly political propaganda content. Occasionally, however, music served as a form of propaganda in its own right, providing a national cultural showcase for composers and performers. If British propagandists, particularly those working for Sharq al-Adna, were adept at the former technique, American propagandists led the way in incorporating music into their national projection material. One of the ways in which State Department Private Enterprise Cooperation sought to build cultural links in the Middle East was through the organisation of so-called symphony salutes. These were concerts by American symphony orchestras, dedicated to a particular Middle Eastern city, and later broadcast by the VOA or local broadcasters in the city that was being honoured. In 1952, such concerts included a ‘salute’ from Houstoun to Ankara and from Rochester to Tehran.92 Keen to dismantle the stereotype of the uncultured American, USIA later proved eager to use American classical musicians in the Middle East. In early 1957, for instance, the Agency was particularly pleased with the Iraqi response to the Baghdad performances of opera diva, Eleanor Steber. Having initially expressed the opinion that an operatic performance in Baghdad would be ‘doomed to failure’, the Iraqi press eventually reported not only that the concert had sold out, but also that it had proved to be ‘perhaps the most significant cultural presentation ever offered in Iraq’.93 Similarly, USIA was also happy with reports from Iran, where the San Francisco Ballet Company’s performance in Tehran was declared ‘without question a great success and … the most important American cultural presentation which has been made in Iran’.94 By the mid 1950s, USIA was stepping up its involvement in cultural (as opposed to purely informational) activities, particularly through the appointment of a Cultural Affairs Adviser and the Agency Director’s role as the executive agent of the President’s Emergency Fund for


International Affairs. ‘Under the Fund’, USIA announced, ‘a number of the highest quality American artistic performers have already been presented abroad’, and particular attention was drawn to the tour of the Middle East by the Porgy and Bess Company.95 Performances were given in Alexandria, Cairo and Haifa in January 1955 and USIS posts were told to gain maximum publicity for the events (a task somewhat complicated by USIA’s demands that there be ‘no publicity regarding the plan to send the troup to Israel until it has left Egypt’ and that ‘We do not say that the tour is sponsored by the US Government’).96 Other suggestions for the export of American musicals to the Middle East were less welcome. In June 1955, the American Embassy in Iraq informed the State Department that it had regretfully decided to decline the opportunity of sponsoring a performance of ‘Oklahoma’ in Baghdad. ‘There is no theatrical tradition in Iraq which would make the musical, “Oklahoma”, understood or appreciated’, they pointed out, before noting that There is, perhaps unfortunately, a tradition that women who sing or dance in public places (except in the rather formal concert hall setting) also act as ‘hostesses’ between shows and are available for ‘dates’. Unquestionably, this is the interpretation which would be put on any showing of ‘Oklahoma’. Thus it seems doubtful that the cultural interests of the U.S. would be enhanced by such a venture. … Therefore, with considerable reluctance, the Embassy recommends that ‘Oklahoma’ NOT be scheduled for a Baghdad showing during its forthcoming tour.97 Jazz and swing, on the other hand, provided American propagandists with a musical genre that they could present as an original American art form. USIS officials in Iraq were gaining airtime on Baghdad Radio for records by Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw and Coleman Hawkins in early 194698 and staff in Egypt reported that its ‘Hollywood Entertainment Shows’ and miscellaneous jazz and dance music series were among the American recordings most popular with the Egyptian State Broadcasting (ESB).99 Jazz provided not only a form of cultural propaganda in its own right, it came to be inextricably bound up with the campaign to minimise the damaging impact of images of American racial segregation upon overseas opinion. Middle Eastern press coverage of racial segregation in America was often scathing, with one Egyptian newspaper denouncing the United States as a country that does not believe that Negroes are human beings, does not admit their right to education … forbids any Negro from approaching it or


enrolling with the ‘pure white angels’ – the civilized, enlightened, cultured and God-fearing children of Adam and Eve.100 When, in 1955, Nelson Rockefeller’s Planning Coordination Group concluded that ‘sensitivity about race is one of the chief obstacles to sympathy with the West in much of the NEA area’101 the White House, the State Department and USIA set about finding a means to minimise the damage being done. As well as information and press work drawing attention to racial desegregation, USIA and the State Department seized upon the idea of using jazz musicians to provide ‘living proof to foreign audiences of the great progress achieved by the [Negro] race under the American democratic system’.102 The history of America’s ‘jazz ambassadors’ has now received excellent and extended analysis in Penny Von Eschen’s study of the Eisenhower administration’s sponsorship of overseas tours by Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and others.103 The fact that the very first ‘jambassador’ tour, led by the Dizzy Gillespie band, went to the Middle East was, according to Von Eschen, not an accident. Gillespie’s tour opened in Iran, moving through Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. It was, as Von Eschen points out, moving ‘through the Eisenhower administration’s conception of a “perimeter defense … along the Northern Tier” ’. ‘Diplomatically’, she notes, it was about seeking to ‘shore up the support’ of the Middle Eastern ‘perimeter’ states, while ‘distinguishing the United States from European colonial powers’.104 The ‘jambassadors’ subsequently featured heavily in USIS output in the Arab world. Armstrong appeared in several News Review articles, his popularity presented to Arab readers as proof that Asians were ‘just like Americans when it comes to jazz’.105 Sport was also used as a tool of Western cultural diplomacy in the Middle East. By the mid-1950s, USIA had come to see international sport as a crucial area of Cold War competition for global prestige. The Agency’s Deputy Director, Abbott Washburn, in an October 1954 memorandum entitled ‘International Athletics – Cold War Battleground’, declared that ‘Communism has thrown down a challenge on the sports fields of the world’, adding that The recapturing of American prestige as a sports leader or at least the arresting of the depreciating of … American prestige in the minds of world youth necessarily depends on greater participation in important international competitions by United States athletes and sports teams.106


As far as US ‘sports diplomacy’ in the Near East was concerned, Washburn was less than impressed by the US effort. Examining the American record in January 1955, Washburn noted that ‘Exhibition diver Sammy Lee has been on a tour of the Middle and Far East, and a couple of university coaches have gone to India to hold “athletic clinics”. That’s all. No teams.’107 Washburn had overlooked a number of different American sportsrelated activities. At the lowest level were efforts made by US representatives in the Arab world to use sport to forge bonds of friendship with those among whom they lived and worked. In 1952, the American Legation in Jordan organised its own baseball game against a local Amman college, using the opportunity to score some public relations points with the Jordanians. News Review picked up the story under the heading, ‘Jordanians Beat Americans at Own Game’, reporting the 21–19 victory of the Amman students and noting how the American diplomats had presented the Jordanians with bats, balls, caps and other equipment purchased by members of the Legation.108 Sport featured regularly in the pages of News Review, although some of the efforts made to ‘sell’ North American sports to Arab readers now read rather oddly. An article on ice hockey described how players were ‘mounted on steel runners that have the cutting properties of Damascus blades and armed with crooked hickory sticks a yard and a half long’ in pursuit of ‘a hard rubber disk firm enough to dent a human skull’.109 The State Department Private Enterprise Cooperation office was also active in using American sports teams and institutes as part of its cultural relations operations. In early 1952, it suggested sending members of the United States track and field teams on tours of the Middle East and made approaches to the American Athletics Union. In a report on ‘Private Enterprise Cooperation’ before the Appropriations Committee the office announced that among the ‘unconventional devices and techniques’ recently employed, ‘the Amateur Athletic Union is giving full cooperation in the development of U.S. participation in the Olympics as a psychological factor in international affairs’.110 State Department agencies sponsored other sports tours of the Middle East and a Pennsylvania State University soccer team’s 1951 tour of Iran was considered to have been particularly successful. State Department publicity guidance subsequently noted that ‘the excellent reception given to the Penn State soccer team is evidence that Iranians are genuinely friendly toward the United States’ and asked USIS posts to ‘play up Iranian hospitality and friendliness and the favorable reactions of the U.S. team toward the Iranians. Keep the visit on the sports level. Play it as


non-political’.111 Later, in the mid-1950s, Olympic athletes Mal Whitfield and Robert Mathias, the latter described by State Department propagandists as ‘America’s greatest all round athlete of modern times’, both embarked on goodwill tours of the Middle East, holding coaching clinics, giving exhibitions and talking to sports club organisers and youth groups.112 The basketball exhibition team, the Harlem Globetrotters, had visited Lebanon in 1953, and the State Department subsequently announced plans for another tour of the Middle East taking in Tel Aviv, Beirut, Alexandria, Cairo, Baghdad and Istanbul in July 1955. ‘As you know’, Herbert Hoover Jr announced, The Department has facilitated the various tours abroad of the Globetrotters for the past four or five years. In this connection, the Department has been very cognizant of the unlimited possibilities for racial understanding and good will which can be derived from tours of this type. … Their attraction consists not only in superb skill but also showmanship and broad humor which is intelligible to all regardless of race, language or knowledge of basketball.113 British propagandists also used sport within their cultural diplomacy programmes in Middle Eastern countries. The British Council commissioned a series of sporting documentary films (including features on the Wimbledon tennis championships and the FA cup final) for Arab audiences but the possibility of hitting cultural ‘blind spots’ was ever present, particularly in the emphasis placed on British national sports in newsreels. Information officers in Cairo informed the Middle East Information Department (MEID) in 1949 that football, basketball and swimming were popular subjects, ‘but not cricket in which Egyptians take very little interest’.114 From Beirut, British officials reported that there was ‘not sufficient variety in the British newsreels [and] sports such as rugby union and cricket … are neither understood nor popular in the Lebanon’. French newsreels, they observed, were more successful in that they incorporated ‘locally popular sports such as cycling, swimming, ski-ing’.115 Features on the Olympic Games appeared occasionally in British propaganda, and the Ikhwan al Hurriya made much of the success of Egyptian athletes at the 1948 London Olympics.116 Even on this theme, however, care had to be taken to avoid offending Egyptian sensitivities and Eagle-Lion later reported that it had not thought it appropriate to show its film of the 1948 games in Egypt ‘since no shots appeared of participating Egyptian teams’.117 Information staff


in Damascus even reported that this film, ‘The Glory of Sport’, had been ‘banned in Syria because it made no mention of Arab victories’.118

‘Two Way Street, One Way Traffic?’ The Cold War politics of cultural exchange Shortly after the end of the war, a State Department enquiry into American cultural relations with the Arab world produced the warning that A cultural relations program which shovels out thousands of dollars of materials and services, especially on a charity basis, meets with the cupidity and contempt of foreigners. There must be some sense of mutual respect, some consultation on our part as to their desires in the way of information and cultural services, and some demand on our part for the exchange of their cultural goods against ours. … Nothing promotes goodwill so successfully as an interest in the other person’s activities or accomplishments.119 Superficially, at least, the message appeared to have hit home. In 1948, George V. Allen, director of the State Department’s Office of Public Affairs, addressed the US Advisory Commission on Information. ‘Cultural relations’, he argued, must be a two way street if we are to avoid a justified accusation of imperialism. We must endeavor not only to tell foreigners about the United States but to assist in the process by which Americans learn about foreigners. We should welcome … the information work of foreign governments inside the United States, telling our people about their lands and explaining to us what their governments are trying to do.120 The reality was less satisfactory. The State Department’s post-war assessment had been quick to complain that ‘the principal of mutuality has often been disregarded in the hasty setting up of a program or the taking over of a war pressure program’.121 That this should have been so was hardly surprising, given the view, openly expressed at USIS Baghdad, that ‘Iraq has little to offer the United States of a cultural nature, the only exception being archaeological research facilities. Cultural cooperation between Iraq and the United States will be, therefore, virtually a one-way street.’122 When the conduct of cultural diplomacy in the Middle East was so often conceptualised as part of a civilisational


mission to enlighten and educate, the principle of mutuality was predictably forgotten or deployed as a device to flatter the target audience. The contempt in which several Western propagandists held their Arab subjects was often palpable. One Foreign Office official, having described the Egyptian petit-bourgeois or ‘effendi’ class as ‘the crude product of superficial eastern civilisation … the people who think they know how the western world works’ went on to cast doubt on the value of British cultural relations work among them. ‘With all respect’, he began, ‘I sometimes feel that our approach has been wrong. We have attempted to interest the young Arab in Shakespeare’s birthplace and Stonehenge and have expended a great deal of energy in flattering their little vanities and persuading them that they are the future hope of the Middle East countries. Perhaps we should have sought to impress upon them the quantity and quality of our weapons of destruction and have deflated their overweening sense of their own importance.’123 Another factor to be considered was that the Cold War was itself providing the impetus for the politicisation of Western cultural relations. Cultural diplomacy was always ‘political’ in the sense that it was conceived of as long-term propaganda designed to facilitate the pursuit of diplomatic objectives. The challenge for cultural diplomats, however, was to ensure that their work remained untainted by the whiff of politics as far as their target audiences were concerned. It is clear that the Cold War imposed pressures, particularly on the American programme, that made this task inordinately difficult. Indeed, some American officials entirely reversed the orthodox interpretation of the ideal relationship between cultural activities and foreign policy. ‘Long-term cultural projects’, one State Department officer told the Office of Information and Cultural Affairs’ (OIC’s) William Stone, ‘will be beneficial only in measure as our foreign policy is successful, I believe that the acid test is not whether political information activities “contaminate” the purity of cultural projects, but rather whether the latter impede the success of the former’.124 Throughout the period, the state agencies responsible for American cultural relations were firmly located within the US national security establishment. In 1953, the Jackson Committee institutionalised the conception of a ‘total Cold War’ strategy, connecting the psychological arm of foreign policy with the more traditionally revered, diplomatic, military and economic branches. This, may have benefited the political propagandists but it was far more questionable as a guiding philosophy for cultural diplomacy. The primacy of short-term political objectives, driven by the contingencies of the Cold War, was thus established at an


early stage in the post-war era. In 1950, one USIE program officer explained that We spend a great deal of effort endeavoring to cause the Frenchman to think well of the United States and to admire our culture, and this aim is desirable. But at present it is of relatively minor importance whether a Frenchman loves Americans or considers us cultural barbarians, but of great importance whether he votes for a member of parliament who supports the strengthening of the French armed forces, or writes articles urging Franco-German cooperation, or works to oust the communists from his trade union local.125 US cultural diplomacy was thus incorporated into the Cold War national security establishment, made subservient to short-term political goals and regularly doomed to failure as a result. In linking cultural diplomacy so closely to the pursuit of political objectives, US officials underestimated the extent to which a misjudged or unpopular policy could undermine even the best-planned programme of cultural activities. Never was this clearer in the post-war Middle East than during the Palestine crisis. As one Baghdad newspaper declared in 1947, ‘We no longer require American science, culture or education by a nation which knows neither right nor justice.’126 It is impossible to separate the national projection campaigns conducted by Britain and the United States from a broader set of propaganda objectives concerning the ideological struggle against Communism and the Soviet Union. It was recognised at an early stage that anti-communism was an insufficient response to the ideological challenge presented by the Soviet Union, and in 1951, the Cabinet explicitly recognised that the British Council’s work was ‘bound up with the wider task of defending Western civilisation against the inroads of Communism’.127 As Anthony Nutting concluded in 1953, ‘All our propaganda is planned against the background of the Soviet threat … [we are] … no longer just ‘projecting Britain’ for its own sake’.128 This not only risked opening cultural diplomacy agencies to the charge that they were engaging in overtly political activities, it also left them vulnerable to the consequences of association with unpopular political objectives. Moreover, given that Western area specialists were well aware of the roots of Nasser’s popularity in the Arab world by the mid-1950s, it should have been clearly apparent that it was unrealistic to expect cultural diplomacy to bridge the political gulf that had opened up between Arab nationalism and the Cold Warriors of Washington and Whitehall.


Under the pressures of the Cold War, the projection of positive images of the West went hand in hand with the dissemination of material intended to denigrate and destroy the prestige of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc. Cold War objectives thus had a habit of attaching themselves to some unlikely cultural forms. It was in this sense that Louis Armstrong, the quintessential jazz ambassador, came to recognise his role as an unconventional Cold Warrior. In the Middle East, as elsewhere, the ‘blue note in a minor key’ had become A weapon like no other nation has; Especially the Russians can’t claim jazz.129 The next task, therefore, must be to examine the ideological and psychological weapons wielded by Britain and the United States against the Soviet Union while fighting the Cold War propaganda battle in the Middle East.

4 ‘Who Can Be Neutral?’ Anti-Communism and Cold War Propaganda in the Middle East

‘So let’s get Mother Russia to teach us how to share! It will share with us: Secret police! Slave labour camps! Anti-Muslim falsification campaigns! Indoctrination of children against parents! Indoctrination of children against God! Indoctrination of brother against brother! Mass Killings! Won’t life be wonderful?’ ‘Suppose the Russian Communists Were Here’ (USIA pamphlet distributed in Syria and Jordan in 1957) This chapter looks at the ways in which the Cold War battle for hearts and minds was fought in the Middle East, examining the methods and tactics employed by British and American propagandists in their bid to strengthen anti-communist attitudes in the area. In particular, it questions whether the high priority afforded to anti-communist and antiSoviet themes was a suitable strategy for Middle Eastern audiences and explores the reasons for the unreceptive attitude of much of the Arab world to Western Cold War propaganda. To that end, the chapter is divided into four major sections. It looks first at Anglo-American perceptions of the Soviet and communist threat to the region and considers why, given the low level of that threat for so much of the period, Cold War themes were so prominent in propaganda output. 97


A second section examines the politics of Cold War propaganda in the Middle East, throwing light on the nature of Western collaboration with regional leadership groups and investigating the bid to present Western models of reform and development as alternatives to communism in the Middle East. The third and fourth sections look at two Cold War propaganda campaigns prosecuted with particular vigour in the region. The first was the bid to discredit neutralism as a viable foreign policy for Middle Eastern governments. The second was an attempt to mobilise Islamic leaders and institutions against the Soviet Union and local communists. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the flawed assumptions that underpinned the West’s approach to Cold War propaganda in the region.

Threat and response: the Soviet challenge in the Middle East It has been argued that events in the Middle East were at the heart of the collapse of the Grand Alliance and the onset of the Cold War. Soviet policy towards in the Straits, the Mediterranean and North Africa persuaded British diplomats that the Soviet Union was seeking to challenge British primacy in the region.1 Post-war crises in Iran, Turkey and Greece similarly convinced American leaders that they faced a Soviet threat to the Middle East. As Dean Acheson later recalled, The year 1946 was for the most part a year of learning that minds in the Kremlin worked very much as George F. Kennan had predicted they would. … The Russians themselves greatly helped our education. In picking the Straits and Iran as points of pressure, they followed the route of invasion by barbarians against classical Greece and Rome and later of the czars to warm water. From Thermopylae to the Crimea the responses to pressure at these points had been traditional. If some Americans found their history rusty, neither the British nor the President did.2 Nevertheless, any analyst relying on the reports reaching London and Washington from the Middle East itself would be left with a mixed impression as to the extent and seriousness of the communist threat to the countries of the area. The American Legation in Cairo was warning about the Soviet threat as early as July 1946, when a memorandum by First Secretary, Philip Ireland, was forwarded to the State Department.

Anti-Communism and Cold War Propaganda 99

‘The Middle East’, Ireland claimed, is a fertile ground for propaganda touched with sufficient reality to give a promise of freedom from hunger and want, satisfaction of political ambition and enlargement of social and economic opportunities. It is precisely along these lines that the available evidence indicates that Soviet Russia is now proceeding.3 In Iraq, Ireland warned about Soviet activities in the Kurdish regions and among the urban masses, while in Iran the Tudeh Party was ‘organised with Russian assistance … against the Iranian Government’. In Syria and Lebanon, Soviet influence was said to be ‘flourishing’, and the Communist Party had ‘gained a fairly large number of adherents’.4 In Egypt, meanwhile, the authorities were worried enough to initiate a crackdown on alleged communists, rounding up over 200 alleged suspects, closing down 11 journals and introducing parliamentary legislation against subversive activities.5 British officials were also quick to express concern about post-war Soviet activities in the Arab Middle East. In May 1946, Terence Shone reported from Beirut that although there were ‘no definite signs that the Soviet Government, in their relations with the Levant States, have embarked on a forward policy to secure for themselves a position of paramount influence’, the Soviet Government had been acting in support of the local communists. ‘The activity of the local Communist party’, Shone noted, ‘which is certainly in close touch with the Soviet Legation and seems to dispose of considerable funds, is markedly increasing in the Lebanon.’6 Others saw danger signals in the changing intellectual climate in the region. ‘In the more developed countries of Egypt and Lebanon’, argued M.L. Fitzgerald, ‘socialism and especially communism are becoming more and more discussed. Words have even been coined in Arabic for such controversial terms as “proletariat”!’7 By September 1946, the British Ambassador in Cairo, Sir Ronald Campbell, was pressing for a new approach, urging that ‘the time had now come to counter the infiltration of communist propaganda by openly attacking the communist theory and practice’. Pointing out that the fact that ‘we do not answer communist propaganda places us under the double disadvantage that the communist misrepresentation carries the day and that the Middle Easterner regards our restraint as evidence of weakness’, Campbell recommended that ‘authority should be given to begin anti-communist publicity’.8


Such thinking contributed to the decision to establish the Information Research Department (IRD) in 1948. Even before the creation of IRD, however, anti-communist propaganda in the Middle East was being stepped up by British and American agencies. In June 1947, discussions between British and American diplomats produced agreement on the desirability of greater efforts in this field. ‘It was high time,’ noted Eastern Department’s Peter Garran, ‘that the U.S. and Britain should work out what could be done to stop or retard the spread of Communism in the area.’ The US Embassy’s Lewis M. Douglas replied that the State Department ‘had long been thinking areawise along the lines just outlined by Mr Garran’, although he reminded the British of the ‘severe financial limitations’ under which the American propaganda agencies were labouring. Douglas also suggested an Anglo-American ‘informal exchange of views … regarding the programs for Near Eastern countries likely to yield the best results’, although in keeping with American reluctance to cooperate openly with the British, he was quick to state that ‘a joint-British–American program would not be desirable’.9 By April 1948, as IRD’s global war on communism was getting underway, the American propaganda campaign was also building up steam. ‘The American Government and people’, wrote the US Minister to Syria, George Wadsworth, ‘have set out to stem the tide of Soviet expansionism and it is, therefore, axiomatic that our information program gear itself to this top priority task – extending if you will the policy of containment from the political and semi-military sphere to the psychological front.’10 Not everyone was convinced of the immediacy of the threat. In July 1946, when Philip Ireland presented the Egyptian anti-communist crackdown as evidence of Soviet penetration, the Cairo Legation’s Public Affairs Officer (PAO), Cecil Lyon, argued that the whole affair gave an ‘exaggerated impression of strength and importance of Egyptian communists. At present, lacking organization, cohesion, and discipline, they do not constitute a real threat to the Government’.11 To many observers, it appeared that the level of Western anti-communist activity in the Middle East was out of all proportion to the existing threat and many reports stressed that anti-communist propaganda might prove counter-productive. British officials in Libya informed IRD in November 1954 that There is at the moment practically no Communism in this country. … For this reason the Government-controlled press is averse to publishing anti-Communist articles which, in their opinion, would draw people’s attention to a subject about which they know little or nothing.12


In the early 1950s, the Joint Intelligence Committee ( JIC) found it difficult to see that communism had made significant headway anywhere in the region. A ‘Survey of World Communism in 1952’ concluded that ‘In the Middle East as a whole … Communism made little progress and the parties themselves continued to be feeble and disorganised’. Even Iraq, shaken by communist-inspired disturbances in November, was quickly stabilised as when the authorities arranged for the mass arrest of communist suspects and by the end of the year, JIC analysts were confident that ‘the Communists were lying low again’. Across Libya, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Aden and the Persian Gulf States, the JIC concluded simply that there were ‘no Communist Parties or influence’.13 The following year, little had changed and the JIC reported that the Communist Parties of the Middle East had again failed to make significant progress. ‘During 1953’, the JIC concluded, The Arab Communist Parties remained weak, and in Egypt and Iraq, seriously divided. Only during a breakdown in authority could they hope to act effectively; they are a security rather than a political problem to the Governments of the countries concerned.14 It was not until 1954 that the JIC observed that ‘the Communist Parties of the Arab Middle East adopted a bolder and more active policy from which, for a time, they gained in both prestige and achievement’,15 and only in April 1956 did analysts conclude that ‘Russian influence is likely to increase and has in some cases already done so’.16 In this sense, the JIC analyses bear out the historical consensus that after an initial foray into Middle Eastern affairs in 1946, the Soviet Union only really started to extend its influence into the region after the death of Stalin in 1953.17 Despite the JIC’s scepticism about the extent of communist penetration, the notion of a communist threat continued to exercise British and American propagandists. The Communist Party may have been banned in Lebanon, but the United States Information Services (USIS) officials still believed that Beirut was the ‘center of Communist activities in the Middle East’.18 Iraq, where the Communist Party was also outlawed, was believed by USIS officers to host numerous underground cells,19 while in Syria, the collapse of the Shishakli dictatorship in 1954 allowed communist activists to operate openly. Syria was subsequently regarded as the most vulnerable of the Middle Eastern states, and nervous cold warriors were able to convince themselves that communism was indeed ‘on the march’ in the Middle East.


Many officials feared that the necessary elements for communist subversion were in place, and the Jackson Report identified several domestic sources of vulnerability in the region, the most important being between ‘Arab and Jew’, ‘white and colored’ and ‘present or former colonial powers and present or former dependencies’.20 British officials also worried about the social and economic vulnerabilities of Middle Eastern nations. In March 1950, the British Embassy in Cairo warned IRD that Egyptian vulnerability to communism stemmed from acute maldistribution between rich and poor, a rapidly growing population and a limited availability of cultivatable land; the concentration of land-ownership in the hands of a small proportion of the population and consequent widespread ‘land hunger’; a religious faith inadequate as a stimulus to the development of modern social reform; a frustrated effendi and student class, emotional and somewhat idealistic, lacking outlets for their aspiration; and the normal corrupt and inefficient administration met with in the Middle East.21 In this tense atmosphere, any signs of Soviet activity or influence were seized upon. At a meeting of USIA’s area directors in June 1954, Huntington Damon argued that ‘in the past six months the Soviets have been moving into the NEA area in a big way, spending vast sums of money on trade fairs, or showing their films on Russian ballet at the biggest theatres and other similar activities. The Soviet Union and all the satellite nations will have exhibits at the Damascus trade fair’.22 By December 1955, the NSC had concluded that The Soviet Union, with a new dynamic communist determination, is making a concerted effort to develop decisive influence in the area. … This new Soviet effort, because of its great flexibility and the varied instruments at its disposal, is much more dangerous today than it was even during the Stalinist era. … Unless present trends are reversed, the Near East may well be oriented toward the Soviet bloc within the next few years.23 Viewed from this perspective, it was easy to conclude that increasing Soviet influence and subversion would be a feature of political life in the Middle East for the foreseeable future. Objective investigations of actual communist influence in the region may not have come anywhere near justifying these fears, but this did not stop British and American officials from embarking upon extensive anti-communist campaigns. A British


Embassy report from Cairo in August 1946 noted that ‘In Egypt the communists have succeeded far more in propaganda than organisational activity’, and this analysis would have continued to hold good for most Middle Eastern countries well into the 1950s. It was the fear that the Soviets would succeed in undermining the West’s position, rather than that they were on the point of tangible, positive gains for themselves that propelled the West’s propaganda response. Considering the decline of British military and political influence in April 1956, the JIC admitted that ‘The Russians probably do not wish to fill the military vacuum themselves. They probably do not even wish, at this stage, to fill the political one.’24 The fear was that Soviet propaganda might succeed in disrupting the Western position in the Middle East thus ensuring the area’s neutrality in any future conflict. These concerns prompted an instinctive British and American reaction that made countering Soviet propaganda a top priority. It is far from clear, however, that this was a wise course of action.

Reaction and reform: the politics of anti-communism in the Middle East The waging of an anti-communist propaganda war in the Middle East confronted British and American officials with the challenge of establishing reliable channels through which the required message could be disseminated. Direct co-operation with Middle Eastern governments and media facilities was a favoured strategy and one to which both British and American officials devoted much time and effort. Significant evidence has emerged to suggest that the IRD was extremely successful in establishing high level contacts within Middle Eastern governments. In Ankara, Embassy officials passed IRD papers to a contact within the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs,25 while in Cairo, Security Service officers established a liaison with an Egyptian officer within the Directorate of Military Intelligence. Embassy staff met their Egyptian contact approximately once every ten days, feeding IRD material directly to both Egyptian Military Intelligence and the Ministry of the Interior. The contact provided IRD with an opportunity to whet the anti-communist appetite of the Egyptian authorities and was used to alert them to the activities of Egyptian communists overseas. ‘We have … been able to give them a certain amount of information on the activities in Europe of Egyptian communists and delegates to conferences which they would almost certainly not have been able to obtain from their own sources’, Embassy staff reported in July 1953.26 By 1955, IRD head, Jack Rennie,


could state that difficulties encountered in getting material into the Egyptian press were being offset by the IRD’s ‘increasing collaboration with the government over anti-communist propaganda’.27 British representatives in Amman described Jordanian officials as ‘willing co-operators’ in the field of anti-communist propaganda,28 while IRD material was also supplied to selected recipients in Bahrain and Kuwait.29 Officials in Baghdad worked closely with ‘prominent Iraqis, politicians, professional people and others’ and, by July 1955, the Embassy’s contact list included the Minister of the Interior, the Director General of Propaganda, Minister of Education former Prime Minister Jamali and current Prime Minister, Nuri Said.30 Military channels were used to pass on anti-Soviet material and in 1954 Major-General Boucher (representing the War Office’s Director of Military Intelligence) informed the JIC that he had recently met the Iraqi Chief of Staff in order to pass on IRD material emphasising the Soviet threat to Iraq.31 IRD was also active in developing contacts with government figures to secure closer anti-communist collaboration in Lebanon and Sudan.32 US propagandists were not far behind their British counterparts when it came to anti-communist collaboration with regional leaders. The USIS and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) staff developed valuable contacts including some at the highest level of government. The Jackson Committee was told, during the course of its investigations into the US overseas information programme that American officials in Iran were working with ‘many Iranian government offices … for the dissemination of unattributed information, especially movies and pamphlets’.33 It was in Egypt, however, that US officials achieved their most spectacular successes. As early as 1947, the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt was using his access to the Egyptian Prime Minister, Nokrashy Pasha, to inspire articles in the Egyptan press34 but it was after the 1952 Egyptian revolution that US–Egyptian anti-communist co-operation really took off. Subsequently, United States Information Agency (USIA) was able to boast of a number of collaborative publishing projects, the most successful of which was a book, The Truth About Communism. As USIA’s Henry Loomis explained, This book has an introduction by Prime Minister Gamal Abdul Nasser and is authored by Major Amin Shaker, chief aide to the Prime Minister. Although the contents were not controlled by USIS, the book was based to a large degree upon material supplied by USIS and a series of midnight conversations between USIS officers and Major Amin Shaker.35


Loomis noted that the USIS Cairo staff had also been working closely with Egyptian Government authorities in an effort to aid them in their anti-Communist activity. This work has resulted specifically in the publication of several pamphlets in which the Communist attitude on religion and the Communist adherence to Moscow has been brought out. The pamphlets were published under the names of non-existent organizations.36 When the US–Egyptian relations began to deteriorate after September 1955, Egyptian authorities began to view their links to US propagandists as a political liability. The PAO in Cairo reported in March 1956 that The proposed publication of an Arabic edition of ‘What is Communism?’ has been somewhat delayed because the Egyptian official concerned decided it would be more effective if a sheikh revised the USIS translation. … The GOE official is most concerned that no one should know of any Egyptian arrangement for cooperation in the publication and all posts are urged not to discuss this freely, even among the American staff.37 Involving themselves in the internal politics of Middle Eastern countries raised a number of questions for anti-communist propagandists. Frequently, these were connected to concerns about political and social reform and the perils of close association with reactionary governments and political parties on the far right. Harold Lasswell identified the dangers of close association with reactionary regimes as early as 1946. ‘Too often,’ he wrote, our policy ‘has been misrepresented as a “fight Russia” policy or a “get tough” program and American leaders have become the heroes of nearly all reactionary forces outside Russia who imagine that we will support them at all costs regardless of their domestic policy.’38 British officials expressed similar concerns, not least because of the need to present an acceptable face of British foreign policy to the Labour government’s rank and file supporters. ‘Is it likely,’ asked Sir Hugh Dow from his Consulate in Jerusalem in 1949, ‘that the average socialist Member of Parliament will continue to support a policy in the Middle East which, as he sees it, continues to bolster up despotic or narrow oligarchic governments which suppress popular movements in their own countries?’39 The dilemma for Western propagandists was neatly summarised by the Foreign Office’s Denis Greenhill in April 1946. ‘We must not be


linked with the parties adhering to the status quo,’ Greenhill observed, noting that British policy ‘must not appear hostile to the wellbeing and improvement of the common man.’40 The problem was not easily solved and Eastern Department staff were still wrestling with it in 1952, concluding that We must have bases in the Middle East because of the danger of war with Russia … and we have to use the Pashas, who are still Prime Ministers, Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Kings to protect our interests. … [T]he danger of war with Russia makes it particularly important to prevent Communist coups in the Middle East. This can only be done in the short term by the suppression of Communist parties. It leads us … to suspect people who are genuinely anxious for reform. … We are also handicapped by our association with the Americans, in that they are disposed to support any force, however reactionary, which they believe opposed to Communism.41 There was some hypocrisy in this criticism of the US approach, as the British were themselves quite happy to consort with figures from the far right of Arab politics. This was particularly true in the Levant, where shortly after the formal achievement of Lebanese and Syrian independence in 1946, the British began developing their own covert links to far right parties. In May 1946, US officials reported the appearance of a number of British intelligence agents in Damascus and Homs, including the new passport control officer at the British Consulate who was identified as having ‘recently served as one of the chief British Intelligence Officers in Beirut’.42 The following month, Gordon Mattison (Charge d’Affaires at the US Legation in Damascus), informed the State Department that ‘the British were continuing their policy of rebuilding their political intelligence setup in Syria’. Mattison named Colonel Frank Stirling, Brigadier Hutchins and Brigadier Frere as intelligence operatives claiming to be in Syria on ‘private business’, but their arrival had provoked local comment to the effect that ‘Britain’s normal trade relations with Syria hardly justified the large influx of high salaried British subjects.’43 The strengthening of the intelligence network in the Levant coincided with reports that the British were collaborating with the far right Syrian Popular Party (SPP) founded by Antun Sa’adah, a Lebanese politician with pro-fascist leanings. US War Department intelligence analysts noted in May 1946 that Just as the SPP suspects the Communist Party of having connections with the Russians, the communists strongly suspect the SPP of being


supported in their anti-communist activity by the British. These suspicions are based partly on the mutual opposition of the SPP and the British against the communists, and partly on the friendly relations of SPP leaders in Beirut with officers of the British government.44 Information regarding British intelligence work in the anti-communist underground is naturally difficult to come by but intriguing evidence has emerged in a telegram sent to Washington by US diplomats in Beirut in May 1953. Relying on a ‘well-informed’ source, the report drew attention to an Amman-based ‘Committee on Communism and Destructive Principles’ which, it was claimed, was founded and controlled by Albert Dib, ‘a leading British agent in Beirut’. This organisation was connected to another Amman-based group, ‘The Arab Hawks Club’, and two Lebanese organisations, the ‘Arab Students and Teachers Club’ and the ‘Movement of Combatting Communism in Lebanon’. All of these organisations, the report claimed, were ‘financed by and basically directed by the British’.45 One may be forgiven for responding to Denis Greenhill’s complaint that it was ‘absurd that we should be accused of reactionary tendencies at a time when we are enacting some of the most far-reaching measures of social legislation which the world has ever seen’, with a touch of cynicism.46 Nevertheless, Greenhill’s suggestion that the British ‘welfare state’ could be held up as a social democratic alternative to communism introduces an important aspect of Western propaganda in the region. In October 1946, Ivone Kirkpatrick considered the argument that anticommunist material alone was insufficient and that a positive approach was also required. ‘We should ram home to the peoples of the Middle East’, he argued, that Our policy is progressive. … We are not wedded to reactionary elements. On the contrary we wish to encourage progressive forces in so far as we can do so consistently with our resolve to respect and foster the independence of the Middle East countries. To that end, British propaganda should emphasise that Britain leads the way in social reform. Our democratic system of government, social services, organisation of industry and labour, administration of justice; in short, the British way of life offers the best example of orderly and rapid progress. Material on these subjects should be given the widest possible publicity.47


British information officers in Cairo concurred, observing that ‘It is valuable to show that Britain is politically interested in promoting social progress … and to demonstrate that the improvement in the lot of the under-privileged, which has taken place in Britain by constitutional means, is an answer to the violent and destructive Communist doctrines’.48 As the Cold War intensified, Western propaganda naturally took on a more strident anti-communist tone, but the positive aspects of the campaign did not disappear. Christopher Warner reminded British information officers of this in 1950. ‘The prevailing doctrine,’ he stated, ‘was that British propaganda should not be entirely negative, but that, as well as exposing the evils of the Soviet regime, we have to show that there is a better alternative and that Western democracy, with Britain in the lead, is pointing the way to it.’49 US officials were thinking along similar lines, noting in 1951 that Our propaganda labors under a handicap. We cannot openly advocate the overthrow of the established government, even though we realise its unprogressive nature. Nevertheless, while not attacking the governments themselves, we have placed ourselves firmly on the side of basic social, economic, and political reforms in the Near East. Our purpose has been to foment evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, changes.50 Before considering the main thrust of British and American anti- communist propaganda, therefore, it is important to consider the manner in which Western propagandists worked to promote visions of political, social and economic reform in the Middle East. The Social Publicity Officer at the British Embassy in Cairo led the way in disseminating propaganda of this kind. The Cold War aspect of the work was made clear in a May 1948 report arguing that The promotion of social welfare in Egypt is to combat the spreading of Communist propaganda. The most effective measures against the latter require action by the Government to set up social services on a nation-wide scale, although it must not be forgotten that even this is inadequate without accompanying action in the economic field. In the meantime, mere publicity of British Social Services will not go very far to promote social improvement unless, as we suggest, the efforts of sincere minor Government officials and of enlightened voluntary organisations are increasingly encouraged.51


Two magazines, ‘For Your Information’ and ‘Progress’, were published in both Arabic and English and by the late 1940s, ‘Progress’ had acquired a readership of almost 1000 Egyptian professionals and social workers.52 British officials in the area saw personal contacts as another important channel for social welfare publicity and by the spring of 1948, contacts in Egypt had been established with ‘officials of the Ministry of Social Affairs’ and ‘a large number of voluntary organisations, big and small, Egyptian and foreign’.53 The Embassy’s oral propaganda networks and the weekly bulletins of the Ikhwan al Hurriya provided other important channels. Between 1945 and 1951, the Ikhwan’s director recognised that, in its emphasis on the promotion of British social democracy, the Ikhwan al Hurriya was ‘chiefly concerned with carrying out a long term policy which I believed to be dear to the present Labour Government’.54 An example of the way in which the Ikhwan’s social development material was linked to its anticommunist themes can be found in a February 1948 bulletin in which an anti-communist speech by Clement Attlee was discussed alongside feature articles on industrial development in Egypt.55 Given this emphasis on political reform, left wing leaders and labour organisations constituted an important target audience. In December 1945, the long-serving British Ambassador in Egypt, Miles Lampson (Lord Killearn) suggested that the proposed sending of a party of Egyptian Trade Unionists to the United Kingdom for six months is a most promising step in the right direction. It cannot fail to give some encouragement to those Egyptians who wish to see an orderly improvement in the social conditions of the workers and to combat to some extent the revolutionary agitators whose activities still cause a good deal of concern in responsible quarters.56 By 1950, the Cairo Information Department had developed a ‘twofold strategy’ for dealing with the spread of communism among Egyptian workers. The first objective was to bring Egypt’s quarter of a million industrial workers to ‘fully appreciate the evils of Communism’. The second aspect of the strategy was to make every effort ‘to ensure that Trade Unions are used to improve the conditions of the worker, and not by small cliques of Communists as political instruments’.57 The task of facilitating the development of strong, anti-communist trade unions provided IRD with an important challenge. IRD had for some time believed that building up the prestige of the International


Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and encouraging the organisation to step up its work in the Middle East was the best means of countering the communist World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU).58 By 1954, IRD, the Information Policy Department (IPD), the British Middle East Office (BMEO) and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) had combined to produce and disseminate pro-ICFTU leaflets in Arabic across the region.59 Similar material was also distributed among contacts in local trade unions, and IRD reported in August 1954 that the Histadrut (Israel’s ICFTU-affiliated General Federation of Labour) was ‘quietly active in disseminating anti-WFTU propaganda’.60 At the same time, however, IRD was careful to avoid obvious or open collaboration with the ICFTU since it was feared that this would damage the ICFTU’s reputation were it to become public knowledge.61 As the 1950s progressed, concern grew about the need to shore up what was seen as an increasingly vulnerable Middle Eastern left. From Cairo, the former IRD chief, Ralph Murray argued that the task of shoring up the left had acquired new significance given his fears that a complacent Egyptian government might inadvertently allow the communists to gain a foothold. ‘I do not think’, he wrote, ‘that the Ministry of the Interior’s anti-communist staff is as capable as some believe of uncovering the sapping and mining of the Egyptian left wing, if the Communists have the intelligence to stick quietly to that task with, for the time being, no subversionary attempts to overthrow the régime itself.’ Murray stressed the value of exchange visits for Egyptian leftwingers and observed that the British-run schools in Egypt potentially constituted a valuable weapon against the spread of communism among Egyptian youth. The value of such schools would be increased, Murray suggested, if they were to do more to attract the children of left-wing parents by charging lower fees.62 Britain’s ambassadors in Lebanon and Syria were united in the belief that ‘a much more sustained and more penetrating effort’ was needed to bring influence to bear on the metropolitan left-wing elements of Beirut and Damascus. Sir John Gardener reported that although British officials were making progress with the Syrian trade unions, his staff was not equipped to provide the kinds of practical advice to be of use in strengthening a fledgling trade union movement.63 Both Chapman Andrews and Gardener urged that further steps be taken to foster contacts between the British, Syrian and Lebanese labour movements and lobbied for the appointment of a British Labour Attaché in the area. With the Treasury unwilling to provide the funds for such an appointment, and with the Foreign Office reluctant to ask the oil companies for


contributions (‘it is Her Majesty’s Government’s job to protect them not the other way around’64), no real progress was made. More was achieved on a number of other fronts. Gardener was able to report that approaches to the left-leaning educational establishment had resulted in the cultivation of ‘useful contacts among the University teaching staff’,65 and both Gardener and Murray commented on links between local left-wingers and the British labour movement. Murray’s most innovative suggestion, which he hoped might lead to a ‘more extensive penetration of the Egyptian Left’, was ‘the stationing in Cairo of a really good British left-wing journalist … charged with the job of keeping on terms as a Socialist with as wide a circle of writers and reporters as possible and extending his personal influence over them’.66 Gardener drew attention to the recent visit to Syria by the Labour MP, Eric Fletcher, undertaken in a bid to establish links between the Syrian Ba’thists and the British Labour Party.67 The State Department placed material on aid and development at the heart of its Cold War propaganda, and American publications in the Arab world consistently sought to inform readers about new and existing projects. In July 1951, News Review highlighted Dean Acheson’s exposition of US aims in the Near East, repeating his assurance that the US sought to provide economic assistance to help the people of the area ‘feel that their lot is with the free world and that the free world has the basic needs – moral and material – at heart’. Acheson’s objective, it was stressed, was to ensure that ‘the drive for economic improvement [was] associated with the rest of the free world instead of with communism’.68 Subsequently, the most important American development programme in the Middle East, certainly the one which featured most prominently in propaganda to the area, was the Point Four programme announced by Truman in January 1949. By June 1950, Point Four aid had been incorporated into the 1950 Foreign Economic Assistance Act, and a Technical Co-operation Administration had been established to oversee its implementation.69 In effect, Truman had authorised a small-scale ‘Marshall Plan’ for the Middle East and, like the Marshall Plan, Point Four was motivated by fears about the appeal of communism in deprived areas. In his message to Congress announcing Point Four, Truman was at pains to stress the dangers of Arab neutralism and Soviet expansion in the Middle East, stating that In these circumstances, a significant risk to the security of the free world lies in the fact that the countries in this area are economically under-developed. Existing moderate governments, for lack of


technically and administratively trained public servants and for lack of financial resources, are unable to provide effectively for the basic needs of their peoples … This inability strengthens the hand of irresponsible and extreme nationalist groups and provides scope for Soviet divisive tactics.70 Point Four was immediately recognised by the USIS as an important psychological weapon and a major propaganda effort was made to present it as evidence of US friendship and goodwill. One of the chief problems to be overcome was the suspicion that the investment of US capital in overseas development projects was simply ‘dollar imperialism’. USIS officials were told to stress that the programme was one of self-help and not simply an American ‘hand-out’. Similarly, PAOs sought to present Point Four as a long-term investment in order to prevent the rise of unrealistic expectations and subsequent disillusionment. In order to counter accusations of ‘dollar imperialism’, the State Department prepared a list of themes for USIA, foremost amongst which was the idea that Point Four was designed to bolster the independence of the countries receiving it.71 News Review subsequently published an article titled ‘Aid Programs Lack Imperialism Threat’ in March 1952 in which Samuel Kopper, acting director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern Affairs, argued that US aid to the Middle East was not motivated by ‘any desire whatsoever to encroach upon the sovereignty of these nations’, and that American aid to the Middle East was ‘not being offered in a spirit of superiority or as any “nefarious scheme” to create American markets or spheres of influence’.72 UK development programmes were smaller in scale, but British propagandists did their utmost to bring them to the attention of the Middle Eastern public. Indeed, one can argue that the launch of Point Four stimulated British efforts in this field. It was no coincidence that as Point Four aid began to flow, the publicity strategy of the BMEO’s Development Division changed markedly. British officials had not previously sought to publicise the development work of the British Middle East Office (BMEO) but in 1951, information officers were asked to pay more attention to the BMEO’s contribution to regional economic and industrial development.73 There was a hint of bitterness in the Foreign Office’s observation that ‘Point IV, which was announced with excessive propaganda as a panacea for the Middle East, has failed to produce any result except an invasion by hosts of officials, many of whom are of indifferent quality.’74 Arguably, British publicity on aid and development themes was partially inspired by the desire to ensure that the Americans did not


receive all the credit. The American PAO in Cairo suspected a British campaign along these lines, noting in October 1954 that The fact that the British Information Service is taking advantage of the better atmosphere created by the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement to remind Middle Easterners of services rendered in the area makes less impression upon many Egyptians than their suspicion that the British are out to prove that the U.S. is a Johnny-come-lately in the field.75 There was a negative aspect to Western aid and development propaganda and it was most clearly manifested in efforts to discredit communist claims about the better living standards of those fortunate enough to live in the Soviet ‘worker’s paradise’. Stories about low pay, food shortages, the difficulties of obtaining medical supplies, even high rates of alcoholism within Soviet society were frequently the subjects of Western propaganda. Condemnation of Soviet manufacturing ability was common, with everything from Hungarian trains and Eastern bloc steel production, to the design of Russian refrigerators, subject to attack. News Review designed easily comprehensible graphics to illustrate the higher standards of living enjoyed by American workers, comparing, for example, the amount of time it took Russian and American workers to earn enough to buy certain basic foodstuffs. To earn enough to buy a kilogram of beef, for example, was said to take the average Soviet labourer some 257 minutes, as opposed to just 52 minutes for his American counterpart.76 The magazine also ran a regular cartoon strip based on the misfortunes of a comic character named ‘Little Ivan’ and his unfortunate experience of life behind the Iron Curtain. Some thought it a mistake to call attention to Soviet living standards in this way and several information officers expressed concern that ‘articles about conditions in Russia and Eastern Europe have little appeal’ and might even prove counterproductive. The British ambassador in Iraq argued that Stories of corrupt officials, inefficient public services, rural poverty and suppression of free speech make little impact in the Middle East. Even leading Iraqis sometimes say that the Iraqi agricultural worker might be better off under a Communist Government.77 Such concerns exposed an obstacle in the path of social development propaganda in the Middle East, one that was clearly expressed in 1947


by Colonel Wheeler, Britain’s information officer in Iran. ‘The propagation of social democracy in the Middle East’, argued Wheeler, ‘is extremely difficult principally because hardly anyone understands what it is and those who do, namely the educated upper classes, think it would be unsuitable for their countries and would in addition undermine their position.’78 Similar doubts were expressed in Egypt, where British officials pointed out that Lip service is paid to the principles of democracy, but, in fact, the feeling that might is right … is accepted as one of the foundations upon which the social and political structure of the country is based. … Not infrequently one hears the wish expressed by Egyptians of different classes for an enlightened dictator. It is admitted in private that Egypt is not ready for parliamentary government or a Western-type democratic regime.79 From Iraq, Stonehewer Bird was more confident, arguing that ‘ultimately the British ideal is the one most fitted for acceptance in the Middle East,’ but even he accepted that ‘inherently, it is an ideal very difficult to “put over” ’.80 The Foreign Office agreed that ‘there is no glamour in ideals of moderation, toleration, social progress and individual freedom’.81 Concerns about the rising tide of anti-British nationalism reinforced these doubts and, as the British information officer in Beirut concluded in 1952, as long as the Arabs regarded the West as their enemy, ‘the finest documents on British democracy and social progress cut no ice whatsoever’.82 American propagandists were equally pessimistic, David Newsom writing from Baghdad in March 1954 that I continue to feel a basic dissatisfaction with our effectiveness. We are continually searching for ways to reach the restless intelligentsia where so much of the ferment takes place in the Middle East today. Only occasionally do we seem to have brief flashes of success. Their widespread acceptance of Communist propagated ideas continues, basically because of their dissatisfaction with local conditions. We have not yet licked the problem of attacking these ideas without injecting ourselves into the local political scene.83

The campaign against neutralism Neutralism loomed large as a target for the West’s Cold War propagandists. The National Security Council (NSC) analysts argued that the


distinctions between communist and neutralist were ‘far less distinct than is popularly supposed’, being dependent upon the circumstances in which a country was asked to ‘stand up and be counted’.84 In the Middle East, since the Western nations were the status quo powers, neutralism worked to the advantage of the Soviet Union. Jefferson Caffery argued in 1954 that neutralism ‘fits perfectly into the Soviet Peace offensive’ and that Egyptian leaders were using neutralism as a ‘blackmail gambit’ against the West.85 His British counterpart, Ralph Stevenson, agreed, claiming that Egyptian neutralism between East and West is peculiar in that it is accompanied by a professed enmity towards the West. The … danger to which the RCC have exposed themselves is that the Egyptian public will draw the conclusion that neutralism involves friendship with the Soviet Union and its satellites. The present neutralist agitation is obviously admirable cover for pro-Russian and pro-Communist propaganda.86 By the time of the Bandung Conference in April 1955, the NSC had divided the countries of the Middle East into three categories. First, there were those countries where neutralism was not a significant force, but the NSC considered only Israel to fall into this category. A second group consisted of countries such as Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Iran, whose governments were committed to pro-Western policies, but where there was substantial public opposition. Third, there were countries such as Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, whose governments openly professed a desire to follow a neutralist foreign policy and who were undertaking active measures to hinder British and American policy.87 According to this analysis, there was not a single Arab State where neutralism was not regarded as an obstacle to Western policy. For British and American propagandists, communism and neutralism went hand in hand, with the latter held to be an evolving danger to the Western position in the region. Throughout the 1950s, therefore, they sought to discredit neutralism and to build up the idea of a Soviet threat. The shift in Soviet propaganda strategy in the aftermath of Stalin’s death, when the new Soviet leadership began to base their approach to the countries of the ‘developing world’ on protestations of friendship and the desire for peace, caused something akin to panic. In June 1955, Rockefeller convened a panel of American psychological warfare and international relations experts at Quantico, Virginia, to discuss the challenge presented by this change in tactics. The panel report recommended


a reinvigorated campaign to ‘capture the symbols that express man’s aspirations and thereby influence political behaviour’, those symbols including ‘peace, self-government, economic advancement, security, freedom and cultural progress’.88 British thinking was moving in a similar direction. In October 1955, Anthony Eden received a CIA analysis of Soviet policy, which declared that the ‘smiling friendliness’ of the new Soviet policy was intended to accomplish four main objectives: (a) (b) (c) (d)

blur the lines of division between East and West; promote neutralism; reduce the vigour of the Western Alliance; create a more effective setting for soporific propaganda.89

Eden’s advisers agreed that Soviet ‘peace’ propaganda was a ploy ‘intended primarily to mask an offensive against the Middle East’.90 Western propagandists had been seeking to counter the Soviet ‘peace campaign’ for some time and countless pamphlets, cartoons, newspaper and magazine articles and radio broadcasts had already been dedicated to the task. Perhaps the most repeated refrain was ‘deeds not words’, casting down a public challenge to the Soviets to back up ‘peace talk’ with concrete proposals and actions. Both British and American propagandists churned out a steady stream of articles with such titles as ‘Does Russia Really Want Peace?’ or ‘Change of Heart or Change of Tactics?’. Under the guidance of his psychological warfare advisors, Eisenhower used major speeches as part of the bid to capture the banner of ‘peace’ from the Soviets. ‘The Chance for Peace’, ‘Atoms for Peace’ and ‘Open Skies’ were all intended to emphasise the West’s genuine desire for peace while casting the Soviets in the role of aggressors. One of the key problems in the battle against neutralism was the need to make a forceful case against a foreign government’s pursuit of a particular policy while avoiding the impression that Britain or the US was interfering in that country’s internal affairs. This solution to this dilemma was sought in the production of material purporting to demonstrate that neutralism endangered the independence of any country that adopted it. A favourite technique was the use of historical analogies. In the summer of 1953, the Information Policy Department (IPD) expressed satisfaction at the impact of one pamphlet, ‘The Dangers of Neutrality’, which drew upon the lessons of Belgian neutrality in 1914 and 1940. It argued that ‘No aggressor who is prepared to precipitate a world war – whether it be the Kaiser or Hitler or, as many fear


for the future, the Soviet Union – will show any respect for any neutral who stands in his line of march’: Belgium had since signed up to NATO and here was the pamphlet’s lesson for its Arab readers. ‘It is particularly unfortunate,’ the leaflet stated, that neutralism should have such strong appeal at the moment in some of the Middle Eastern countries. Because the area – weak militarily, of vital importance strategically and rich in an important raw material such as oil – would be an irresistible temptation to the aggressor … The neutral state … is a pathway along which the aggressor can march. The neutral is the weak point in the defences of the free world and the weak point is always attacked first.91 If nothing else, this pamphlet succeeded in provoking a Soviet counterattack and Moscow Radio accused it of ‘distorting historical facts’ and attempting to ‘mislead the reader into believing that small nations cannot pursue an independent policy’. Its author was rather pleased at all the attention, and information officers in Beirut interpreted Soviet petulance as proof that the anti-neutralism campaign, which had by now mobilised such intellectual heavyweights as Bertrand Russell,92 was having a discernible impact on public opinion.93 A standard USIA operating procedure was to inspire and report antineutralist statements by Arab political and religious leaders. Thus, when Ahmad Hussein, the Egyptian ambassador to the US, stated that ‘Egypt cannot stand alone’ and the former Egyptian Prime Minister, Ali Maher argued that ‘It is impossible for Egypt to be neutral either politically or militarily’, both statements were seized upon by USIA.94 Even better was a leaked Egyptian Government memorandum of September 1954, which stated that there was ‘no doubt that Egypt today stands in every respect with the West’.95 These and many other examples of pro-Western or anti-neutralist statements were picked up and circulated across the Middle East. The theme of ‘Soviet imperialism’ was one of the most important planks in the West’s Cold War propaganda platform. Not only was it seen as a potent message in its own right, it was used to draw the sting from Arab hostility towards the European colonial powers. The image of the Soviet Union as an expanding empire, denying sovereignty and independence to the small nations it had swallowed up, became a staple feature of the anti-Soviet campaign. Indeed, the second of USIA’s ‘Global Themes’ was specifically defined as the exposure of ‘the Communist Party or movement as a foreign force directed from Moscow … for


expansionist purposes – Red colonialism’. In keeping with this brief, USIA sought to promote the idea that ‘local communist parties are not in fact indigenous parties but adjuncts of an international conspiracy, and the instruments of Soviet colonial expansion and control’.96 In October 1954, the Operations Co-ordinating Board (OCB) approved a new USIA campaign to highlight the themes of ‘international communist conspiracy’ and ‘Soviet imperialism’ in the Middle East. USIA was to co-ordinate the production of ‘materials demonstrating the ties of local communist and front organizations with Moscow, and the techniques employed by the communist movement in promoting the selfish interests of the USSR’.97 For USIA, the warning against ‘Red Colonialism’ remained a top priority and a collection of reference papers and articles was produced for distribution to all overseas posts. One such collection, ‘Words and Deeds: Soviet Promise and Soviet Reality’, was dominated by the theme of Soviet territorial expansion. One article, entitled ‘Soviet Imperialism: World’s Champion Aggressor and the Biggest Single Threat to Peace’, concluded that ‘the self-acclaimed “leader of the peace loving camp” has … been guilty, on a gigantic scale, of aggression beyond its own borders’.98 In 1955, USIA distributed a reference paper outlining the nature and extent of Soviet and Chinese expansion in the 15 years since the outbreak of the Second World War. This document was converted by the Near East Regional Service Center (NERSC) Beirut into a feature article in News Review, which, under the headline, ‘Freedom Versus “Colonialism” ’, pointed out that ‘Soviet and Chinese communists have taken over the rule of 740,316,000 people’.99 As the delegates at the Bandung conference gathered to condemn colonialism, the West sought to shift the focus of that condemnation away from themselves and on to the Communist bloc.100 Condemnations of Soviet imperialism featured consistently in News Review, with supportive Arab and Asian figures regularly quoted as examples of ‘independent’ and ‘objective’ comment. Articles appeared in which the Egyptian ambassador to Pakistan denounced the Soviet bloc as ‘the worst kind of imperialism’101 and a former Iraqi Prime Minister described a ‘new colonialism’ in which communists ruled over ‘subject races in Asia and Eastern Europe on a much larger scale than [the] colonial powers’.102 British propagandists had been hammering away at identical themes since the 1940s. In 1946, Wheeler suggested from Iran that A useful talking point in repudiating charges of Imperialism is that the so-called autonomous Republics of the Soviet Union are, in fact,


far less independent than the British Dominions who have complete control over their security, economy and foreign affairs.103 The Ikhwan al Hurriya published its own series of articles on Soviet ‘Imperialism’ in the late 1940s, arguing that ‘it is surely obvious that Russia is the most aggressively imperialist power in the world today’, and contrasting the Soviets with a British government that had ‘voluntarily given independence to nearly a fifth of the inhabitants of the globe’.104 IRD was prolific in its output on the theme of Soviet imperialism. Articles such as ‘Khruschchev the Colonialist’ (translated into Arabic by the Regional Information Office (RIO) Beirut in January 1956) and ‘Soviet Expansion’ (offered for use among Arab communities in Israel) drove home the message that the Soviets thirsted after imperial aggrandisement. A commercial publication in the Background Books series, How did the Satellites Happen? explained the process by which communism had come to dominate the ‘captive states’ of Eastern Europe. IRD was especially keen to demonstrate the similarities between Tsarist imperialism and the foreign policy of the present Soviet rulers. An article entitled ‘Does Peter the Great Still Live?’ appeared in Al Aalam105, and RIO Beirut translated and distributed an IRD piece, arguing that ‘Czarist absolutism [was] mild by Kremlin standards’.106

A spiritual wall? Religious propaganda and the Cold War Underpinning American propaganda was the belief that the West represented an enlightened moral force. The conceptualisation of the Cold War as a manifestation of the battle between ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ was reflected in numerous speeches by leading statesmen and Eisenhower’s major speeches during his first term in office were calculated to highlight the moral dimension of the conflict. In April 1954, he spoke of the spiritual strength of the American nation in the face of ‘the great threat imposed upon us by aggressive Communism – the atheistic doctrine that believes in fatalism as against our conception of the dignity of man’.107 Moral and religious rhetoric thus played an important part in American Cold War propaganda throughout the world, and the Middle East, birthplace of three of the world’s great faiths, was no exception. In 1951, the State Department drew up a set of guidelines for religious propaganda, which was to shape much subsequent output in the Middle East. The key objectives were: (a) To increase understanding abroad of the historic and continuing influence of moral and spiritual forces in American life;


(b) To promote on the basis of the common elements in our faiths, mutual respect and understanding with all peoples who cherish like ethical and spiritual values; (c) To enlist the cooperation of all peoples in the defense of moral and spiritual freedom against the threat of Communist totalitarianism.108 In 1952, the State Department created a ‘Working Group on Special Materials for Arab and Other Moslem Countries’, charged with the task of ‘developing mutual understanding between the Arabs and the people of the USA’.109 As Huntington Damon explained, We are trying to foster the concept among Arabs that the United States is also interested in them as individuals and equals about whom we wish to be better informed and with whom we wish to establish better personal relationships and more complete understanding.110 This committee seized upon religious propaganda as a means of strengthening the sense of mutual interest between Arabs and Americans, anticipating the Jackson Report’s conclusion that overseas propaganda ‘should speak in terms of the deeper spiritual values uniting this nation with the rest of the world’.111 It was for this reason that Jefferson Caffery called attention to an Egyptian Minister’s declaration that both ‘Islam and Christianity are religions which form good citizens’,112 and USIA’s Arabic media gave heavy play to one American academic’s assertion that ‘Islam and American democracy [were] fully compatible in mutual toleration and respect’.113 The group produced an ‘Operations Plan’ later adopted by USIA. It suggested that ‘the building of the Washington Mosque and Cultural Center offers a news peg for a … propaganda program built around Moslem activity in the United States’. Such themes were said to offer ‘an opportunity for demonstrating the respect and genuine interest which the United States, as a Government, and the Americans, as a people, have for the culture of the peoples of the Moslem world’.114 By June 1952, Damon was able to report that ‘All media are developing special features which will be issued from time to time until the dedication of the Mosque which is expected to take place sometime in 1953.’115 The single most successful publicity coup of this kind was the ‘Mecca Airlift’ of August 1952 by which 3763 Moslem pilgrims, stranded in Beirut, were flown by US Air Force planes to Saudi Arabia. USIS officials contributed to the organisation of the operation and were instrumental in publicising the event. State Department guidance was issued within


24 hours of the airlift getting underway, informing USIS posts that the operation ‘will provide maximum psychological advantages if local Moslem organs allowed perform job of publicising on own to greatest extent possible’.116 Even so, later reports indicated that within a fortnight of the airlift, USIS posts ‘had distributed among Muslim peoples in 28 countries of the Mediterranean and Near East area 194,000 copies in English, Turkish and Arabic of a pamphlet telling the story of this “magic carpet” ’.117 Propaganda of this kind continued to play a part in US psychological operations and in 1957 the OCB created its own working group charged with finding ways of improving relations between America and the Islamic world. Like its International Information Administration (IIA) predecessor, the OCB group based its recommendations on the belief that Islam and Christianity have a common spiritual base in the belief that a divine power governs and directs human life and aspirations while communism is purely atheistic materialism and is hostile to all revealed religion.118 British propagandists were less active in this field, although material stressing the bonds between Britain and the Muslim world appeared from time to time. In 1950, the Ikhwan al Hurriya informed its members that In England we have a long history of contact with the Moslem world. Writers like Burton and Doughty, T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, to name only a few, have kept us familiar with the character and customs of Islam. As a creed and a code it has always had attractions for a particular and numerous type of Englishman.119 On the whole, British propagandists made fewer efforts to promote the idea of common Western and Islamic values, preferring to pursue the task of exposing the contradictions between Islam and communism. Communism, it was argued, was anathema to true followers of the Islamic faith and Muslim societies aware of this fact would form a ‘spiritual wall’ against communism. By no means was everyone convinced by the ‘Islamic bulwark’ thesis, however. In March 1946, British officials in Cairo claimed that communists had penetrated the Muslim Brotherhood and that the Soviets were actively propagating the idea that communism was sympathetic towards Islam.120 From Beirut, Terence Shone questioned whether the supposed incompatibility of Islam and communism could be relied upon ‘to prevent ideas associated … with “communism”


and Soviet Russia from spreading in Arab countries’.121 These doubts were echoed by Stonehewer Bird, who believed that, in Iraq, ‘the hold of Islam is weakening … [and] could not … be counted upon to do more than slow up the organisation of a Communist State, were the Communists to succeed in gaining control of the centres of power by the conversion to communism of the educated class’.122 American propagandists were inclined to agree. Philip Ireland argued that the Soviet attitude towards Islam had been so cleverly presented that ‘in many areas, Islam can no longer be counted upon as a bulwark against the doctrines of Soviet Russia’.123 Concerns about the wisdom of relying upon Islam to prevent the spread of communism grew during the 1950s, as fears about the inadequacy of the Islamic ‘spiritual wall’ became commonplace within British intelligence circles. A JIC report prepared in 1954 concluded that While the Moslem faith appears superficially to be an effective barrier to Communism, we consider that its importance as a stabilising factor should not be over-rated. … Where modern civilization has broken into Moslem strongholds, e.g. through the exploitation of oil resources, the Moslem faith seems powerless to prevent a rapid demoralisation in the face of materialism.124 Nevertheless, Western propagandists continued to deploy religious themes as part of their anti-communist campaigns. Ralph Murray explained the British attitude in November 1949. ‘It is broadly true’, he accepted, that the social philosophy of Islam itself is too generalised and too archaic either to contain any reassurance for the future, or to act as a stimulus in the development of modern social reform. It is nevertheless true, we think, that as a religion, it still contains and teaches a slogan of personal liberty which finds some response deep in the mind of every Moslem Arab. … It is this essence of personal integrity, engrained in the highly individualistic Arab, which provides the basis for our critique of Communism in terms of Islam.125 Thus encouraged, British propagandists continued to frame their anticommunist material in religious terms. Between 1948 and 1951, religious propaganda formed a regular part of the Ikhwan’s weekly bulletins. In April 1948, the bulletin called the attention of Ikhwan members to the


recent decision of the Interpretation Committee at Cairo’s Al Azhar University that ‘Islam respects ownership and admits no communism.’ A second article made the point that in communist states, ‘religion is constantly denounced as superstition and “a survival of bourgeois mentality” ’.126 In the early 1950s, the Ikhwan developed an increasingly tough line on communism and Islam. One article presented a catalogue of Soviet abuses including ‘forced transportation [of] … entire districts involving thousands of men, women and children’, ‘forced labour’, ‘imprisonment’ and ‘even the firing squad’. The choice for the Muslim world was clear: It can either establish stable and friendly relations with all those countries which share with them the essential truths of spirituality and join with these countries in a new effort to build up a peaceful and prosperous life for all; or it can listen to the demagogues and charlatans, many of them in Russian pay, who would drive the Orient into a holocaust and lay its bleeding and shattered body beneath the jackboot of Soviet imperialism.127 Drawing attention to the plight of Muslims within the Soviet Union was a favourite IRD tactic and a 1954 report from Cairo concluded that ‘material on the persecution of Moslems [was] the most useful of all’.128 An early IRD paper entitled, ‘Communism and Islam’, was issued in 1949 with the aim of highlighting Soviet Islamophobia. ‘Communism’, it announced, is a challenge to the great heritage of Islam – to the conviction that the individual has an inherent value and that order and liberty are reconciled within the moral law. Above all it is a direct challenge to belief in God, free will, immortality. … Islam disappears into the grey and pitiless materialism of the Stalinist dictatorship.129 American publications became important vehicles for propaganda of this kind. From its earliest editions, News Review, carried reports that ‘Stalin would ban [the] Koran’130 and that Soviet leaders hoped ‘to discredit Islam’ and ‘liquidate’ Muslim leaders.131 By the mid-1950s, hardly a week went by without a piece of this kind. The magazine was especially keen on shocking stories about the ‘elimination of religious leaders’ and the ‘suppression of religious teachings and Moslem culture’.132


The ultimate communist objective, it was argued, was to ‘destroy Islamic faith and influence in Soviet territory’.133 Al Sadaka also published numerous articles along these lines, producing features such as ‘Al Azhar Combats Subversive Doctrines’, which explained how the Islamic university in Cairo was ‘fighting against Communism and atheism in all its forms’.134 Western propagandists specifically targeted Al Azhar. After the Egyptian revolution in 1952, the politicisation of the university administration by the Free Officers allowed USIS officers to establish links to university staff and students. In conversation with the US Embassy’s Cultural Officer in March 1953, the Rector of Al Azhar discussed ‘Islam’s rejection of Communism’ and revealed that ‘more than 300 preachers have recently been appointed … to go out to various mosques and give addresses: (a) against subversive doctrines, especially communism; (b) in support of Egypt’s new regime.’ Embassy staff subsequently reported that ‘Al Azhar seems worthy of careful consideration for increased, but slow and tactful, USIE labors.’135 What became known as ‘Project Al Azhar’ focused on USIS provision of English-language tuition to selected students and staff and discreet anti-communist co-operation with the university authorities. At the end of 1955, USIS Cairo reported that ‘for the third successive year English classes have … been set up by USIS for hand-picked students and young teachers’. ‘Most of these young religious leaders,’ they continued, ‘are now becoming members of the USIS library and they regularly carry away with them copies of the USIS weekly Al Sadaka and other USIS publications.’ A number of ‘graduates’ from these classes were subsequently channelled into the educational exchange programme.136 British propagandists engaged in a number of covert projects to use Islamic institutions as vehicles for anti-communist themes and began work to penetrate Al Azhar even earlier than their USIS counterparts. IRD began cooperating with information officers in Cairo in a bid to mobilise Al Azhar behind the anti-communist cause in 1950 when Embassy officials reported that It is … essential that the sheikhs of Al-Azhar should fully appreciate the atheistic basis of Marxism and the importance of combating its spread. In particular we should strive to ensure that every student leaves this University a resolute opponent of Communism. … To this end we might make use of the University magazines in which our anti-Communist material could appropriately be inserted, possibly through the medium of the Ministry of Wakfs.137


Officials in Cairo observed that ‘the Friday Sermon has always been recognized as one of the most important ways of spreading propaganda in the Moslem world’ and reported that We have now devised a scheme for ensuring that anti-Communist themes are adequately dealt with. A series of sermons has been written [and] the Director of the Special (anti-Communist) Section has gladly undertaken to pass them on (again as his Section’s own work) to the Ministry of Wakfs for distribution to the Imams.138 This kind of operation was not limited to Egypt, and there is evidence that officials in Lebanon and Iraq were working along similar lines. The Baghdad Embassy reported in 1953 that ‘with the Government’s connivance, imams and mullahs could be provided with talking points for use in their sermons’.139 Information staff announced that they were working on methods to facilitate dissemination of anti-communist material within the Shia communities of Iraq and received an enthusiastic response from IRD. ‘We should like to know more about your “pilot” scheme for the covert dissemination of propaganda in the Shia holy places since it may suggest ideas that could be used outside Iraq,’ IRD replied, before asking whether the project was connected to its own proposal that ‘Friday Sermons prepared in Beirut’ be made available to ‘certain Shia divines?’140

Weaving nets to catch the wind: Arab resistance to Cold War propaganda In 1946, Ivone Kirkpatrick circulated a publicity directive in which he argued that ‘Our problems in the Middle East are not created by Russia. They existed before the war and would afflict us even if Russia disappeared from the scene.’141 Fixated by the task of awakening the Middle East to Cold War threats, however, Western propagandists tended to ignore Kirkpatrick’s analysis, only to be repeatedly frustrated by Arab reluctance to regard the Cold War struggle as a particularly pressing concern. As the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt was told, none too politely by Nokrashy Pasha in June 1947, ‘Egypt does not sympathise with Communism, but if America supports Britain in the Security Council, and Russia supports Egypt, the Egyptians will learn by themselves which is the friendly nation.’142 American officials in Cairo, reporting the Egyptian response to Truman’s ‘Campaign of Truth’ in 1950, took note


of an Al Ahram editorial which stated bluntly that We know that communism idolises oppression and is a stigma on the human brow, but, even if we did fail to see the truth and needed American guidance to discover it, no effort on the Americans’ part will have any positive results so long as the big Western powers deny us any of our rights or stand in the way of our national aspirations.143 British officials were also aware of the tendency of Arab audiences to dismiss anti-communist propaganda. Arthur Kellas wrote to IRD from Baghdad in July 1955, making the point that In our experience, it is barely possible to interest the politically conscious Iraqi in the Communist system at all. Insofar as he is interested in international affairs, he is concerned about Israel and “imperialism” of the British, French and American varieties, of which, he can at least persuade himself that he has some experience.144 RIO Beirut’s response to this observation was that if it was indeed the case that ‘politically-conscious Arabs are far more concerned with Israel and Western Imperialism than with any threat of Soviet Imperialism’ then it was ‘surely part of our duties to see that they are warned’.145 Efforts were made to denounce the Soviet Union in terms specifically tailored for Arab audiences. In 1949, IRD had felt it necessary to warn against giving publicity to Soviet anti-Semitism, observing that Some degree of anti-Jewish feeling [is] almost universal in countries where the Jews are present in any numbers. This may be deplorable, but there are sound reasons for it – the soundest being that, as Dickens said, ‘they do get on so’. However specifically the stuff is aimed at the Jews, it is bound to hit a lot of Gentiles as well; and I feel that they will say, if only to themselves: ‘There’s one thing to be said for these Communists; they keep the Jews in their place’.146 Conversely, the suggestion that there was a pro-Israeli bias to Soviet policy was employed from time to time. News Review reminded its readers in 1952 that At the time of the Arab–Israeli War, the Soviet press favoured the Israelis and in some instances went so far as to brand the Arabs the aggressors. This is not mentioned in present-day Soviet propaganda


which has now completely changed its tactics in an attempt to win over the Moslems of the Middle East.147 IRD made its own contribution to this campaign, inspiring articles such as ‘Communists in Syria Betray Palestine’ and ‘Is Russia Helping Israel?’ in the Syrian press in the mid-1950s.148 The problem remained that the West was far more vulnerable to this kind of propaganda than the Soviet Union and most Western propagandists, as we shall see in Chapter 5, preferred to steer clear of the issue whenever possible. For the vast majority of Middle Easterners, anti-communism never became a potent rallying cry. Although some of the West’s Cold War themes undoubtedly struck a chord with certain political, social and religious groups, the most that can be said of the campaign as a whole was that it tended to reinforce the impression that communism was not relevant to the majority of Middle Easterners. Western propagandists failed to find a consistent means of binding anti-communist themes to the causes that had come to dominate Arab political culture by the mid-1950s. Arab nationalists never came to regard anti-communism as a relevant aspect of their bid to eliminate colonial influence in the Middle East, while the continuing state of hostility between Israel and the Arab nations was crucial in preventing the notion of an imminent Soviet threat to the region from taking hold. The anti-colonial sentiments of Arab nationalist leaders and the growing ferocity of the clashes on the Gaza frontier were far more pressing concerns than the Western fixation with the Soviet Union. As Nasser himself told John Foster Dulles in May 1953, I can’t see myself waking up one morning to find that the Soviet Union is our enemy. We don’t know them. They are thousands of miles away from us. … I would become the laughing stock of my people if I told them they now had a new enemy, many thousands of miles away, and that they must forget about the British enemy occupying their territory.149

5 ‘The Less Said the Better’ Western Propaganda and the Arab–Israeli Dispute, 1945–56

Mr Warner’s comment that ‘Palestine bedevils our entire programme’ requires no comment. If Palestine ‘bedevils’ British programs, I am at a loss to find a word for what it does to the American counterparts of these programs. Gillespie Evans, Public Affairs Officer (USIS Cairo), 8 June 1948 I cannot avoid the fear that the Israeli issue is in a fair way to losing us the Middle East. It stands in the way of co-operation between the Arab countries and the West in matters of defence and it poisons our relations to such an extent that we are impotent to counter the Communist advance. Evelyn Shuckburgh, Foreign Office Assistant Under-Secretary, 15 December 1954 This chapter examines how Western propagandists faced up to the challenge of the Arab–Israel dispute, perhaps the single greatest political obstacle to the successful pursuit of British and American psychological objectives in the Middle East. From the post-war crisis in Palestine through to the efforts to promote an Arab–Israeli peace settlement in the mid-1950s, the pernicious influence of the conflict was felt in almost every branch of the information and cultural diplomacy programmes in the region. The chapter first examines British and American propaganda during the 1945–49 period of crisis and war in Palestine, highlighting the paralysis that afflicted the State Department’s information programme and exposing the very different approach taken by British propagandists. 128

The Arab–Israeli Dispute, 1945–56 129

A second section investigates Western propaganda in the early 1950s, the period in which it became apparent that Israel had established itself as an enduring feature of the political landscape. In particular, it examines the rhetorical strategies of silencing, distancing and neutralism that Anglo-American propagandists sought to apply to politically sensitive issues. A third section explores Western propaganda in support of attempts to engineer a long-term Arab–Israeli settlement, focusing upon the difficulties involved in forging a joint Anglo-American approach to the questions of publicity that arose in relation to the ‘Alpha’ peace plan. The propaganda policies of the Western powers did not always follow the same course (and Britain remained far more likely to resort to overtly anti-Jewish tactics), but, in the final analysis, it cannot be said that either British or American propagandists made progress in repairing the damage to Western prestige that had been inflicted in the 1940s.

Propaganda and the Palestine question, 1945–49 There is insufficient space here to provide a detailed survey of the vast literature dealing with Western policy towards the post-war crisis of the Palestine mandate and the first decade of the Arab–Israel dispute.1 Similarly, the following analysis of British and American propaganda in the early years of the Arab–Israel dispute must necessarily be a selective one. In particular, I have chosen to focus upon the issues that best illustrate the limited scope for Western propagandists on the Israel–Palestine question. Two major themes dominate this section. The first is the profound failure of the State Department’s propaganda agencies to confront the informational challenge with which they were presented by Truman’s policies towards the question of Palestine. The second is the efforts made by British propagandists to distance themselves both from the policies of the United States Government and from the Zionist movement itself in order to maintain their own reputation and popularity in the Arab world. The collapse of Western prestige in the Arab world after 1945 was astonishingly rapid, and the Palestine issue was at the centre of this crisis. A report compiled by United States Information Services (USIS) staff in Baghdad in July 1946 illustrates the extent of the American fall from grace. The ‘deep and virtually inerradicable love and admiration’ that, it was claimed, ordinary Iraqis had for the United States, had been shaken by events in post-war Palestine. ‘America’s apparent support of the Zionist cause in Palestine’, it was argued, ‘has severely jolted American–Iraqi relations.’2 Furthermore, the morale-sapping reorganisation which


imposed major funding and personnel cuts on the overseas information programme, left the new State Department in no position to address the chief reason for this unprecedented collapse of American prestige. The situation was exacerbated by the absence of policy direction and guidance from Washington to information officers in the field. As Pinckney Tuck complained to the State Department from Cairo in early 1946, OIC has received no background information for dissemination in the local press. … Our position is not understood and, as far as I can see, we are doing little to explain it. … OIC directives strictly prevent it from preparing or distributing commentaries of its own on the Palestine problem. … In my opinion it is quite paradoxical for the Government of the United States to spend $150,000 on publicity in Egypt and at the same time to avoid touching on the subject which more than any other gives rise to friction in American–Egyptian relations.3 Tuck was forced to wait for almost two months before a distinctly unhelpful response from Washington stated simply that The Department is aware of the consequences of official silence on Arab public opinion. Nevertheless … the dangers of a statement far outweigh any doubtful gains likely from an explanation which by force of circumstances must be incomplete and therefore unconvincing to the Arabs and provocative to important elements at home.4 This was little more than obfuscation on the part of a rudderless State Department. When the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry produced its report on 20 April 1946, its conclusions intensified anti-Americanism in the Arab world and did little to clarify American policy for the benefit of those charged with explaining it in the Middle East. Worse, Truman’s public response, in which he stated that ‘I am very happy that the request which I made for the immediate admission of 100,000 Jews into Palestine has been unanimously endorsed’, and welcomed ‘the further development of the Jewish National Home’,5 provoked fresh anger across the Arab world. In contrast, British propaganda in Egypt portrayed the report as having rejected ‘the Zionist dream of a Jewish state in Palestine’.6 The episode provides an early indication of the gap between professional American diplomats and the White House. Just weeks after Truman’s enthusiastic response, Philip Ireland, First Secretary of the


American Legation in Cairo, recorded that ‘this Report … is universally rejected by all Arabic-speaking peoples’, and noted that ‘while Mr. Roosevelt was regarded as a great personality throughout the Middle East … Mr. Truman, on the contrary, is now thought of as a man of small stature, because … he has allowed internal politics to warp his judgment’.7 In October 1947, Anglo-American discussions on Palestine collapsed when State Department diplomats told Foreign Office staff ‘with obvious embarrassment’ that ‘they were unable to talk on Palestine with the same frankness as on other subjects since they disapproved of the policy of their own government in this matter’.8 ‘The State Department is already converted but impotent’, the Foreign Office concluded, ‘With a presidential election next year, we cannot hope for consistency or logic over Palestine. … The most we can hope for is that the U.S.A. will help us to pick up the pieces.’9 Caught between a presidential policy with which many of its staff did not agree and a chronic awareness of the state of its own finances, the Office of Information and Cultural Affairs (OIC) was close to paralysis. Even routine cultural activities in Palestine were deemed inadvisable on the grounds that although ‘[t]he Jewish group in Palestine … would be more than willing to take advantage of any opportunity for cultural cooperation’, the Arab community, being ‘neither familiar with the United States nor anxious for cultural cooperation’ would refuse, leaving the US in a position where any offers it made in the cultural field would ‘all be accepted by one side and not by the other with the result that it would appear that we were favoring one side and not the other’.10 The best practical advice that OIC could offer was that ‘In general partisan statements from Arab or Zionist sources in this country should be avoided.’11 The UN’s approval of partition in November 1947 deepened the problems confronting American propagandists in the Arab world. From Baghdad, Armin Meyer reported that Arab resentment at America’s role in the partition vote had produced a ‘flood of Arab public opinion against the United States’ against which it was virtually impossible to swim. Set against this tide of hostility, the official guidance sent out to USIS staff in the Arab world, informing them that they should persuade the Arabs that US policy was characterised by its ‘reliability, consistency and seriousness’ was almost laughable. Meyer sought to impress upon the authorities back in Washington the fact that for the Arab peoples of the Middle East who ‘had depended upon the United States as the one world power which would abide by principles of right and justice’, the Palestine affair was an experience of ‘shattering disillusionment’.12


In these circumstances, there was little that cash-starved USIS posts could do to cushion the impact of Truman’s statements and policies. ‘It is palpably impossible to “sell” partition to the Arabic press’, reported USIS staff in Cairo, noting that the Section could do little more than attempt to … avert growth of a movement to ‘clamp down on’ USIS, as the mouthpiece for a country which had adopted a policy felt by the Arabs to be unfriendly, inimicable, and dangerous to their own national aspirations.13 The period, one United States Information and Educational Exchange Program (USIE) official later recalled, was a time of ‘dark days for our information program, and no propaganda could overcome Arab emotions. … During the Palestine crisis our objective was to “hold the fort” until better days.’14 British information officers did not suffer from the same paralysis as their American counterparts, although the speed with which the crisis in Palestine developed did mean that they were initially unprepared for the propaganda war in which they found themselves. As the Jerusalem Public Information Office’s annual report for 1946 made clear, ‘the main cause of our difficulty … has been the absence of a policy. … Not until the closing months of the year … has our work seemed to have a purpose’.15 The speed with which the crisis developed, the absence of political guidance from above, and what the authorities in Palestine described as Jewish ‘political warfare tactics’, combined to leave British propagandists fighting a series of defensive campaigns and, as staff in Jerusalem saw it, ‘usually losing, since the first story always gets the press’. The situation in 1946 was gloomily described as a ‘one-sided political warfare’.16 C.J. Morris has questioned the claim that the problem for the British propagandists in Palestine was the absence of policy guidance, contending that British policy was ‘never haphazard, undefined or even reactive’.17 This is a difficult thesis to sustain in the face of the evidence for 1946 (although it is better suited to the situation in 1947). British information staff in Jerusalem noted that the governing authorities in Palestine had ‘gradually became more accustomed to look upon the Information Service as being an integral part of the administration, and not something to be thought of when everything else was done’.18 They also benefited from the clarification of government policy and welcomed developments towards the end of 1946 when ‘it became apparent that our task was to create an atmosphere in which both Arabs and


Jews would agree to come together to the postponed Round Table Conference’.19 This, as Morris points out, may well have been ‘seeking to achieve the impossible’20 but it did set the propaganda agenda until Bevin’s decision to withdraw from Palestine was announced in October 1947. Thereafter, the nature and objectives of British propaganda changed markedly. As official Foreign Office information guidance to Middle Eastern posts put it, We are in general fairly satisfied with the effect of our undertaking to withdraw. This has allowed us at last to give up the unenviable position of protagonist. … We may at some stage have the opportunity of using our good offices to bring Arabs and Jews together, but the moment for this has not yet come, and we must be extremely careful not to become prematurely associated with any compromise proposal.21 No longer constrained by the responsibility for maintaining stability and security in Palestine, British propagandists adopted an aggressive set of partisan themes and tactics designed to appeal to Arab opinion. As the crisis in Palestine escalated in the last months of 1947, the British attempted to salvage their reputation in the Arab world with a series of anti-American and anti-Jewish campaigns. As early as 1946, USIS staff in Baghdad had reported that recent antiAmerican developments (which included discrimination against the United Press (UP) and USIS news services, and the curtailment of several educational exchange projects) were ‘possibly not without British encouragement’22 and USIS staff in Lebanon observed that In the current Anglo-American rivalry for unpopularity among the Arabs, the United States was way out ahead. As each new report arrived from Washington of plans for expediting 100,000 refugees to the Holy Land, the British improved, if possible, their chaste and non-committal policy. … It would seem to be a safe prediction that when the first of the 100,000 Zionists begin to disembark at Haifa, there will be no doubt left in the Lebanese mind as to which of the two English speaking powers should bear the major responsibility.23 From Syria, the US Charge d’Affaires accused Reuters of taking pains ‘to emphasize American responsibility’ for the Anglo-American Report on Palestine, concluding that the evaporation of the ‘reservoir of goodwill’ had been hastened by ‘the efforts of the British to foist responsibility … upon the United States’.24


British-controlled media outlets continued to pour forth a stream of anti-American messages. In March 1948, Sharq al-Adna spoke of the ‘sheer resentment’ produced by American policies, suggesting that ‘Truman’s only concern was to be reelected’25 and implying that the White House was motivated by the presence in the US of ‘four hundred thousand Jews, whose votes will be needed in next November’s Presidential elections’.26 In Egypt, the Ikhwan al Hurriya distributed large quantities of reading material making it clear that America was very largely responsible for the original decision of the General Assembly of the U.N.O. in favour of partition, and how much wiser she would have been to have listened to the advice of Great Britain, who was in a far better position to know the facts, and to have realised from the beginning that partition could be no solution to the Palestine problem. … There have been two factors in the defence of Palestine. One is of course the unity of the Arab nations on the question, and the other undoubtedly has been Great Britain’s attitude towards partition.27 Sharq al-Adna was even prepared to recycle Soviet propaganda, quoting an editorial in Pravda, which condemned US attitudes towards the Palestine question as ‘an alarming policy of swindling’.28, 29 The State Department eventually reacted in February 1948, instructing its USIS posts to ‘Avoid comment indicating Britain is deriving benefit in the Near East from U.S. embarrassment with the Arab states or that any difference of objective interests exists between Great Britain and the US in the Near East.’30 Truman’s recognition of Israel in May 1948 provided British propagandists with an irresistible opportunity. Ikhwan bulletins made the point that ‘The precipitate American recognition “de facto” of the Zionist government has met with almost universal disapproval in England’,31 and Houstoun-Boswall, the senior British diplomat in Lebanon, believed that If British recognition is withheld I am confident that His Majesty’s Government will recover much of the ground which they lost in recent years and that many of our difficulties in the Middle East will probably disappear.32 There was some evidence to support this assertion. Staff in Beirut noted that in the weeks after American recognition of Israel ‘the general tone of the press became bitterly anti-American … and full of praise for


Britain’.33 The Middle East Information Department (MEID) staff noted that Truman’s ‘precipitate recognition’ of Israel ‘caused a wave of revulsion against American policy [while] H.M.G.’s non-recognition of the Jewish State … caused British prestige to soar in the Arab world’.34 Anti-Zionist themes had been present in British propaganda to the Arab world for some time, and attitudes bordering on the anti-Semitic found expression at high levels within the policy-making establishment. Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East Office (BMEO), provided one of the clearest indications of this tendency, writing in May 1948 that ‘It is difficult to see that Zionist policy is anything else than unashamed aggression carried out by methods of deceit and brutality not unworthy of Hitler’ and issuing warnings about ‘what a Jew will do to gain his purpose’.35 From Beirut, Houstoun-Boswall argued that It is obviously not in our interest to see a Jewish State established in Palestine. … Therefore we should make up our minds on which side our own bread (and nobody else’s) is buttered. We need the Arabs and they need us – though most of them are too timid to say so openly. It seems to me then to be essential to ensure that the Arabs, particularly King Abdullah … should not be allowed to land themselves in any further trouble. … We will have then to make quite sure by all means at our disposal that he does not suffer a military defeat at the hands of the Jews.36 British anti-Zionism was clearly apparent in publicity dealing with Jewish immigration. In December 1947, Ikhwan bulletins stressed that ‘there would be no relaxation in the measures to prevent illegal immigration of Jews’ and drew attention to the interception last week by four destroyers and two cruisers of the British Navy of two large boats containing the biggest number of illegal immigrants yet stopped. These two boats contained no fewer than 13,000 Jews, who have all now been landed in Cyprus and thus prevented from going to Palestine, where they would have constituted an appreciable reinforcement to Jewish military strength.37 The Foreign Office even sought to associate Jewish immigration with the communist penetration, claiming that the illegal immigrants are now coming almost entirely from countries in the Russian orbit and it is safe to assume that only those well


indoctrinated in the Communist faith are allowed to go. Illegal immigration has thus become part of the Russian plan and their support of partition is another example of their hope to use Palestine as a springboard for their influence in the Middle East.38 Sharq al-Adna repeated the slur that Zionism was a ‘secret ally of Communism’ and reported that Jewish immigration to Palestine is being carried out with the knowledge of the Soviet Union and its satellites. … According to reliable information, we can positively say that Russia has a plan aiming at permitting one and a half million Communist agents to infiltrate into Western Europe and the Middle East. Some of these agents may be Russians and others may be Jews.39 By November 1948, the British Embassy Publicity Section in Cairo was issuing attributable material comparing Zionism in Palestine to Soviet policy in Czechoslovakia. ‘In a unitary Palestine State’, it was argued, ‘there would be every likelihood of the Jewish minority, by methods of organised political terrorism, establishing power over the Arab majority’.40 Terrorist incidents in Palestine, particularly the activities of the Irgun and the Stern Gang, were used by British propagandists to smear the Jewish community as a whole. In the Arab world, strongly worded statements against ‘Jewish terrorism’ were a useful means of indicating a common Anglo-Arab interest in the face of the Zionist enemy. Ikhwan bulletins in Egypt took the opportunity to point out that ‘outrages committed by Jewish terrorist groups have increased in numbers and barbarity’ and wasted no time in holding the Jewish Agency to account. ‘The continuance of indiscriminate murder and condoned terrorism’, it was claimed, ‘can lead only to the forfeiture by the Jewish community of Palestine of all right in the eyes of the world to be numbered among the civilised peoples.’41 Pressing this theme further, Ikhwan propaganda proclaimed in April 1948 that The Blight of terrorism spreads like a slow stain over the Jewish people in Palestine, and it is a sorry condemnation on their claims to statehood that this menace should still stalk unchecked through the land. … This monster of violence has been nurtured by Jewish refusal to recognise it as an evil and to cooperate with the British authorities to eradicate it from their midst.42


The massacre of Arab villagers at Deir Yassin provided obvious opportunities for propaganda of this kind. Responding to the Jewish Agency’s condemnation of the atrocity, Sharq al-Adna gave extensive coverage to an Arab League communiqué which described ‘Jewish terrorists’ as ‘revolting to the conscience of humanity’ and contrasted their behaviour to Arab fighters who, it was claimed, ‘in fighting Jews have followed their inherited traditions and proved their definite desire to stick to the traditions of chivalry and war which they inherited from their ancestors generation after generation’.43 Sharq al-Adna was capable of more balanced and responsible reporting and British officials in Cairo even reported that American Foreign Broadcast Information Service monitors had professed themselves ‘surprised at the apparently pro-Jewish tone of some of the Sharq el Adna [sic] news broadcasts’.44 Nevertheless, the suspicion that Sharq was deliberately used to disseminate anti-Jewish themes deemed unsuitable for official channels remains strong. Gordon Waterfield, controller of the BBC Arabic Service, warned that Sharq’s provocative calls for the Zionists to be ‘wiped off the face of the earth’ would prove to be politically embarrassing. Sharq, Waterfield was told in November 1949, is used as a sly agent of ours which can say what Mr. Bevin is afraid to say openly and get away with – Jews or no Jews. In war time it played a role, but today what I feel in my bones is that someone in Tel Aviv is piling up a crime sheet of provocative indiscretions and that one day – for instance if there should be a pogrom in an Arab State – a dossier will be given with a lot of hot and – for us – embarrassing publicity on the lines that Mr. Bevin has been to all intents and purposes an agent provocateur.45 Unsurprisingly, Sharq al-Adna was a target for Haganah propagandists and saboteurs. In January 1948, four transmitters were stolen from a mobile transmitting station in Jerusalem, upsetting ‘plans for continuous transmission during the period of [Sharq’s] move to Cyprus’.46 Police investigations concluded that ‘the thieves received information, if not active assistance, from one or more of the Jewish engineers employed in equipping the vehicle’, and after a number of suspects were apprehended and interrogated, the investigating officer reported that ‘they are all of Haganah affiliation or sympathies and in view of the circumstances of the theft, nature of the material stolen, modus operandi and the known animosity of the Jewish Agency towards [Sharq al-Adna] and the anxiety of the Haganah to improve upon their existing illegal


broadcasting station, it is suspected that the theft was perpetrated by the latter organization’.47 It was no coincidence, therefore, that within weeks of the robbery, a clandestine ‘Haganah Radio’ station launched its own attack on Sharq al-Adna. Haganah broadcasts sought to discredit Sharq in the eyes of its Arab audience by portraying it as a tool of British imperialism whose Arab staff were the type to ‘sacrifice the interests of their countrymen for the sake of their personal aim’ and who could only ‘pretend that they are serving Arab interests’.48 The Anglo-Israeli radio propaganda war intensified during 1948 and Britain collaborated with Iraqi broadcasters against Israel. ‘Contact has been made with the local Broadcasting authorities’, the British Information Department in Baghdad announced in July, while informing that it was working with the Iraqis ‘to enable them to monitor “Voice of Israel” … with a view to immediately countering their subversive propaganda’.49 Whereas unofficial instruments such as Sharq al-Adna and the Ikhwan al Hurriya were free to pursue an openly anti-Israel agenda, official British spokesmen had to tread carefully in formulating their appeal to Arab opinion. A largely pro-Arab British press proved to be a useful source of ‘independent’ comment for information officers in the Arab world.50 Information officers in Egypt, meanwhile, introduced their own ‘internal censorship’ to ensure that ‘we refrain from issuing any articles with a Jewish slant’,51 and explaining that they were ‘refraining from despatching pro-Jewish or even objective items on Palestine’.52 At the same time, attributable Embassy publications such as the ‘Talking Point Letter’ were used to highlight Britain’s pro-Arab position, reminding readers of Britain’s view that ‘the entry of Arab armies into Palestine did not in the circumstances constitute aggression’ and arguing that the Arabs had sent their armies into Palestine ‘to preserve security and order’.53 Briefly, it seemed that Arab opinion, which in the spring of 1948 had been growing ‘menacingly anti-British’, had been won over. As the Information Department in Cairo remarked in its report for the second quarter of 1948, British refusal to recognise Israel together with her diplomatic efforts on behalf of the Arab States at the UN, produced a ‘sudden favourable atmosphere’, which the ‘Department did its utmost to exploit’, not least by taking every opportunity of ‘rubbing it in to editors that Britain and Britain alone was holding the ring for the Arabs’.54 The apparent triumph, however, was to be short-lived. The defeats inflicted upon the Arab armies by Israel led to accusations that Britain had failed to provide sufficient support for the Arabs. Sharq al-Adna reacted by seeking to contrast the failure of Egypt’s Arab allies


with the continuing support offered by Britain. ‘It seems’, Sharq commentators proclaimed, ‘that one ally of Egypt, that is, Britain, was the only one which stood beside Egypt in its present difficulty’.55 British officials also sought to bolster their prestige by returning to the recognition issue. ‘There is no likelihood of Britain recognising the so-called state of Israel’, Ikhwan al Hurriya members were told in September 1948,56 and this message was repeated in December when the Ikhwan’s weekly bulletin quoted a number of statements in the House of Commons, including one MP’s remark that it would be ‘anomalous as well as premature to admit Israel to the United Nations when Eire, Portugal, Italy, Transjordan and Ceylon are still waiting’.57 The fate of the 750,000 Palestinian refugees was an issue upon which both British and American propagandists seized in order to stress their respective governments’ commitment to humanitarian aid and to cast themselves in a favourable light before Arab opinion. USIE officials saw in the Palestinian refugee crisis a rare opportunity to gain some positive publicity for American policies and the State Department’s guidance to USIS posts in November 1948 stated that In order to offset possible bad impression created by our seeming support of Israeli position it would be well to recall that the US took the leading position in putting forward and pushing through the recommendation that the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund contribute 6 million rather than $2,200,000 for disaster relief to Palestine refugees. … It can also be pointed out that the U.S. contributes 72% of the total funds received by UNICEF from governments and same percentage of residual UNRRA balances.58 Throughout 1949, US propagandists in the Arab world were reminded that ‘We should strive for maximum amount of favorable publicity for the UN Palestine refugee program.’59 British propagandists adopted a similar approach. Initially, the Cairo Embassy’s ‘Talking Point Letter’ limited itself to publicity for British action on behalf of the refugees in the UN, and the reporting of the Foreign Office’s announcement in August 1948 that ‘tents and medical supplies … from British stores in the Middle East were to be made available for refugee relief’.60 Before long, however, Ikhwan al Hurriya bulletins were citing British opinion polls indicating that ‘100% agreed that Arab refugees should be allowed to return to their homes from which they had been expelled by the Jews’ and demanding that ‘compensation should be paid to them for loss of their homes, land or possessions’.61


It is to be doubted, however, whether publicity for refugee aid programmes achieved much more than to remind Arabs of the disaster that had befallen them and to reinforce subsequent feelings of bitterness. As one participant in a May 1950 meeting of the State Department’s Information Policy Committee meeting observed, ‘I didn’t find any enthusiasm in the Arab countries for the Palestine refugee problem. … [A]s far as people you talk with are concerned, there is no enthusiasm. They think its a pro-Israel policy.’62 More radical Arab voices reacted with some venom, denouncing ‘British expressions of sympathy and offers of help for Arab refugees as “a murderer’s tears shed over his victim” ’.63 Nevertheless, US propagandists continued to play the refugee card, which, in 1953, was identified as a means of winning back ‘a measure of confidence in [American] good will and impartiality in the Near East’ and the State Department concluded that ‘the refugee problem should be separated for special attack at this time’.64 The destruction of Palestinian Arab society and the establishment of Israel produced a tide of Arab hostility that Western propagandists could do little to stem. The British, with more room to manoeuvre given their willingness to exploit anti-American and anti-Semitic themes, achieved some short-term success in the summer of 1948, but the failure of the Arab armies ultimately gave British proclamations of support the hollow ring of empty promises. In 1947, British propagandists had identified ‘Arab dissatisfaction over … the problem of Palestine’ as ‘the over-riding factor affecting our information work’ and concluded that ‘Britain has not come off without severe criticism’.65 Despite a concerted effort to distance Britain from the US and to indicate sympathy with the Arabs in their battle against Zionism, relatively little had changed at the beginning of the 1950s. Sterndale Bennett (Troutbeck’s successor at the British Middle East Office (BMEO)) believed that officials in London simply did not appreciate the handicap under which British officials in the Arab world laboured as a direct result of the general perception of ‘the part we have played in creating the [Palestine] problem and by the sympathy for Israel with which we are credited’.66

Neutralism and the Arab–Israeli conflict By 1950, partisan approaches to the Arab–Israel dispute, whether in the form of uncritical American support for Israel or British backing for the Arabs were increasingly recognised as an unsatisfactory basis for regional propaganda. For some British officials, however, adopting a policy of public neutrality between Israel and the Arabs was a bitter pill to


swallow. For Troutbeck, it amounted to just one more betrayal in a series of injustices inflicted upon the Arabs: The Jews were determined to get what they wanted and, with their immense drive and the immense power they have shewn themselves to wield not only in the USA but in most countries of the world, not excluding our own, they would have rattled the Arabs out of any diplomatic position which they might have taken up. … Once it was clear that [the Arabs] had not the force to defeat the Jews and would not have been allowed to use it if they had, the rest was a foregone conclusion. All that remained to the Arabs was their moral case. … All I can say is that I am very conscious of the moral principles involved in the Palestine question and it was with pain and grief that I saw how very little ice they cut in the world at large and even in our own country. For there is no gainsaying the fact that there is a moral case in this business and, though I can claim very little affinity with the Arabs whose language I do not understand and whose way of life is utterly strange to me, I feel strongly that the way they have been pushed out of one morally impregnable position after another is a very grave reflection on our western civilisation.67 Houstoun-Boswall, prepared to accept in principle that ‘it is essential for us to be friendly with Jews and Arabs’, expressed the belief that our difficulties in attaining this objective are greatly increased by the Israeli policy of deliberately alienating the Arabs by acts of terrorism and by their efforts to oust from Israel even such Arabs as remain. … We never help the Arabs in protesting against Jewish atrocities; rather we join in a conspiracy of silence about them. What reaction can we expect from such an attitude? ‘We stand no chance of holding the Arabs to our side’, he concluded, ‘as long as we give them nothing more than exhortation and often unpalatable advice – such as “don’t hate the Jews; they mean well and are here to stay. So swallow that one and make the best of it” ’.68 Despite these protests, a more pragmatic policy towards Israel developed in Whitehall. Ernest Bevin was even prepared to make a case that ‘there is no reason why considerable advantage to the whole Middle East should not result from the establishment of higher standards of social and economic organisation in Israel’.69 This contrasted sharply with


Houstoun-Boswall’s paranoid warning that The extension of Jewish influence … might possibly serve to maintain the Anglo-American position in the Middle East. … This would in all probability mean the setting up of dictatorships in the Fertile Crescent and a return of the Middle East to the age of colonisation, this time by world Jewry and international oil interests.70 Bevin responded simply that ‘Our general objective must be to have cordial relations with all the States of the Middle East, including the Arab States and Israel.’71 Under Bevin’s leadership, the Foreign Office moved towards the normalisation of relations with Israel. ‘It is our policy to conserve and consolidate British cultural, political and commercial influence in this country’, the British Legation in Tel Aviv declared in September 1950, remarking that Anglo-Israeli relations constituted ‘a link which, as was proved in 1948–49, is capable of surviving the severest strains’.72 US policy makers, meanwhile, were well aware of the need to mend their tattered relations with the Arabs. In practical terms, this meant a concerted effort to portray the United States as an impartial and reliable diplomatic partner. The need to rebuild the tarnished reputation of the US dominated USIE’s 1950 ‘Country Papers’. In almost every country, the need to ‘to neutralize the effect of our pro-Jewish policy in the Palestine War’73 was listed as a priority objective. In Iraq, for example, the task was to restore ‘the reservoir of good-will which was damaged because of the Palestine affair. … We must show in every way possible that despite our favoritism toward the Jewish cause we are not antiArab’.74 How this was to be achieved was another matter. At the conference of US Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) held in Beirut in February 1952, a number of positive suggestions were made, among them the argument that The actual implementation in clear unequivocable terms of the announced American policy of neutrality between the Arab states and Israel is vital if we expect to achieve any of our other objectives in the Arab world. Implementation of such a policy, to mean anything, must: 1. Convince the Arabs that we will not permit Israel to expand beyond her present borders. 2. Adopt a much better formula for financial neutrality than that of letting Israel be an equal factor in a fiftyfifty division. 3. Continue at an accelerated rate to push forward and to finance compensation to and rehabilitation of the Arab refugees.75


Such thinking reflected the widespread awareness, at least among those members of the Foreign Service inclined to be sympathetic to the Arabs, that Our policy of underwriting the Israeli nation is the fundamental cause of friction, unrest and instability in the Arab States today. It is impossible for us to sweep under the carpet the responsibility we bear for the rise of Israel, nor can we hope to induce the Arabs to forget, much less to forgive, and become ‘realistic’ in their approach to this sensitive subject. The wound to Arab pride and aspirations is too deep.76 As Harold B. Minor, the US Minister to Beirut, put it in his opening remarks to a conference of American PAOs in February 1952, ‘Money, Point 4, or the Near East Command will not win back our leadership, but an impartial attitude toward Israel may.’77 For much of the 1950–54 period, British and American information policies towards the Arab–Israeli dispute were relatively well co-ordinated. The public position was one of professed neutrality, designed not to resolve the dispute, but to minimise the damage to Western interests in the region until such time as a long-term peace settlement was a realistic proposition. A number of characteristics of Israeli–Arab relations in the early 1950s made this policy problematic, however. Foremost among these was the issue of Arab ‘infiltration’ and Israeli ‘reprisals’ that characterised what Benny Morris has called ‘Israel’s border wars’.78 Thefts and murders committed by Arab infiltrators prompted often brutal reprisals against Arab villages and these incidents, in the context of an Arab–Israeli competition for international support, threatened the viability of the Anglo-American policy of neutrality. Frequently, it was Israel that found itself faced with public expressions of condemnation by British and US spokesmen. The Tripartite Declaration of May 1950 was repeatedly invoked as the foundation of Western policy towards the Arab–Israel dispute by both the British and American information services throughout the 1950s. The Declaration pledged that Britain, France and the United States would remain committed to the establishment and preservation of peace and stability in the Middle East and that each nation would, in the event of a violation of the Arab–Israeli armistice agreement, take action both within and outside the United Nations against the aggressive party. As such, the Declaration was a useful statement of Western impartiality, a principle that was severely tested by the actions of the Israeli Defence


Force (IDF) along the Jordan frontier, most notoriously at Qibya in October 1953. The Qibya raid was launched in response to the murder, on the night of 13 October, of an Israeli mother and her two children by infiltrators from Jordan. Despite the co-operation of the Arab Legion with the Israeli authorities and a Jordanian promise to bring the murderers to justice, a retaliatory attack on the village of Qibya went ahead on the night of 14 October. An IDF commando unit slaughtered more than 50 villagers, including many women and children. The Western perception that ‘certain Israeli authorities are behaving in an irresponsible and outrageous manner’79 made a public condemnation inevitable, although it would not be overly cynical to suggest that Western propagandists rather welcomed the opportunity to score some popularity points with the Arabs.80 On 16 October, the Foreign Office News Department endorsed the condemnation of Israel issued by the Mixed Armistice Commission (MAC) of the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organisation (UNTSO), expressed British ‘horror’ at an ‘apparently calculated attack’ and called on the Israeli Government to bring those responsible to justice.81 US policy had been set out in State Department guidance in February 1953 when USIS officials were told to ‘confine news coverage of Jordan– Israel friction to objective, factual reporting, maintaining strictly impartial treatment to both sides’.82 The Qibya raid placed USIA in an awkward position. Just weeks before the raid, USIA had received official State Department guidance entitled ‘Current Problems of US–Israel Relations’ in which ‘an effort by the United States to show a more balanced attitude towards Israel vis-à-vis the Arab countries’ and ‘a series of provocative incidents initiated by the Israelis’ were blamed for a recent deterioration of US–Israeli relations.83 Clearly, the issue of border incidents was a sensitive one for US diplomats. When news of the Qibya raid broke, USIA and the State Department were left attempting an awkward balancing act. On the one hand, the State Department issued a relatively strong condemnation of the attack, expressing America’s ‘deepest sympathy for the families of those who lost their lives’ and demanded that ‘those who are responsible … should be brought to account’.84 On the other, the formal information guidance issued to USIA was more restrained. ‘These events should be kept in their proper contexts’, USIA was warned, ‘In any public expression on this subject we wish to avoid giving the impression that we are singling out Israel for special punitive action.’ The State Department, it appears, was rather less interested in exploiting the official American condemnation of the raid to garner plaudits in the


Arab world than it was to ensure that no impression was given of any change in US policy towards Israel.85 The limited impact of public condemnations of Israel soon became clear. In August 1954, Moshe Dayan announced to the British Ambassador that he considered the Qibya raid to have ‘worked’, in the sense that it had terrified the Arabs on the Jordan frontier into quiescence.86 Qibya thus exposed the shortcomings of Britain’s publicity policy for dealing with frontier incidents. By making it look as though Britain was all talk and no action, Israeli defiance had dangerous implications for British prestige in the Arab world. Several British officials were growing increasingly concerned at the impression of British weakness in the face of Israeli actions. Glubb Pasha was especially quick to denounce what he called Israel’s ‘psychological urge to bully others’ and equally keen to condemn a policy, which he considered unnecessarily timid and that risked undermining the British position in Jordan. Glubb had already caused a small diplomatic storm with an interview he gave to the New York Times in the summer of 1953. Described by the Labour MP, Woodrow Wyatt, as ‘an anti-Semitic tirade’,87 Glubb had suggested that many of the terrorist atrocities committed within Israel had been perpetrated by ‘criminal immigrants from European ghettos’ before going on to describe an alleged Israeli desire to ‘kill lots of Jordanians to show them what’s what’ as ‘smacking of Nazism’.88 The events of March 1954 intensified American and British anxieties about their approach to publicity regarding Israeli reprisal raids. After Arab infiltrators killed 11 Israeli civilians in an attack near Beersheba on the night of 16 March, the Israelis, blaming Jordan, demanded that the British and Americans condemn the Jordan Government as they had condemned Israel after Qibya. Official expressions of sympathy were offered to Israel, but when no condemnation of Jordan was made (Glubb asserted that the crime was committed by infiltrators from Sinai), the Israelis promptly withdrew from the MAC and launched a reprisal attack upon the West Bank village of Nahhalin. This raid, on 28 March, resulted in the deaths of four Jordanian National Guardsmen, three Arab Legionnaires and one female civilian. Sterndale Bennett was deeply critical of the Foreign Office’s low-key response, arguing that I do not think there is any comparison between the faults of individuals on the Arab side … and the planned blows delivered by the Israeli armed forces. … I am in fact getting a little concerned at the distance which sometimes seems to separate London from the actualities of


the Middle East. … Can we afford to be schoolmasterish on this human issue?89 Sterndale Bennett, rather like Glubb and his predecessor at the BMEO, John Troutbeck, saw the matter in simple terms. ‘It is the Israelis who have put themselves positively in the wrong by savage atrocities like Qibya and Nahhalin’, he declared, going on to argue that Any general resolution which does not truly reflect this position will be misleading and likely to do harm out here, especially if it attempts to balance Nahhalin against the Beersheba bus incident (for which it is now practically certain that Jordan bears no responsibility).90 Worried that the Israelis might be successful in ‘driving a wedge between our ally [ Jordan] and ourselves’, Sterndale Bennett argued for a stronger British commitment to Jordan in order to shore up British influence there.91 In private, Foreign Office staff agreed that Jordan was the victim of unjustified attacks and many believed the Israelis were deliberately undermining the authority of the UNTSO. Few, however, thought that there was much to be gained from getting involved in a public argument with Israel on the issue. A vigorous anti-Israeli propaganda campaign might temporarily boost British prestige in the Arab world, but it might also undermine Israeli ‘moderates’ such as Moshe Sharret and strengthen the hand of the ‘hawks’ who favoured more aggressive policies towards the Arab states. The Foreign Office thus remained committed to a policy of neutrality and mediation between Israel and the Arabs which, while allowing for condemnation of excessive Israeli reprisals, held out no promise that the British would take the Arab side against Israel in any but the most extreme circumstances. As Falla argued, Although the Arab States are more important to us strategically than Israel, we cannot for that reason back them through thick and thin in their quarrel with Israel. To do so would probably lead to … Sharret’s downfall and the emergence of a more bellicose regime.92 Official American reaction to the rising state of tension on Israel’s borders was summarised by the National Security Council (NSC) in July. USIA was reported to have made ‘special efforts … in regard to the need of making clear to the area the impartiality of US policy towards the Arab states and Israel’.93 Particular emphasis was given to two speeches


by Henry Byroade on 9 April and 1 May. Both were given heavy radio play by the Voice of America (VOA) and were reproduced with additional editorial comment in News Review,94 whereas Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) in the Middle East were instructed to distribute the texts to ‘as many key people and as many editors as possible’.95 Byroade’s message was a reiteration of American impartiality. ‘A pro-Israeli or a pro-Arab policy’, he declared, ‘has no place in our thinking. … If we are to be accused of being pro-anything … [it] is that our policy is first and foremost pro-American.’96 Placing the US Government ‘somewhat in the middle’, Byroade asked Israel to cooperate with the UN, while demanding that the Arabs begin negotiations to defuse border tensions.97 The problem for British and American propagandists was to explain their neutrality to an angry Arab world. To a large extent, they dodged the issue by delegating responsibility for countering Israeli propaganda to the UN. Inspired by the growing suspicion that the Israelis were seeking to discredit the UNTSO, the British sought to encourage a more forthright response by the UN staff responsible for policing Israel’s borders. Israeli attacks on the UNTSO increased when Israel withdrew from the MAC after the UNTSO’s failure to condemn Jordan for the Beersheba killings, and the leading MAC and UNTSO representatives, E.H. Hutchison and General Bennike, were both denounced as pro-Arab.98 T. Wikeley, at the British Consulate in Jerusalem, was unconvinced, arguing that ‘It is too easy for the Israelis to brand anyone “pro-Arab” if they see that that is all that is required to get rid of a man they dislike.’99 Wikeley believed that the attacks on Hutchison and Bennike stemmed from the threat that UN rulings posed to the manipulation of Israeli domestic opinion. ‘Not only do [the Israelis] deliberately mislead the public’, he argued, ‘but they thereby increase the very tension in public opinion which they subsequently utilise to justify another “retaliation” ’.100 When UN observers on the border found themselves being harassed and even attacked by Israeli troops, Wikeley and his French and US colleagues reached the conclusion that the Israeli objective was ‘to get rid of the UNTSO altogether’.101 In this deteriorating situation, the Foreign Office lent its support to the idea of strengthening the public relations capability of the UNTSO. Wikeley had claimed earlier that ‘publicity … is one of the main keys to the situation’, citing the UN’s failure to explain to the Israeli public Hutchison’s reasons for not condemning Jordan after the Beersheba bus massacre. Had this been done, he argued, ‘there can be … no doubt that the exacerbation of public opinion with which the Israeli Government made great play and which in turn was the cause of Nahhalin, would


either not have happened, or have been much reduced’.102 In June 1954, an American, Hamilton Fisher, began work as the UNTSO’s public relations officer and, in the view of the Foreign Office, made a ‘good start’, succeeding in getting the texts of MAC resolutions printed in full in the Israeli press. Wikeley reported that the Israelis seemed ‘rattled’ by Fisher’s appointment, trying unsuccessfully to curtail his activities.103 Fisher was killed in a car accident on 16 August, but his early success had demonstrated to both the British and the Americans that they could stand behind the UN over the question of frontier incidents. It enabled their information services to rely on recycled UNTSO statements and press releases, minimising the likelihood that they would take the brunt of Israeli or Arab antagonism themselves. Reporting to the NSC in August 1955, USIA announced that its strategy for dealing with border incidents was to promote understanding and support for General Burns (Bennike’s successor at the UNTSO) and his plans to ease border tensions. By mid-1955, USIA felt able to claim, somewhat optimistically, that ‘Through stories placed in the press, as well as regional publications, VOA broadcasts and personal contacts, a more sympathetic climate for considering General Burn’s [sic] plans was brought about.’104 Increasing reliance on the UN did limit opportunities for British propagandists to sympathise overtly with Jordan. In early August, in response to the suggestion that they publicise the contrast between the Jordan authorities’ determination to take disciplinary action against Arab Legion troops crossing the frontier with the deliberately planned and authorised IDF incursions, the Information Policy Department (IPD) argued that ‘We should find it difficult to give publicity to an incident of this kind through the official information services without expressing or implying the approbation of HMG in such a way which would infuriate Israel’.105 After the Nahhalin raid both Foreign Office and State Department propagandists concluded that publicity for frontier clashes tended to play into the hands of the Israelis who, it was thought, were deliberately exaggerating incidents in order to prepare the ground for further reprisals.106 Basing publicity policy on the lines formulated by the UN still provided more opportunities to criticise Israel than it did Jordan, and allowed those criticisms to carry a stamp of respectable impartiality. The purported neutrality of US policy towards the Arab–Israel question was compromised by a number of careless habits. At the beginning of September 1954, proposals to draw up a public statement drew strong criticism from US officials in the Arab world. The statement had sought


to assuage Israel’s security concerns, and it restated America’s commitment to defend Israel in the event of Arab aggression under the terms of the Tripartite Declaration.107 Ambassadors and information officers in Damascus, Beirut and Baghdad reacted immediately. Raymond Hare, in Beirut, criticised the entire set of assumptions underlying the initiative, arguing that ‘giving assurance to Israel at this time is not (repeat not) justified by facts of situation in which it is Israel, rather than the Arab states, which is assuming belligerent posture’.108 The Baghdad Embassy put the case that the unilateral declaration to Israel as envisaged by the State Department will negate in Iraq the thoughtful and constructive efforts of past 18 months to restore confidence in US as being as genuinely interested in friendship of 40 million Arabs as of 1 1/2 million Israelis. … No amount of secondary phrasing indicating similar concern for Arabs can obscure fact that in Iraqi eyes any such gesture will be regarded as gratuitous and unwarranted assurance to aggressor nation.109 Finally, US officials in Damascus pointed out a number of rhetorical devices that they believed indicated bias towards Israel. Why was it, they asked, that whenever the State Department spoke of ‘security’ they mentioned Israel first and the Arabs second? Why was it, on the other hand, that when the discussion turned to frontier violence and the threat of ‘armed attack’, the Arabs were invariably listed before Israel?110 The question of publicity for arms supplies to Israel and the Arab states presented British and US information workers with a particularly problematic issue. The root of the problem was that, after September 1955, the arms question became a major point of connection between the Arab–Israeli dispute, Soviet penetration of the Middle East and the divisions within the Arab world upon which British political influence increasingly depended. This complex convergence of policy considerations led to confusion and paralysis as British and American propagandists pondered how the question of weapons supplies could best be handled. The matter came to a head as a result of Egyptian propaganda policy in the immediate aftermath of the Czech–Egyptian arms deal. Keen to promote the idea that he had struck a blow for the Arab peoples against the West, Nasser embarked upon a campaign to persuade Arab opinion that the deal with the Communist bloc had been a necessary counter to a Western arms supply policy, which withheld weapons from the Arab states whilst providing them to Israel. In October 1955, Nasser made a


well-publicised speech in which he claimed to have come into possession of French documents proving that Britain and the US had recently supplied 120 aircraft, 115 tanks and 100 armoured cars to Israel. British diplomats proved deeply reluctant to engage in a public dispute with Nasser. Ian Scott, first secretary at the British Embassy in Beirut, remarked upon the Lebanese President’s surprise at being privately shown evidence that any imbalance of British arms supplies to the Middle East was in favour of Egypt rather than Israel and noted the President’s advice that, given that the case against Nasser was ‘going by default’, the British should ‘publish and be damned’.111 There were a number of reasons why British propagandists resisted this advice. First, there was the fear that a public refutation of Nasser’s claims through the publication of evidence that Britain had in fact provided more weapons to Egypt than it had to Israel would provoke a storm of protest from proIsrael MPs in the House of Commons and hand the Israeli Government a potent bargaining chip in their bid to obtain more arms from the West. Scott also pointed out that to publish the figures indicating a British bias in favour of Egypt would invite questions as to the arms supplies of the US and France. If it were to emerge that their deliveries to Israel ‘more than counterbalanced our excess to Egypt’, the West as a whole, Britain included, would be denounced in the Arab world. The issue might also be seized upon as evidence of a split between the Western powers, vindicating one of the key planks in the Soviet propaganda platform. Short of ideas and lacking space in which to manoeuvre, the Foreign Office limited itself to private representations to selected Arab leaders. The State Department was also wary of the threat to Western prestige and popularity caused by Nasser’s allegations. Guidance issued to USIS officials in October 1955 instructed them to respond to Nasser’s claims with the argument that the US had abided by the terms of the Tripartite Declaration in its sales of arms to both Israel and the Arab States. In order to create the impression that this situation was more favourable to the Arabs than the Israelis, PAOs were told to point out that although the US had a grant aid agreement with Iraq and, although it had offered similar agreements to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, no such agreement existed with Israel.112 Neither the British nor the American information services, caught between too many conflicting positions, were comfortable with question of arms supplies to Middle Eastern countries. To remain silent in the face of the Egyptian allegations risked allowing Nasser’s propaganda to take hold across the Arab world, painting a damaging picture of Western bias in favour of Israel, but to counter Nasser by pointing out


the high level of arms supplies to Egypt during 1955 would not only hand a propaganda weapon to the Israeli government, it might also incense Iraqi and Iranian leaders who might legitimately argue that they had received little in the way of Western arms as a reward for their cooperation with Western regional defence plans. Underlying these factors was the fear that it would be counter-productive to allow the Soviet Union to draw the West into a public argument about arms sales. It would be all too easy for Soviet propaganda to paint a picture of a Western-backed Israel being opposed by the Soviet Union arming her Arab friends against the forces of Western and Zionist imperialism. Evelyn Shuckburgh was not alone in thinking that there was ‘something to be said for keeping quiet about arms sales in the Middle East whenever we can’.113 The policy of public neutrality towards the Arab–Israel dispute was a short-term measure that at times risked alienating rather than appeasing one or other or both of the protagonists. British officials were never entirely comfortable with a policy that some considered unjustifiably pro-Israeli and a threat to Britain’s political and material interests in the Arab world, while American diplomats fretted at the least sign that USIsraeli relations were deteriorating. The temptation to ignore the issue in the hope that it would go away was consequently a powerful one, finding expression in the Foreign Office’s conclusion that the best response to the storm of criticism in the Arab world provoked by Churchill’s famously pro-Zionist speech of 11 May 1953 was that it was best to say as little as possible on the matter,114 or the weary observation by one American PAO that ‘The best thing perhaps is to ignore the Israel problem in USIE output in Syria and to concentrate our efforts on personal conversations with people who may be influenced.’115

Propaganda and the search for an Arab–Israeli settlement The frequent reluctance of both the Foreign Office and the State Department to take a stronger public line against Israel was indicative of their belief that while a general settlement to the dispute was possible, Israel would need careful handling if it were to be achieved. In the early 1950s, British and American policy makers had gambled that the road to peace could be prepared through policies of neutrality and mediation before the level of resentment against the West in the Arab world became unmanageable. By the end of 1954, however, the lack of progress made, and the awareness that the ongoing dispute provided a constant source of opportunity for Soviet mischief-making, meant that the search for an


Arab–Israeli agreement was given a much higher priority. The Foreign Office and the State Department had come to believe that the achievement of a general settlement was vital for the preservation of the West’s position in the region, and NSC staff went so far as to conclude that an Arab–Israeli settlement was ‘the sine qua non of US objectives in the area’.116 In this atmosphere, British and American propagandists were asked to direct their efforts to the support of an Arab–Israeli peace process. The first serious Anglo-American discussions aimed at producing a peace plan took place in Washington in January 1955. At an early stage it was agreed that publicity should be avoided. Indeed, Shuckburgh’s visit to Washington was thought to necessitate a ‘cover story’ to prevent press speculation.117 This caution is unsurprising. Britain’s ambassadors in the Arab world were concerned about the repercussions of public knowledge of British involvement in any effort to promote a settlement. British representatives in Jordan, Iraq and Syria were united in their belief that attempts to engineer such an agreement would not only fail, they would also risk angering and alienating the Arab world. Believing that Britain had neither the means of persuasion nor coercion to move the Arabs towards a settlement, ambassadors advised the Foreign Office to ‘make very sure that space and oil in the Middle East no longer matter before we sacrifice them to a will-of-the-wisp’.118 Both the Foreign Office and the State Department realised that if any attempt to broker a settlement were to be made then, at least until a fair probability of success existed, the need for secrecy was paramount. Eden told his Foreign Office staff in December 1954 that it was ‘essential that our consultations should remain absolutely secret. … Any leakage of the fact that we were considering a settlement would be fatal to our relations with the Arab States’.119 Shuckburgh believed that the propagandists did have a role to play in the early stages of the process, but that it was in heightening fears of communism rather than making a positive case for a settlement. He argued that the immediate priority was to use the communist threat as a lever to persuade Israel that ‘the discrediting and humiliation of non-communist Arab regimes’ was not in its long-term interest.120 As early as November 1953, US diplomats had argued that publicity on the subject of American efforts to promote Arab–Israeli peace was counter-productive, with the Baghdad Embassy arguing that Little is to be gained at this time through the use of the U.S. interest in a solution of the Palestine problem as a psychological theme. If U.S. moves are to be presented, this should be done only after consultation with the field and after opportunities to prepare the local


psychological climate in so far as it is possible for what may be unpalatable actions.121 The product of the Anglo-American talks was ‘Alpha’, a set of proposals intended to form the basis for Arab–Israeli negotiations. In keeping with the belief that any publicity on the subject would endanger chances of success and damage the West in the eyes of the Arabs, a veil of silence was drawn over the project. As late as September 1955, after Dulles had revealed that the US was working for a settlement, British officials were still arguing that ‘we must try to keep secret the fact that we are talking to the Egyptians and the Israelis’. Even the idea of covert propaganda operations in the Palestinian refugee camps was discounted, at least ‘until we find our negotiations sticking and it seems that apparent pressure from the refugees would help to push the Arab Governments to serious discussion of the compensation question’.122 The first major shift away from this policy of silence came in May 1955 when the State Department began to consider a public initiative. The British were immediately sceptical, with Shuckburgh noting that ‘we do not like the idea: we believe that a public statement at the present time would be dangerous and unlikely to produce the desired results’.123 The Foreign Office was not only concerned about the possible consequences of an American statement, they were also angry at what was seen as an attempt by Dulles to ‘bounce’ them into acquiescence at short notice. When Dulles, with just one week’s notice, informed the British that a statement on Arab–Israeli peace proposals would be made on 26 August, Eden was furious. ‘The Americans are behaving disgracefully’, he exploded, ‘this is their third change of plan over the operation. … We certainly cannot undertake to give HMG’s support to a statement which we have not yet seen … [and] … we should hold the Americans responsible for any flare-up which may occur in the area’.124 When tempers cooled, both the British and the American information services set about the task of working out how best to communicate such an important policy shift. Although the code name and the details of Anglo-American planning remained secret, Dulles’ speech of 26 August marked the public launch of ‘Alpha’ and the beginning of Western attempts to use information policy to facilitate an Arab–Israeli settlement. The statement was, on the face of it, most noteworthy for what it did not say. Packed with earnest protestations of American friendship for both Arabs and Israelis and appeals to the spirit of conciliation, peace and progress, Dulles made no attempt to outline the details of a settlement, confining himself to the identification of three areas (refugees,


the climate of fear and mistrust and borders) where he felt grounds existed for negotiation. While suggesting that the current Israeli borders should not be regarded as permanent, he offered nothing to the Arabs in the way of a reference to the 1947 UN Resolutions upon which the Arabs based their negotiating position and, in his determination to avoid providing specific details of the Alpha proposals which might be shot down by either side, made no reference to territorial adjustments more favourable to the Arabs in the Negev. In several important respects, the statement confirmed the fears of British officials that the Americans were not prepared to push the Israelis into any significant concessions.125 Sterndale Bennett certainly took this view, arguing that the statement, in calling for the Arabs to abandon their commitment to the 1947 UN Resolutions, end their economic blockade and compromise on the issue of Palestinian ‘right of return’, while providing only vague promises of territorial adjustments and refugee compensation in exchange, was ‘heavily weighted in Israel’s favour’. He believed that while the statement might have the beneficial effect of ‘jolting’ the Arabs out of unrealistic standpoints, it risked undermining British efforts to bring Arab states into the Baghdad Pact.126 While the Foreign Office was not wholly convinced by the claim of bias towards Israel, their continuing distaste for bringing Alpha into the open remained clear. Michael Rose, replying to Sterndale Bennett, suggested that the only real reason for Britain’s going along with the American statement was the belief that it represented ‘the only way of pinning them to our present joint policy of refusing to conclude a defence treaty with Israel until a settlement has been reached’.127 The discomfort felt by the British was reflected in the publicity guidance issued to posts in the Middle East. They were instructed not to ‘make too much’ of the statement and to minimise its impact. It was clear that the British wanted publicity for the speech kept as low key as possible and posts were reminded that ‘the statement itself is an American initiative … you need not volunteer any public comment on it’. Although instructed that they should not actively seek publicity for the speech, British spokesmen were provided with detailed guidance as to how to respond if questioned on certain issues. This guidance served to put a decidedly ‘Arab-friendly’ interpretation on the proposals. Officials were told that they could refer to the 1947 UN Resolutions as a starting point for compromise on the Arab side and that they should also, if pressed on the Arab blockade or frontier questions, make mention of the possibility of a land connection between Egypt and Jordan through the Negev and the use of a free port in Israel for Jordan as enticements to the Arabs.128


It is possible that Eden’s personal vanity and a sense that the Americans were attempting to steal the plaudits in an area that the British saw as ‘their patch’ may have contributed to this policy. In the days following Dulles’ statement, Foreign Office staff characterised Eden’s mood as unhappy ‘with the publicity which the Dulles statement on Alpha is receiving. … He feels that our long standing interest in the area is not receiving the credit it deserves’. The Prime Minister wondered whether it might not be possible to leak to the press the line that the Government was pleased that there were now signs that American policy was ‘coming into line’ with that of Britain.129 Publicity guidance to US representatives differed markedly from that received by their British counterparts. Officials were told that they should ‘provide no details of the possible elements of a settlement without specific instructions to do so’.130 General publicity portrayed the statement as an attempt to explain what steps the US would take in order to facilitate a settlement and not a means of coercing or bribing either of the protagonists into acceptance of an American dictate. Emphasis was to be placed on the value of American aid and security guarantees for the development of the self-sufficiency, economic stability and independence in the region, with particular stress placed upon American respect for the ‘cherished principles of independence and sovereignty’. The United States Information Agency (USIA) sought to emphasise the advantages to be gained from a settlement whilst arguing that the price to be paid should not be thought of as involving any great sacrifice of principles.131 News Review, for instance, attempted to make Dulles’ announcement more appealing to an Arab audience by placing the fact that ‘Secretary of State John Foster Dulles has expressed the U.S. view that the Palestine Arab refugees ought to be compensated by Israel’ at the head of its report on the statement.132 On the whole, however, American information policy was far less sympathetic to Arab grievances and sensitivities. Without offering any concrete proposals for territorial concessions by Israel, PAOs were instructed to encourage the Arabs to enter into negotiations by pointing out the weaknesses of their current position. They were told to publicise the argument that their hopes that the economic blockade would lead to Israeli economic collapse were ‘not borne out by Israel’s balance of payments position’ while pointing out that the continuing absence of a settlement served only to enhance Israel’s ability to attract aid from overseas. Other themes for use in Arab areas included the idea that the refusal of the Arab states to ‘discuss a settlement on terms which no other country considers realistic has not enhanced the international position of the


Arab world’. On the refugee question, PAOs were instructed to describe the Arab position on repatriation as ‘unrealistic’ and even to suggest that world opinion was growing sceptical of Arab protestations of concern for the refugees.133 Given British fears of a Middle Eastern ‘flare-up’ following Dulles’ statement, the relatively calm reaction in the Middle East came as something of a relief. In the autumn of 1955, concern about Alpha’s lack of progress, fears about further Soviet encroachments, and the nagging suspicion that the US was using the Arab–Israel issue to extend its political influence in the region at Britain’s expense, combined to persuade Eden to launch his own public peace initiative. Having been deeply sceptical of the American plan for publicity on Alpha, the British now executed a dramatic u-turn and agreed that a public statement, making it ‘possible for our Arab friends to support us and difficult for our Arab enemies to attack us’, should be made.134 Israeli sensibilities were not a primary concern, and Geoffrey Arthur stated bluntly that ‘we must face the fact that if we are ever to bring about a Palestine settlement we shall have to be nasty to the Israelis at some stage’.135 Eden’s Guildhall speech on 9 November 1955 was selected as the occasion for the British initiative and his speech revolved around the endorsement of the 1947 UN Resolutions on Palestine as the basis for negotiations. As Shuckburgh pointed out, this would be the first time that a British statement had declared openly that ‘a settlement for the Palestine problem must be found in a compromise between the present status quo and the 1947 Resolutions’. This was calculated to boost British popularity in the Arab states. As the Foreign Office informed the Cairo Embassy on 9 November, ‘Nasser can scarcely complain, as he did after Mr. Dulles’ statement … that this speech contains nothing of advantage for the Arabs’.136 The propaganda value of the Guildhall speech was recognised from the start and Middle Eastern representatives and information officers were advised accordingly. Foreign Office guidance to the Middle East stressed that the speech did not expose any difference of opinion or policy with the US Government, it simply ‘made plain what Mr. Dulles implied in his statement of August 26’.137 This was Eden’s revenge on Dulles. The British Prime Minister was openly adopting a more pro-Arab position than ever before and linking the American Secretary of State to it. Shuckburgh recognised that the references to the 1947 Resolutions would have to be shown to Dulles in advance of the speech since not to do so ‘would be very near a breach of faith’. He recognised this just two days before the speech was due to be delivered.138 In private, British


diplomats were less convinced of the unity of purpose between themselves and their American counterparts, with Arthur declaring bluntly that ‘I myself shall not believe the Americans are really behind us until I see them willing to press Israel publicly to make concessions’.139 In Israel, Jack Nicholls was reduced to making assurances that the speech was ‘implicit’ in its recognition of Israel’s right to exist.140 The response was predictably hostile with Ben Gurion suggesting that the ‘essence of Sir Anthony Eden’s proposal is the crushing of the State of Israel’.141 This was not unexpected nor was it considered particularly important. British propaganda in support of the Guildhall speech was directed at the Arab world. Guidance telegrams instructed information officers to place heavy emphasis on the Prime Minister’s declaration that the 1947 UN Resolutions could not be ignored.142 Ambassadors and information officers were told to encourage Arab leaders to align themselves with Eden’s speech and to obtain as much favourable coverage in local newspaper and radio commentaries as possible. The results provided an immediate, if short term, source of satisfaction for British propagandists and diplomats alike. The major Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram, seen as a semi-official voice of Nasser’s government, reported that ‘the Arab Governments welcome the contents of Eden’s statement’, prompting Arthur (somewhat carried away by the rare experience of British policies receiving a good press in Egypt) to proclaim ‘A triumph!’143 The official American reaction was, naturally, much cooler. Arthur responded to it with the observation that the State Department’s reply ‘shows pretty clearly the limit of public support for the Prime Minister’s speech’.144 If overt British propaganda had visibly shifted in a pro-Arab direction, this tendency was exaggerated in the government’s unattributable media. Sharq al-Adna in the course of a January 1956 broadcast ostensibly aimed at reinforcing the impression of Anglo-American unity, veered towards outright anti-Semitism. Signs of Anglo-American policy coordination, declared the Sharq announcer, ‘have disturbed two nations, namely the Russians and the Jews’. After denouncing the ‘traps and political intrigues woven by Israel’ to split the Anglo-American alliance, Sharq declared that ‘the Jews’ were hoping to sow dissension between ‘the two Anglo-Saxon states’. Dubious innuendoes such as this dovetailed neatly with Sharq’s conspiratorial dismissal of Egyptian criticisms of British policy in the region concerning the Baghdad Pact and the Buraimi Oasis as the product of Jewish rumour mongering.145 It is difficult to disagree with Shimon Shamir’s conclusion that ‘even if the planning and execution of the British and American peace proposals had been perfect, they hardly had any chance of success’.146


In 1955, neither Arab nor Israeli leaders were convinced that a settlement was necessarily desirable or achievable and no amount of propaganda, particularly given the constraints of secrecy to which the Alpha project was subject, could persuade them otherwise. Before Alpha’s final collapse in 1956, the publicity campaigns drawn up to support it were most notable for the manner in which they exposed the different priorities and sympathies of British and American policy makers. Perhaps the most perceptive analysis of the problems faced by Western propagandists on this issue was developed by Selwyn Lloyd. In the case of the Arab–Israel dispute, Lloyd told the House of Commons in 1954, ‘the more that is said about it in public, the more difficult it is to get the two sides together. … If I am asked to comment on the activities of one side with which I may not agree, in fairness I have to point out where I think that the other side have not been behaving as they should. I do not think that the public interest is served by that course of action.’147 The policies pursued by British and American propaganda agencies were largely inadequate as a means either of regaining lost Western prestige amongst the Arab world or of convincing Israeli and Arab opinion that a compromise settlement was either necessary or desirable. The immediate strategic concerns of both Israel and the Arab states and their preparations for a ‘second round’ far outweighed the American bid to get them to recognise the Cold War threat from the Soviet Union as the most immediate priority. Whilst British policymakers may have wished to have been able to abandon the position of neutrality in favour of a clearer, pro-Arab position, the need to maintain a united front with the Americans and the desire to avoid involvement in a war with Israel, trapped them into their uncomfortable public position. Forced to adhere to a public position of objective neutrality whilst attempting to shore up a crumbling informal empire in the Arab world, British propagandists, suffering under the weight of a host of conflicting objectives, either froze under the demands of secret diplomacy or were reduced to unpleasant innuendoes that were always likely to be rendered impotent in the face of the noisier populism of genuine Arab nationalists. The Americans, meanwhile, stuck doggedly to protestations of neutrality without ever convincing either themselves, or the Arabs, that this was a true reflection of American policy. As one State Department Middle East specialist put it in 1954, ‘not much can be expected … until we back up our program of impartiality between the Jews and the Arabs with deeds as well as words’.148 Furthermore, the US tendency to view Middle Eastern events through a Cold War lens allowed Arab propaganda to condemn American ‘impartiality’ as hypocritical and immoral. The Lebanese


Daily Star was among those who questioned the consistency of a policy that declared ‘neutralism’ to be a bad thing for Arabs in the Cold War but a justifiable American policy regarding Israel. It was ‘morally wrong to be neutral in the face of a great evil’ the paper asserted, whether that evil was the Soviet Union or Israel.149 Western governments, beyond their ineffective appeals against communism and a rather dry reliance on the legalistic formulations of the Tripartite Declaration and, when it suited them, the United Nations, had little in their propaganda armoury to compete with the more dramatic appeals to blood, sacrifice and nationalism made in the name of both Arabs and Israelis. Ultimately, the damage to the Western position in the Middle East had been done in the 1940s and there was little that either British or American propaganda could do to recover the situation in the 1950s. As one State Department official put it in 1951, The issue of Palestine … blasted the reservoir of good-will America had enjoyed in the Near East and so alienated the Arab states from us that it will take a generation or more to overcome completely the damage done. … We in our propaganda program to that area were in the position of trying to persuade them that we love them and that the Russians are the nasty people, while in the meantime slugging them over the head on the Palestine issue.150 The defining characteristic of Western propaganda to the Arab world on the subject of Israel was awkward silence. In May 1950, Shepherd Jones told the State Department’s Information Policy Committee that Washington … just doesn’t understand how unpopular we are because of our policy in Palestine. And it seems to me these people are determined to bat us over the head a little bit because we, as they say it, have had an untenable position on the Israel problem. We just really do not fully appreciate the lost friendship that we have developed, the drop in American prestige in this very large area of millions and millions of people.151 Fellow committee members agreed, posing the question, ‘Aren’t we faced with one horrible task here … what can you do from an informational standpoint? What should we say to these people … to try to slowly mend the fence?’ Few answers were forthcoming. Jones concluded wearily that ‘The American voice will not now be believed … and if you just play music and can convince them you’re not engaged in propaganda, that is about all the best propaganda you can give’.152

6 ‘Equal Partners’? Propaganda, Anglo-American Rivalry and the Nationalist Challenge

The Americans seem anxious to build their empire on their own, and in so far as they seek our co-operation at all … seem to find us embarrassing partners. Their attitude reminds me of those advertisements warning against bad breath. Sir Henry Pelham, British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, 17 December 1952 The challenge of Arab nationalism was among the most troublesome issues with which Western propagandists operating in the post-war Middle East had to deal. The post-war consolidation of an anti-colonial political culture across the Middle East struck directly at the traditional foundations of British influence, heightened Anglo-American tensions and provided Western Cold War strategists with a major policy headache. Interpreting these issues differently, British and American propagandists approached Arab nationalism from divergent positions. The British priority was to erase the taint of colonialism attaching to them and to seek to frame Anglo-Arab relations in terms better suited to the post-war world. American propagandists were not initially confronted by the same knee-jerk anti-colonialism and when it came to the question of Anglo-American relations, US propaganda was frequently characterised by a reluctance to associate openly with the British.

A new era? The rhetoric of Anglo-Arab relations, 1945–55 As Wm. Roger Louis pointed out in his account of British imperialism in the Middle East, the Labour governments of 1945–51 identified the need 160

‘Equal Partners’? 161

for a ‘revolution in Imperial attitude’ and the recasting of Britain’s relations with the people of the Middle East on the principle of equality.1 One can trace this policy back to a memorandum written by Glubb Pasha shortly before the end of the war in which the commander of the Arab Legion expressed his belief that Anglo-Arab relations were ‘on the threshold of a new era’. A changing regional order and ‘the progress made by the Arabs’ meant that ‘the time for their assumption of complete independence has arrived’. At the same time, the nature of British interests in the Middle East meant that ‘the British Empire is obliged to make every effort to prevent other Great Powers from obtaining undue influence in that area’. Glubb suggested that this apparent contradiction made the reconfiguration of the Anglo-Arab relationship of paramount importance. ‘We must bind them to us’, he concluded, ‘by their need for protection, and by our constantly friendly, helpful and constructive attitude … our motto should be discussion not dictation’.2 The general thrust of this argument was well received, even if, J.V.W. Shaw, Acting High Commissioner for Trans-Jordan, believed that there was ‘a degree of unreality in claims of the Arabs to sovereignty and independence’. Shaw agreed that there could be no harm in dealing sympathetically with Arab nationalism, even if all that this meant in practice was ‘permitting the state in question to assume the outward appearance of … sovereignty and “independence” ’.3 This bid to transform the appearance, if not always the reality, of Anglo-Arab relations was at the heart of British psychological strategy in the Middle East in the post-war decade. The challenge was described by the British ambassador in Washington, Oliver Franks, who reported that the State Department’s George McGhee was deeply worried about our own policies and methods of approach in the Middle East. He … thinks that if we want to preserve our interests and our position we have got somehow to put a convincing new look upon our relationships with the Middle Eastern countries. At present they do not feel that we come to them as equals and partners however wise and helpful we may be as guides and advisers. Without a convincing new look, he fears an explosion, and in this, of course, he worries particularly about Egypt.4 The task for the information departments, as defined by the Eastern Department in 1952, was to ‘convince the Middle East states that we sympathise with constructive nationalism and wish to see them strong, prosperous and enjoying political, military and economic independence’.


The question was whether ‘continually harping on our desire to see the Middle East really independent’ would, given the actual direction of British policy, be sufficient to convince Arab opinion that an era of Anglo-Arab partnership and equality had really dawned.5 In practice, efforts to remove the stigma of ‘imperialism’ were thwarted by a series of contradictions between British interests and the national aspirations of the Arab states. The failure of the 1948 Anglo-Iraqi (Portsmouth) Treaty, the territorial dispute between Britain and Saudi Arabia and the longrunning state of Anglo-Egyptian antagonism combined to undermine the credibility of Britain’s ‘new era’ and ‘equal partners’ propaganda. An early sign that Britain would struggle to win over Arab nationalist opinion came with the failure of the renegotiation of Britain’s treaty relations with the Arab states. In particular, the collapse of the Portsmouth Treaty exposed the limited capability of the ‘new era’ theme. The original plan was to present the treaty as evidence of Anglo-Arab partnership, and Foreign Office drafts for Bevin’s speech announcing the treaty were full of references to ‘a new basis of equal co-operation and partnership’ and the ‘common strategic interests of … our two democracies’.6 When violence in Baghdad forced the Iraqi government to abandon efforts to ratify the treaty, British diplomats blamed the failure upon the presentation of policy rather than the policy itself. Condemning Iraq’s ‘totally ineffective’ management of public relations, the Foreign Office’s Bernard Burrows concluded that ‘We should through our own public relations organisation either have been warned that this would be so or have been prepared to look after public relations for both sides.’ At the same time, Burrows revealed the fraudulent nature of ‘equal partners’ rhetoric, stating that ‘We have in fact to adopt a dual attitude. We must negotiate as though we were dealing with an equal and sovereign power, but we must also take our own measures and precautions as though we were dealing with a protectorate.’7 In the wider Arab world, the failure of the Portsmouth Treaty was a major propaganda setback. As Arab opinion grew increasingly hostile to Britain over the situation in Palestine, Egypt and Sudan, Bevin’s policy of treaty renegotiation drew some stinging public criticism. Even Sharq al-Adna joined the chorus of disapproval, its correspondent in Damascus reporting that British policy at the moment aimed at distracting Arab attention by signing treaties which were mere scraps of paper. At the present time, when Egypt and Britain are in dispute concerning the evacuation of British forces and the Sudan, Britain extends her hand to Iraq to


conclude a treaty which is nothing but a noose around the neck of the Iraqi people.8 Anglo-Saudi territorial disputes placed strains on both Anglo-Arab and Anglo-American relations. The problem arose from conflicting claims to the Buraimi oasis, a fertile region in the south-eastern Arabian Peninsula, after Saudi Arabia, eager to claim any oil resources in the area, sent an occupying force into the oasis in 1952. Britain, acting in the name of the Ruler of Abu Dhabi and the Sultan of Muscat, rejected the Saudi claim, seeing the matter as a question of British prestige and the future of British influence in the Persian Gulf. British propaganda relating to the Buraimi dispute encompassed a range of objectives. An immediate priority was to refute the charges of imperialism levelled by the Saudis. A secondary aim was to enlist American support. Should these objectives prove impossible to achieve, British propaganda would seek to play down the dispute in a bid to keep it out of the public eye. The British initially concentrated on two main themes. They argued in favour of international arbitration, on the grounds that Saudi Arabia ‘could accept this … if her conscience were clear’. At the same time they sought to convince foreign opinion that ‘Saudi territorial claims have continually grown whereas our claims on behalf of the Trucial States, whose interests we are bound to protect, have never varied.’9 This second point was at the heart of the British refutation of Saudi accusations of ‘oil imperialism’. British policy was to be defined in terms of the need to protect the interests of two small Arab countries against a larger, expansionist power. As Burrows argued, Britain would make the case that ‘we could not, in our capacity of protecting the Trucial States, give up, or risk, the vital assets which to the best of our knowledge belong to them’.10 Accusations of colonialism were to be refuted by the claim that Britain was defending the rights of Arabs. Anglo-Saudi propaganda exchanges were often bitter. The Saudis claimed that the British blockade of the area (intended to deprive the Saudi occupiers of essential supplies) was causing indiscriminate suffering and accused the British of shooting and starving villagers into submission. Formulating a response was problematic, not least because, as Shuckburgh noted in June 1954, ‘I am informed that we have been killing or wounding two or three villagers almost every week.’11 In these circumstances, Britain’s refusal to allow an investigating commission into the area was hardly surprising since, as Eastern Department’s L.A.C. Fry observed, it could ‘hardly fail to find against us’.12 The Foreign Office stuck doggedly to News Department’s line that the blockade affected


only the Saudi occupiers and that civilians could buy all their supplies unhindered from neighbouring villages, a falsehood that was faithfully reproduced by the British press.13 When, in July 1955, Egyptian propaganda returned to the theme of starvation in Buraimi, British information officers were instructed to issue counter-allegations of Saudi and Egyptian ‘dishonesty and malevolence’.14 One is tempted to respond that British officials would have been better advised to heed the Saudi Deputy Foreign Minister’s suggestion that ‘if you stop shooting our people we will stop attacking you in the Press’.15 British propagandists succeeded in alleviating some of the worst effects of Saudi and Egyptian ‘starvation’ propaganda in July 1955. The opportunity for a skilful public relations exercise arrived when a major fire in the village of Hamasa rendered hundreds of villagers homeless. British officials immediately saw the propaganda value of a relief mission, C.A. Gault, the Political Resident in Bahrain, arguing that the Saudis could, in the circumstances, hardly object to relief and they could only prevent Sheikh Rashid accepting at the cost of much unpopularity with his own people. … As the village is predominantly pro-Saudi Arabia there might also be positive political advantage to be gained.16 The Saudis did indeed refuse to allow British forces into Hamasa to distribute the aid, arguing that British agents had deliberately started the fire. The Foreign Office quickly issued information guidance denouncing these Saudi allegations and making its own misleading claim that the relief operation was a civilian one (it was, in fact, under the control of British Army officers). Information officers across the region were instructed to gain publicity for the line that If the Saudis continue to frustrate the humanitarian work you should stress their callous disregard for the sufferings of those whom they claim as their subjects. If they give way and allow supplies to be distributed you should point out that it is only as the result of the British initiative and persistence that anything at all has been done for the victims of the fire.17 The breakdown of international arbitration proceedings in September 1955 prompted a sustained British propaganda attack. British tactics at the Arbitration Tribunal had been founded on allegations of widespread Saudi corruption and bribery. The BBC, Sharq al-Adna and the British


press were all used as vehicles to carry material on these themes with The Times, in particular, acting as a willing purveyor of Foreign Office arguments regarding Saudi bribery. When, on 16 September, the British delegation in Geneva learned that the Tribunal was about to rule against them, the smear campaign began in earnest. Privately, Shuckburgh was astonished by a decision made in the face of what he claimed was ‘overwhelming’ evidence of Saudi corruption. He concluded that the Tribunal was ‘rotten with Saudi money’ and noted that the leader of the British legal team, Sir Hartley Shawcross, was said to be ‘staggered’ at the Tribunal’s ‘incompetence and resistance to truth’.18 The British member of the Tribunal, Sir Reader Bullard, acting on the instructions of the Foreign Office (although this was denied at the time) announced his resignation with a public attack upon his Saudi counterpart, thereby collapsing proceedings before a ruling against Britain could be announced. The Foreign Office then released a statement cataloguing alleged Saudi abuses including bribery and an attempt to initiate a coup d’état in Abu Dhabi.19 Sharq al-Adna accused the Saudi Tribunal member of bribing both Tribunal members and witnesses, claiming that he was ‘not fit to be on the membership of the Commission’. The station’s news coverage denounced Saudi Arabia as a ‘backward nation’ yet to ‘catch up with the caravan of civilization’, throwing in allegations about a ‘thriving’ Saudi slave market for good measure. The Saudi royal family’s role as protectors of the Islamic holy places was also dragged through the mud, Sharq claiming that its tolerance of the slave trade was encouraging ‘pilgrims coming from overseas to bring with them certain non-Moslem servants with the idea of selling them in Mecca’.20 The breakdown of the Arbitration proceedings led directly to a British military action that ejected the Saudi occupiers on 26 October 1955. Eden’s public announcement of the operation stated that Saudi bribery and intimidation had made any return to impartial arbitration impossible and that this obliged the British Government to ‘protect the legitimate interests of the Ruler of Abu Dhabi and the Sultan of Muscat’.21 The key objective was to present the operation as one of British support for Arab rulers threatened by Saudi expansionism. Officials were instructed to publicise the idea that ‘it is the territory of two Arab states that the Saudis have been threatening and that the forces that have reoccupied Buraimi are Arab forces’.22 Propaganda targeting opinion in Iraq and Jordan played upon the long-standing enmity between the Saudis and the Hashemites as information officers put the case that ‘no state on [Saudi] borders can consider itself safe from the threat of frontier dispute … they do not consider their frontier with Iraq as settled’.23


These campaigns continued into 1956, with the key objective continuing to be that of preventing Arab opinion from being taken in by facile ‘anti-imperialist’ propaganda put out by Saudi Arabia. The Saudis’ intended victims are the small Arab Rulers of the Arabian peninsula, whose territory and possible oil resources they wish to appropriate; and the inhabitants of other Arab States, who are being systematically corrupted and shut out from fruitful co-operation with their neighbours.24 Perhaps the most formidable obstacle in the way of propaganda emphasising a new era of Anglo-Arab relations was the long-standing state of Anglo-Egyptian antagonism. Between 1945 and 1954, two issues dominated what became known as the ‘Egyptian question’, the irreconcilable British and Egyptian plans for the future of the Sudan and the presence of large numbers of British troops at the military base in the Suez Canal Zone. There had been some post-war optimism when, in May 1946, the Foreign Office attempted to bring Egypt within its conception of a ‘new era’ of Anglo-Arab relations, publicly announcing a desire to consolidate the ‘alliance with Egypt as one between two equal nations having interests in common’.25 Before long, however, the stalling of treaty negotiations led to the onset of a low intensity AngloEgyptian propaganda war. As events in Palestine added to Egyptian hostility towards Britain, the unfavourable climate of opinion that developed was one in which information officers in Cairo could achieve little. As the Counsellor at the Embassy explained in May 1948, I imagine I am right in supposing that you maintain an Information Office in Cairo primarily for the purpose of assisting the Ambassador in his negotiations with the Egyptian Government by trying to create in Egyptian public opinion a readiness to accept the policy of H.M.G. towards Egypt. This is a very, very difficult task. At present, I feel very little optimism about the possibility of making any progress in this direction.26 Anglo-Egyptian conflict in Sudan, ruled since 1899 as an AngloEgyptian condominium, stemmed from Britain’s post-war policy of refusing to accept Egyptian claims to sovereignty while encouraging the Sudanese to opt for independence once Anglo-Egyptian rule came to an end. By February 1947, the Foreign Office was advising British information officers to make ‘discreet use’ of the argument that ‘Anglo-Arab


relations can only suffer as a result of a blind adherence by other [Arab League] member States to Egyptian hegemony in the pursuit of her own ends’.27 The subsequent deterioration of Anglo-Egyptian relations led to a number of unorthodox propaganda initiatives. ‘An unusual part of [our] activities in the last quarter’, the Cairo Embassy Publicity Section informed the Foreign Office in July 1947, has been the perpetration of telegrams … primarily directed at discrediting the existing Government. … These telegrams have exposed the anti-Christian, anti-foreigner campaign that exists in Egypt today. … Factual xenophobic stories were given to the U.P. and A.P. chiefs in Cairo on several occasions.28 In the early 1950s, the Information Policy Department (IPD) had concluded that a tougher line over the Sudan might be necessary. ‘We have decided’, Christopher Barclay announced, ‘that we should now start taking a rather more direct publicity line for the benefit of the Sudanese about Independence with a view to discouraging them from thinking that any form of link with Egypt would be in their interests’.29 In particular, Barclay suggested that an ‘effective way of alerting the Sudanese against Egyptian intentions would be for the BBC and our other publicity channels in the Middle East to give publicity to any statements by Egyptian politicians which indicate that Egypt wants to control the Sudan’s defence and foreign affairs’.30 This tougher line was harder to implement in practice and IPD’s Angus Malcolm admitted in November 1951 that ‘owing to the political necessity of maintaining the fiction of the Condominium, we have had no opportunity for extending our activities … although the Sudan Government Public Relations staff in Khartoum use quite a lot of our material’.31 The situation was transformed after the Egyptian revolution of July 1952 and the conclusion of an agreement on the Sudan the following February. Hopes that the dispute had been permanently resolved proved to be misplaced, however. The agreement provided for elections to determine Sudan’s future, and fresh disagreements arose as the Britishbacked pro-independence party (‘Umma’) clashed with the National Union Party (NUP) advocating union with Egypt. Something of a mudslinging contest was initiated with British and Egyptian representatives exchanging accusations of bribery and intimidation. The BBC and Sharq al-Adna were asked to pay more attention to Sudanese issues and measures were taken to improve the propaganda value of ‘Radio Omdurman’.32 Invitations to the UK for prominent Sudanese leaders and journalists


were arranged and it was even suggested that a senior British Minister go on the Sudanese election campaign trail. Nevertheless, the propaganda momentum remained with the Egyptians. Barclay explained that The Egyptians have a positive aim in view, the winning over of the Sudan to unity with Egypt and are concentrating everything on this. We on the other hand only wish to see the Sudan independent. We are pretty certain that this will be their choice if they are left free to decide. We can only go on doing our best to expose the emptiness of the Egyptian promises and to extol the advantages of independence.33 British propaganda was thus essentially reactive, although preparations were made for an aggressive anti-Egyptian campaign should the situation deteriorate to the point where it might become necessary. These preparations resulted in a memorandum meticulously documenting examples of Egyptian perfidy in the Sudanese elections and affectionately nicknamed the ‘Grand Remonstrance’. In the event, the only use made of the ‘Grand Remonstrance’ was as a non-attributable research paper for Sharq al-Adna. In the short term, this muted approach appeared to have backfired when the NUP gained a narrow majority in the November 1953 election. Eden was singularly unimpressed, chastising officials for ignoring ‘the one issue that at present matters – winning the election in the Sudan’ and mocking the policy of sending anti-Egyptian material to The Times for non-attributable publication. ‘I cannot imagine a more futile exercise,’ he raged, ‘than stirring up our papers which the Sudanese cannot read when we have decided to do nothing.’34 In fact, the Foreign Office was playing a long-term game. The British Middle East Office (BMEO) chief, John Sterndale Bennett explained in June 1954 that although the short-term advantages were with the Egyptians, the British expectation was that they may over-reach themselves in their political and propagandist interference, and that the Sudanese may find the Egyptians to be more of a hindrance than a help in overcoming the political and economic problems of independence. … This, it seems to me, is exactly the situation in which we shall have something to offer, and we should be unobtrusively playing up and disseminating the right ideas for when that moment comes.35 Propaganda policy over the Sudan question was in fact one of the more sophisticated British responses to the challenge of Egyptian and


Arab nationalism in this period. After April 1955, British propaganda eagerly seized on the evident tension between the Egyptian and Sudanese Governments and Sharq al-Adna’s broadcasts on the subject of the Sudan took on a decidedly gloating tone. One such commentary, broadcast on 13 April 1955, delighted in the report of a ‘Sudanese Government spokesman’ that The resolution of the National Unionist Party to form an independent sovereign republic in the Sudan has caused a strong shock in Cairo because the Egyptian leaders keep on boasting that they have won the Sudan over to their side, as if they considered it their greatest victory.36 A British victory was now in sight and Sharq al-Adna was able to report that the Sudanese Premier had stated that ‘in accordance with the new Sudanese Constitution, the Sudan will become an independent republic in July 1956’.37 All that remained was to ensure that Britain’s recognition of Sudanese independence would cause maximum embarrassment for the Egyptians, a consideration that was incorporated within the ‘OMEGA’ proposals drawn up in 1956. It is instructive that success was founded on the British ability to portray themselves as the supporters of independence and the Egyptians as ‘Nile Valley imperialists’. This trick was much harder to repeat in the case of the Suez Canal Zone dispute. By 1950, Egyptian bitterness on this issue had reached a point where British officials were forced to rethink their approach. Ralph Stevenson reported that ‘we could scarcely have a worse Press’ and authorised his information staff ‘to seek out in their lairs the journalists who actually write about us and try to influence them’. Stevenson, himself decided to ‘break with tradition and give a Press Conference in the hope of winning a measure of personal goodwill’, an ordeal which, he claimed, ‘went off surprisingly well’.38 By November, Stevenson could report that his information officers were ‘on “dropping in” terms with at least one member of the staff of every paper in Cairo that matters’ and that ‘we are now in a position to ensure that our views, even on the most controversial subjects, get some kind of hearing’.39 This optimism was unduly naïve. 1951 saw a further deterioration in Anglo-Egyptian relations in the aftermath of Egypt’s rejection of British proposals for a Canal Zone settlement. When it became clear that the Egyptians were sponsoring a guerrilla campaign against British troops in the Canal Zone, the head of the Cairo Embassy’s Information


Department, R.W. Parkes, began providing IPD with material to support ‘an attack on Egyptian efforts … to present a distorted version of events here’.40 With British information work in Cairo hampered by Egyptian censorship, the centre of operations was shifted into the Canal Zone. An Egyptian propaganda campaign (which Stevenson described as having ‘out-Goebelled Goebbels’41) forced Parkes to cooperate with the BMEO and the Army in a bid to counter ‘the wildly exaggerated accounts of events in the Canal Zone put out by the Egyptian authorities’.42 The British military authority in the Canal Zone issued a daily situation report to information officers, Sharq al-Adna and the BBC, while Parkes and the BMEO published an Arabic news bulletin, the ‘Daily Truth’ and a fortnightly broadsheet, ‘News and Commentary From the Canal Zone’. The new publications, described by Stevenson as ‘a pungent and highly effective retort to Egyptian propaganda’43 emphasised the ‘criminality of what the misguided may regard as “patriotic acts” ’ and sought to ‘correct the idea given in the press that terrorism is an easy and rewarding pastime’.44 They were distributed openly in the Canal Zone where it was easier to circumvent Egyptian censorship, and a small number of copies were distributed covertly in Cairo and elsewhere.45 Stevenson later reported that British covert propaganda had been ‘spirited and imaginative’, and there were even plans for large-scale RAF leaflet drops over Port Said, Suez and Ismailia.46 The crisis peaked in January 1952 when major riots left large parts of Cairo in ruins and 26 Westerners dead. British propagandists worked hard to exploit this explosion of violence. From Beirut, Chapman Andrews reported that his information officer was putting out the line that ‘events in Cairo have not only brought shame on Egypt but have done moral harm to her cause and her associates in the Arab world’. The riots also provided an opportunity to score points in support of Britain’s Cold War objectives. ‘Arab nationalist editors,’ it was argued, who are now attacking Britain’s ‘imperialist policies and aims’ with identical … arguments and phraseology of communist newspapers, must be recognised for what they are, namely dupes or proteges of Moscow. Such themes, Chapman Andrews observed, were ‘proving effective’ with editors in Beirut and could profitably be employed elsewhere in the Middle East.47 In April 1952, Minister of State, Anthony Nutting, reflected on the opportunity that had been provided for ‘testing out our Information


machine in the Middle East’. Nutting was pleased to note that Egyptian efforts to discredit the BBC and Sharq al-Adna had passed off ‘without much result’ and he praised the ‘emergency Information operation’ mounted in the Canal Zone. ‘While one does not wish to claim too much for Information work’, he mused, ‘It was certainly gratifying … to find that Arab Governments did not feel that they need to be pushed by public opinion in their countries into giving Egypt any practical support in her difficulties.’48 Ralph Stevenson, was less optimistic. ‘The Information Department, he argued, ‘was set a virtually impossible task so far as Egyptian opinion was concerned. … I fear that the anti-British legacy of the past four unrestrained months is an alarming one.’49 The state of Anglo-Egyptian relations in the spring of 1952 persuaded the Cairo Information Department to draw up a plan for what it called ‘Operation Jolt’, a bid to shake Egyptian confidence in the wisdom of continuing intransigence. Parkes suggested threatening Egypt with the fact that ‘we are prepared … to move our base elsewhere’ or arguing that ‘with or without Egyptian cooperation we intend to stand firm in the Base’. In the event of the base being moved, Egypt would be of ‘negligible value to the Western Powers’, who in the circumstances would have no interest in equipping the Egyptian army or continuing to provide economic or financial support. The result would be economic collapse, an enfeebled army and revolution. In these circumstances when the ‘urban riffraff started cutting the throats of their urban landlords, pashas and middle classes … we would certainly not feel that our vital interests were being threatened and we would not intervene’. As a finishing touch, British propaganda could also emphasise that ‘as a result of her singularly foolish and anachronistic policy over the Sudan, Egypt is in real danger of losing all influences over that country – and all control over her vital water supplies’.50 In the event, when the security situation in the Canal Zone deteriorated once again in 1953, the propaganda battle was comparatively restrained, largely because the new Egyptian regime was engaged in a fresh round of negotiations with the British which neither side wished to jeopardise. The general approach was summarised by the BMEO’s Thomas Rapp. ‘Every effort’, he noted, ‘has been made to prevent publicity for the incidents which are occurring in the Canal Zone. … Egyptian censorship and the restraint shown by the British press have so far succeeded in preventing almost all mention of the situation’.51 ‘Whilst there remains any hope of resuming negotiations’, Stevenson agreed, it was in everyone’s interest to ‘as far as possible play down incidents’.52


This policy was not strictly adhered to by Britain’s unofficial propaganda agents. Sharq al-Adna launched sharp attacks on Egyptian leaders including one broadside against Naguib’s tendency to employ ‘expressions like “enemies”, “battle”, “selection of arms”, “self-sacrifice” and “martyrs” ’. Mocking this martial rhetoric, Sharq argued that ‘there exists no strong indication that the time to wage battle has drawn nigh’, and claimed that at a time when ‘all efforts are being exerted to preserve peace’, Naguib was deliberately creating tension by presenting ‘opportunists … wirecutters, robbers … and plunderers’ as patriots.53 As an Anglo-Egyptian agreement on the evacuation of British troops from the Suez Canal Zone began to appear increasingly likely in the second half of 1953, British planning turned to the question of how to deal with an eventual settlement. On the one hand, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence wished to counter allegations that Britain was a spent force; on the other, they wished to present withdrawal as a break with Britain’s imperial past. The problematic task was to proclaim the arrival of another ‘new era’ in the Middle East while suggesting that, in reality, nothing of substance had really changed. As the Ministry of Defence (MOD) informed British military authorities in the Canal Zone, the main objective was to counter Egyptian attempts ‘to get in early with paean of triumph on defeat for British Imperialism and represent … agreement as meaning total evacuation by Britain of Middle East bases’.54 If withdrawal from Suez was not to be interpreted as a symptom of British decline, a carefully plotted public relations campaign was essential. The question thus became one of how the concept of British power in the region could be redefined to suit the dominant climate of opinion. Sterndale Bennett provided an answer, suggesting three main publicity lines. First, he argued that evacuation of the Canal Zone did not represent an abandonment of Britain’s defence role in the Middle East, being rather ‘a re-adjustment of our defence arrangements’ in the face of ‘constantly changing circumstances and requirements’. Second, British propaganda would continue to support the idea of a collective defence organisation for the Middle East. Most importantly, it was to be stressed that Our own power … so far from diminishing is steadily on the increase and that we are now in a leading position in many of those branches of technical and scientific development which can be of most use to the defence, as well as to the peaceful development, of the free world.55


The military evidence in support of this third point was distinctly shaky. Although Britain retained military bases in the region, the main thrust of the argument was that British military strength would be maintained by a ‘strategic reserve’, a mobile force capable of deployment anywhere in the world at short notice. In practical terms, this force existed primarily on the desks of British military planners but the information agencies set gamely about the task of publicising the theme that The strength of British forces on the spot in peace time is no criterion of their potential strength in war. The development of air communications and of mechanised transport is continually altering strategy, in the sense that reinforcements can be flown in and deployed in the field with increasing rapidity.56 Sterndale Bennett’s ideas were incorporated into a resurrected ‘new era’ propaganda strategy. The rhetoric of ‘partnership’ and ‘Anglo-Arab cooperation’ provided the means by which apparently conflicting propaganda requirements could be reconciled. If British troops were to be ‘redeployed’ rather than ‘evacuated’ and if the claim of continuing military strength were to form an important part of British publicity, then the policy had to be justified in terms of a spirit of friendship and co-operation with the Arab world. British diplomats held no illusions about the difficulty of this task and the February 1954 analysis provided by Sir Charles Duke, Britain’s ambassador in Jordan, suggests that planning for withdrawal from the Suez base contained the seeds of a later anti-Egyptian propaganda strategy. Duke believed that the Egyptians might choose to regard British withdrawal ‘as a step towards driving us out of the Middle East completely’ and become ‘publicly engaged in encouraging the Jordanians and Iraqis to withhold facilities from us’. In these circumstances, he argued, ‘our propaganda would … have to be aimed at driving a wedge between the Egyptians and the Arabs further north, appealing to the self-interest and playing on the fears of the latter’.57 With the resolution of the Suez base question in sight and a spirit of optimism prevailing, British propagandists launched their campaign to ‘rebrand’ Anglo-Arab relations. The vocabulary of nineteenth-century colonialism was jettisoned, but so too was the paternalistic rhetoric of Glubb and Bevin’s post-war bid to renegotiate Britain’s relations with the Arab peoples. Eden’s ‘new era’ was to be characterised by a fresh commitment to ‘equality’ and ‘partnership’, and the Foreign Secretary himself announced his determination to forge ‘a new pattern of friendship’


in the Middle East in which the prospect of ‘a new and growing collaboration with our Arab friends’ was opened up.58 British accession to the Baghdad Pact in April 1955 was presented as evidence of British commitment to precisely these principles, and the NSC was quick to recognise that the advantages of the Baghdad Pact were ‘primarily political and psychological’.59 British propagandists embarked upon a campaign to present the new arrangements as part of the transition from an Anglo-Arab relationship based on bilateral treaties and tainted by inequality and colonialism to a new partnership based on equality and co-operation. Once again, the theme of a ‘new era’ dawning in Anglo-Arab relations had come to dominate British publicity material. On 30 March 1955, Eden made a statement to the Commons making the point that the new relationship with Iraq be couched in terms that succeeded in removing ‘any taint of patron and pupil’.60 Eden declared the Government’s underlying objective to be to forge a new association with Iraq which would bring our relations into line with those which already exist with Turkey and our other partners in NATO. The Agreement which we have now reached with the Iraqi Government … is based on the concept of co-operation between equal partners which it has been our purpose to establish generally in our relations with Middle East countries.61 Harold Macmillan, addressing the inaugural meeting of the Baghdad Pact Council, stated grandly that My country has made a great effort to establish a new relationship with the countries of the Middle East – one based on free co-operation and mutual help between equals. … I want to lay special stress on this concept of equal partnership in a common effort … I hope we can regard this Pact of ours as the beginning of a truly fruitful co-operation not only between us around this table but with others in the Middle East who have similar problems and similar interests.62 The name ‘Baghdad Pact’ was itself testimony to the way in which British rhetoric was shaped in response to the nationalist challenge. The logical title for a ‘Northern Tier’ defence organisation would have been ‘Baghdad Treaty’ or ‘Middle East Treaty Organisation’ but Arabic-speaking officials expressed a strong preference for ‘Baghdad Pact’. Robin Hooper,


from the Baghdad Embassy, explained to the Foreign Office that The Iraqi preference … comes … from a point of Arabic. The Arabic word which is normally translated as ‘treaty’ (i.e. Mu’ahadat) comes from the root ‘Ahd which means a pledge or undertaking. The word which is normally translated ‘pact’, however, (Mithaq) comes from a root (wathq) which means ‘trust’ or ‘confidence’. It means, literally, an agreement between two parties who can trust one another. To an Arabic speaker, it avoids the slightly opprobrious implication (inherent in Mu’ahadat) that the parties have tied each other up tight because they can’t trust each other if they don’t. … The fact that the so-called ‘unequal’ treaty of 1930 and the Portsmouth Treaty were styled ‘treaties’ (Mu’ahadat) in Arabic has added an emotional response to the word for all Iraqis. The Iraqi Prime Minister evidently hopes that the new word will connote a new start for Iraqi relations with foreign countries (including ourselves) on a footing of greater equality.63 US propagandists reached a similar conclusion, with the United States Information Services (USIS) officials instructed that the term ‘Baghdad Pact’ should always be used in preference to ‘Middle East Treaty Organisation’ since the latter term was ‘reminiscent of proposals made in 1951 and 1952 for a Middle East Command and a Middle East Defence Organisation (MEDO) neither of which was accepted by the states of the area’.64 The Egyptian reaction against the Baghdad Pact created a new set of propaganda problems. If British claims to be participating on an equal status with other Pact members were to be challenged at every turn then it was going to be necessary at some stage to make the point that if Arabs were equal partners, some partners were more equal than others. Despite the talk of ‘partnership’ and a ‘new era’, Britain’s vulnerability to charges of imperialism remained readily apparent. Such allegations were difficult to refute directly but for a while an alternative strategy appeared viable. In early 1956, British propagandists began to consider the possibility that Egyptian propaganda could be countered by ‘the creation of a strong Public Relations Department’ within the Baghdad Pact itself.65 The idea of using the Baghdad Pact as a mechanism for producing proBritish propaganda gained ground as it was gradually accepted that the Pact would not, in the foreseeable future, constitute a significant military force. In the meantime, British objectives could be advanced by developing multi-national public relations and counter-subversion


departments with the direct involvement of Turkey, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq. After the April 1956 meeting of the Baghdad Pact Council in Tehran, Britain’s ambassador in Iran, concluded that The main achievement of the Counter-Subversion Committee was to create a permanent secretariat under the administrative control of the Secretary General to co-ordinate, initiate and control action in the propaganda and public relations field.66 The Regional Information Office (RIO) Beirut meanwhile suggested that the Counter-Subversion Committee was likely to offer ‘a remarkable new opening for IRD material throughout the area’.67 By mid-June, a working committee on information, convened in advance of a Counter-Subversion Committee meeting in Ankara, had produced a detailed report outlining the propaganda campaigns and techniques to be initiated. It is, therefore, possible to build up a comprehensive picture of the planned role of the Counter-Subversion Committee and to see how its proposed functions matched the requirements of British propagandists. The committee identified a number of audience categories and key themes. Audiences were classed as either internal (the populations of the member nations) or external (everyone else). External audiences were graded according to an assessment of whether they were ‘Pact-hostile’ or ‘Pact-sensitive’. A guide to the propaganda themes appropriate for each audience category was then provided. ‘The Pact’, it was to be argued, is a means of ensuring the continued independence and sovereignty of its member nations especially the newly independent members. This sovereignty has been hard-won and the Pact nations, faced with the threat of aggression, intend to keep it. Together the members of the Pact are better able to maintain their sovereignty than they would be alone. … The independence and sovereignty of some of the members of the Pact have only recently been won. The Pact offers the best means to ensure that these nations will remain free and equal.68 The notion that the Pact was dedicated to economic and social development was also stressed in propaganda informing non-members that the Pact was not a closed bloc and was open to any country that wished to experience the benefits of its development programmes. In short, the Pact’s public relations machinery offered a vision of Britain working


with the other member-states for the defence of the region, the independence of the states within it and the economic well-being of Pact members. Unfortunately, the Counter-Subversion Committee produced rather less than it promised, suffering from an inability to transform ideas into practical policies and a lack of dynamism that allowed it to be overtaken by the events in the second half of 1956. In August, General Turkmen, Chairman of the Counter-Subversion Committee, noted that it was ‘painful’ to see that because of the delay in approving the Report of the Committee, ‘the permanent body would consequently be unable to begin work for some months’. Turkmen even recommended a reduction in the Counter-Subversion budget since at the present level of inactivity no harm could be done by any cut in funding.69 In examining British attempts to develop the Baghdad Pact as a propaganda instrument it is difficult to avoid a number of harsh conclusions. Without a firm American commitment, the Pact lacked the resources and dynamism to serve as an effective voice in the Middle East propaganda contest. Furthermore, in setting up Iraq as the champion of British policy in the region without providing her with sufficient political and material support, Britain contributed to the destabilisation of Nuri Said’s government. British statesmen, as Townsend Hoopes has argued, forgot ‘that Egypt is the inherent political focus of the Arab world, and underestimated the damage to Western interests that could be wrought by a resentful Nasser’.70 In looking to base Britain’s position in the region on a system of informal empire in Iraq and Jordan, Eden subordinated the campaign to reshape the traditional perception of Britain’s role in the Middle East to a doomed attempt to support Iraq in a regional power struggle with Egypt. The language and imagery of ‘new era’ and ‘equal partners’ was increasingly exposed as a ploy to undermine Egypt rather than a genuine attempt to create new foundations for British influence in the region. In these circumstances, the best efforts of British propagandists could do little to change the perception that Cairo, not Baghdad, was indeed the political centre of the Arab world. Indeed, those propagandists might have been well advised to heed the advice offered from the British Embassy in Saudi Arabia. ‘I do not think it is advisable’, argued A.C. Trott, to direct our propaganda to proving that while once we were very bad, now we are very good: that we used to be evil imperialists, but now we are altruistic benefactors. Such talk would not influence the Arabs: and they would not believe it. Indeed, it is a very arguable matter.71


‘The George III complex’: anti-colonialism and the United States Given the nature of the criticisms levelled at US policy towards Arab nationalism by British historians such as John Charmley and D.R. Thorpe,72 it is instructive to examine the idea that there existed an instinctive anticolonialism in the psychological make-up of American policymakers. When Britain’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia could complain that American diplomats had ‘anti-British complexes in their very marrow’,73 it is clearly important to explore the anti-colonial aspect of American propaganda. The United States, of course, had its own anti-colonial history and many Americans claimed a natural affinity with the independence struggles of African and Asian peoples. As John Foster Dulles told King Saud on the occasion of the latter’s 1957 visit to Washington, ‘the United States were once a colony, and Americans have not forgotten their efforts to gain freedom and independence’.74 British officials did not react well to American statements of this kind. Sir Frank Shepherd summed up their frustrations in a comment from Tehran in 1952. ‘When confronted by the peoples of the Middle East,’ he observed, ‘the Americans tend to allow the George III complex to rise within them to such an extent that they are prepared to believe almost any accusations of colonialism made against Great Britain.’75 Back in Whitehall, James Bowker agreed that ‘the anti-Colonial complex of certain Americans is one of the heaviest crosses which we have to bear’.76 Unsurprisingly, the American propaganda response to the various Anglo-Arab disputes that arose in the post-war Middle East was not always to the liking of British officials. Faced with the contradiction between a set of global Cold War interests, in which the Western alliance was valued at a premium, and regional interests in the Middle East, where open association with Britain or France was altogether less appealing, US policy makers sought to distance the US from Britain, balancing the benefits of appealing to ‘moderate’ nationalism against the damage that might be inflicted upon Anglo-American relations. The propaganda problem created by clashes between anti-colonialism and European imperialism was, of course, intricately bound up with American Cold War concerns. In 1948, Assistant Secretary of State, George V. Allen, considered the problem of nationalism in a memorandum setting out ‘US Information Objectives in the Arab States’. Foremost among American psychological objectives, he suggested, was


the need to show that U.S. policies and aims are fundamentally compatible with the preservation of the sovereignty and independence of the Arab states and that the realization of the national objectives of the U.S. are basically in accord with the national aspirations of the Arab states and their peoples.77 By the 1950s, an increasing number of American diplomats would have agreed with the views expressed by Henry Willard in a 1953 report from the American Legation in Tripoli. We cannot disregard this awakening of Arab sentiments, which even suggests the emergence of a Pan-Arab movement with actual, rather than figurative force and influence. … The growth of Arab nationalism and sense of political unity as a result of differences with the West is the dominating fact with which we should reckon in the days to come.78 In June 1953, a report considering American ‘psychological programs’ in the Middle East was presented to the National Security Council (NSC). At the heart of the report, was the acceptance that It is now clear beyond doubt that the U.K. or the U.S. or both together, cannot maintain and defend Western interests in the Middle East in the 19th Century fashion. It is clear that that the West must work toward the establishment of a new kind of relationship with the Middle Eastern states involving increased recognition of the aspirations of these countries as to their status within the community of nations. US propaganda, in other words, must be ‘designed to … convince local leaders and peoples that the age of Western imperialism is over’. While the regional trend was for American influence to grow at Britain’s expense, the NSC accepted that it remained ‘in the United States security interest for the United Kingdom to continue to assume as much responsibility as is feasible under present conditions’. At the same time, the weakening of Britain’s position and American concern that ‘the distrust of the United Kingdom … has devolved upon the United States’ made a speedy solution to Britain’s disputes with Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia a key American priority. The NSC recognised that its


analysis implied ‘a most serious problem in our relations with the United Kingdom’. Efforts by the United States, which for reasons of tradition and what we consider to be our own self interest finds itself somewhat in the middle between the British and Near Eastern positions on specific problems, are increasingly resented by the British. They interpret our policy as one which in fact hastens their loss of prestige in the area. The US has a delicate role to play under these conditions. If we are to reverse the trend in Near Eastern attitudes, we must assist in finding solutions to local problems in the area which involve its relations with the UK. … Our efforts with the UK must be such as to avoid being placed in a position where we must choose between maintenance of the NATO alliance and action on our part to keep a large portion of the world that is still free from drifting into Soviet hands.79 In a 1955 NSC paper examining the treatment of ‘nationalistic aspirations’ in the United States Information Agency (USIA) programme, concern was expressed that ‘the Communists seemed to be getting more mileage out of nationalistic aspirations in certain foreign countries, particularly in Asia and Africa, than the US is’. The USIA, it reported, ‘is working on the problem, which, as you in the field can easily understand, is not as simple as it sounds. In some countries policy considerations allow us to shout as loudly as we wish for independent nationhood; in others we must speak softly on this subject if at all’.80 Given the nature of the American dilemma, perhaps the best way of investigating how US propaganda dealt with these issues is to look at the policies adopted in response to the specific problems of Anglo-Egyptian and Anglo-Saudi relations. Signs that the American approach to the Anglo-Egyptian dispute might not be entirely to Britain’s liking were present from an early stage in the post-war period. In 1947, when Prime Minister Nokrashy Pasha wished to strengthen Egypt’s anti-British propaganda, he looked to American intelligence and propaganda veterans. Dr. Wendell Cleland, a former Office of War Information (OWI) operative working at the American University in Cairo suggested that the Egyptians seek advice from Theodore Morde, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services. Morde was subsequently appointed as a ‘non-Arabic press consultant’ providing propaganda advice to the Egyptian Government. The appointment was made with full knowledge of the US Embassy, Ambassador Tuck arguing that ‘Morde could render the Egyptian Government a useful service’.


Tuck spared only the briefest thought for British sensitivities, noting that ‘So far I have had no reaction from the British side, although I imagine that the appointment of an American in this capacity may not be altogether to their liking.’81 In the early 1950s, a number of factors suggested that an American shift towards support for the Egyptians was on the cards. The Egyptian press was beginning to adopt a more menacing tone and an Al Ahram editorial of 4 May 1950 warned that American interests would be jeopardised by continuing failure to act against Britain. ‘’We have in Egypt’, it stated, a number of rights which Britain has denied us. Until recently we held Britain alone to account, but now that America has become the leader of the Western world and can do us justice for justice’s sake, we are entitled to turn a deaf ear to her call, as long as this call belies her action. Let the Americans then first practice the truth they want to teach us. Let them begin by admitting our rights in our Canal and our Sudan.82 Egyptian propaganda of this kind touched a sensitive spot for many American policy makers. In April 1952, Richard Sanger informed the State Department that 14 Middle Eastern policy objectives had been presented to USIS Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) together with an enquiry as to how many ‘they felt they could help to accomplish … under present circumstances.’ Sanger was unhappy to learn that four of these objectives were ‘stuck on the British–Egyptian problems’. The solution, he suggested, was to ‘cut ourselves away from the imperialism of dying empires’.83 The American Friends of the Middle East (AFME) needed no encouragement in this regard and in June 1953 it issued its own set of policy recommendations. Foremost amongst these was the demand that ‘The United States should actively support Egyptian sovereignty over the Suez Canal. … Our choice must be for a friendly Egypt or a British Suez.’84 AFME continued to plug away at the Suez issue and even after the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement, remained distinctly cool in its attitude towards the British. In a pamphlet titled ‘Britain Sees The Light at Last’, Garland Hopkins looked forward to the final negotiations as a ‘test of British good faith’ and stated that the agreement marked ‘a resounding defeat for the colonialists and Zionists’. ‘Let us hope’, Hopkins concluded, ‘that this signals the permanent eclipse of their pernicious influence on British policy.’85


AFME spokesmen, however, were not responsible for official American propaganda. At no stage was this more apparent than during the crisis of 1951 when, despite private American frustration with British policy,86 the State Department’s official line remained far more sympathetic to the British than might have been expected. In fact, as the violence in the Canal Zone escalated throughout October, Acheson’s weekly information guidance to USIS posts in the Middle East continued to authorise public criticism of the Egyptians. On 10 October, PAOs were told to ‘pick up comment encouraging Egypt [to] act calmly, constructively, responsibly’.87 A week later, the official line was that the US regarded Egypt’s unilateral abrogation of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian treaty as ‘without validity’ and PAOs were authorised to criticise Egypt’s rejection of British proposals as ‘short-sighted’.88 At the end of the month, US propaganda was continuing to reflect the position that Britain had a right to maintain its position in the Canal Zone.89 It is probable that the State Department, aware of the sensitive state of Anglo-American relations at the time, made a point of adopting a position likely to be well received in Britain. Acheson informed USIS staff on 17 October that the US line could be expected to ‘ameliorate UK feelings deriving from US middleof-ground stand on Iran’.90 Under Eisenhower and Dulles, USIA’s output on the Suez dispute returned to a policy of neutralism between the British and Egyptian protagonists. An August 1953 Policy Information Statement for USIA stressed that The United States role in the dispute has been to cooperate on an informal basis with both parties in an attempt to find a mutually acceptable formula for agreement. At present, we cannot support completely either the British or the Egyptian position. We wish to avoid the appearance of endorsing positions taken by either side.91 When the 1954 Anglo-Egyptian Agreement was finally negotiated, however, Dulles went out of his way to support the British and his statement that the agreement ‘marks the beginning of a new era of closer collaboration between the States of the Near East and those of the West’ was circulated by British propagandists.92 USIA meanwhile, pressed home the idea that the agreement was a ‘constructive, peace-making event’ and worked to ‘encourage other African and Asian peoples to regard the Suez settlement as a model procedure for the liquidation of similar differences between them and the colonial powers’.93 Tensions between Britain and Saudi Arabia proved more problematic, not least because although US policy makers were keen to present


themselves as neutral observers, they found themselves drawn into the dispute through their desire to preserve their rights at the Dhahran air base and to protect the interests of the Arab-American Oil Company (Aramco). The US position on the Buraimi dispute was thus complex and ambiguous. Torn between their desire to protect and strengthen US interests and influence in Saudi Arabia and the fear of alienating their British allies, US propagandists tended to maintain an uncomfortable silence on the Buraimi dispute whilst being pressed for public support by both the British and the Saudis. In August 1953, the USIA was informed that The Buraimi Dispute has had very little publicity and, in view of the delicate nature of our position in the matter, it is in our interest that publicity be kept to an absolute minimum. It is believed that at the present time any publicity given by an official US agency to the dispute should be confined to official releases issued by one side or the other and should be balanced by including statements made by each side.94 British officials were less convinced of American even-handedness particularly when Aramco was under discussion. In 1952, officials commented on the oil company’s ‘magnificent propaganda arrangements’, noting the close co-operation between Aramco and the Saudi government and observing that Aramco’s advice to King Saud was ‘not altogether in line with the policy of the US Government’.95 Aramco’s lawyers played a leading role in drawing up the Saudi legal claim to the Buraimi oasis and by 1955, British diplomats suspected that Aramco was actively disseminating pro-Saudi propaganda in the Middle East and the United States. Harry Kern, a friend of Allen Dulles and Kermit Roosevelt, admitted to having based two anti-British articles in Newsweek on documents provided by Aramco lawyers and in January 1956, following reports that Kern had left Newsweek to take up an oil company position, British officials responded that ‘we may … expect Kern to join the Saudi/Aramco propaganda machine’.96 Official American statements, however, even after the British reoccupation of Buraimi in October 1955, remained wedded to a policy of determined neutralism. In November, USIS officials were instructed to continue plugging the theme that The United States is not a party to either dispute. We favoured arbitration in the Buraimi matter as a means of settling this dispute at


the time the agreement was signed and regret that it has so far not succeeded. We feel the continuance of the arbitration in some form is the preferable solution to the dispute.97 British officials, given their conviction that the Saudis were irretrievably corrupt and anti-Western, saw US neutrality merely as cover for behindthe-scenes support for the Saudis. The American response to British accusations of Saudi corruption lends these suspicions a degree of credibility. When the New York Times carried a story on Saudi corruption which effectively repeated the official British line, USIA was told to make ‘no confirmation from official US sources concerning British charges of Saudi Arabian activities’.98 The decision to withhold support for British allegations was taken despite the NSC’s judgement that the British had ‘a pretty good case against the Saudis’99 and an earlier recommendation that measures be implemented to ‘control Saudi use of oil revenues for bribery in other Arab states’.100 Instead, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) continued to promote the line that there was ‘no independent evidence’ of Saudi attempts to undermine the arbitration tribunal or to engage in bribery in the disputed territory itself.101 This cut little ice with Henry Luce, editorin-chief of Time-Life magazines, who told C.D. Jackson in April 1956 that The biggest scandal in the Middle East – and oh boy it’s got everything – is Saudi corruption. … Saudi money is being scattered lavishly with or without plan. … Saudi money all comes from ARAMCO. Does ARAMCO have any responsibility?102 USIA even noted in late 1955 that ‘Saudi subsidization of the press in … Arab countries’ was creating difficulties ‘in placing material favorable to the US position in the area.’103 Given this evidence, the US refusal to back Britain’s case against the Saudis looks decidedly self-serving. The prevailing attitude amongst British diplomats was that, in failing to support the British at Buraimi, the Americans were making concessions to an oil lobby that was ‘letting down the west’.104 Kirkpatrick was utterly contemptuous of the American approach, and during a particularly savage grilling of one American diplomat, enquired sarcastically whether the State Department believed that Saudi expansion should be halted ‘at any point, and if so, where?’105 Indignant British diplomats stated that ‘there is no more “British colonialism” in the Gulf than there is American “colonialism” in Saudi Arabia’,106 and Britain’s Ambassador in Washington suggested that Dulles’ reluctance to support the British


stemmed from an ‘uneasy conscience’ at his discovery that his role in Saudi Arabia was akin to that of a ‘feudal overlord’.107 Dulles, meanwhile, and rather disingenuously given his refusal to corroborate British charges of Saudi corruption, argued that ‘unwise’ British policy had resulted in ‘Saudi bribes … being used everywhere in the Middle East’.108 A measure of how far apart the British and Americans had moved can be seen in the fact that while the Americans were seeking to strengthen Saudi Arabia as a bulwark against both Nasser and the Soviets, British propagandists were working to undermine the Saudi regime. Pamphlets issued in the name of a ‘Free Saudis’ organisation were circulated in the Middle East in the summer of 1956. These leaflets drew attention to the endemic nature of ‘bribery, corruption and feudalism’ under the Saudi regime, the royal family’s neglect of its religious duties and the enormous disparity in wealth between the Saudi rulers and the ‘hungry masses’, all themes previously employed by British propagandists. The ‘Free Saudis’ promised that if this situation was not rectified, ‘we shall find ourselves obliged to demand the establishment of a new government’.109 Wilbur Eveland’s claim that British Intelligence was working against the governments of Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, reinforces the suspicion that British were engaging in covert propaganda activities against the Saudis.110 It was fortunate that given the potential for a damaging public split between Britain and the US, the Buraimi dispute, unlike Suez, never became a major public issue. In October 1955, British diplomats reported there had been no real interest on the part of the American press in Britain’s reoccupation of Buraimi.111 As far as Roger Makins was concerned, this was all to the good. Any attempts to publicise the British point of view further, he concluded, would be ‘most likely to provoke counter-propaganda on two lines, the anti-colonial, and the insinuation that our action is an attack on the US in support of British oil interests’.112 The maintenance of a tactful, if uncomfortable, silence remained the best publicity the British could hope for. As IPD put it in January 1954, the ‘less said about the dispute the better’.113

Propaganda, Arab nationalism and Anglo-American relations On October 2, 1956, John Foster Dulles gave a press conference in which he argued, with reference to the ‘so-called problem of colonialism’, that The United States plays a somewhat independent role. You have this very great problem of the shift from colonialism to independence


which is in process and which will be going on for perhaps another fifty years. … I suspect that the US will find that its role, not only today but in the coming years, will be to try to aid that process without identifying itself 100% with the so-called colonial powers, or with the Powers which are primarily and uniquely concerned with the problem of getting their independence as rapidly as possible.114 This statement caused deep resentment in Britain. On a superficial level, it seems possible to place his remarks within the general American reaction against British ‘imperialism’. This argument has been developed by John Charmley, who has argued forcefully that Churchill’s sentimental vision of the ‘Atlantic Alliance’ chained British policy in the Middle East to an American anti-colonialism that allowed anti-Western Arab nationalists to benefit from American gullibility.115 Nevertheless, such arguments are not entirely persuasive. Although Eisenhower recognised that the questions of colonialism and nationalism was a crucial issue in the battle for Middle Eastern hearts and minds, his administration balanced such considerations against its other allegiances and priorities. In October 1953, Henry Byroade made a speech dedicated to the theme of colonialism that was held up as an ‘important US policy statement’ and published in USIA’s Arabic magazines. Byroade was explicit in his judgement that ‘old-style colonialism is on the way out’ and that ‘no government has a God-given right to rule peoples other than its own’. He was happy, however, to describe the British Commonwealth as an ‘outstanding example of the kind of association which new nations may undertake without impairment of their powers to determine their own destinies’.116 Indeed, Byroade’s support for national self-determination had very precise limits. He warned that precipitate declarations of independence could only provide opportunities for ‘the new Soviet colonialism’ and might lead to the creation of states unable to provide satisfactorily for the interests of their own people. The nub of his argument was that support would only be forthcoming for moderate, evolutionary nationalist movements. In the circumstances, Byroade’s attitude towards the interests of the European colonial powers was extraordinarily supportive given the audience to which he knew his remarks would be relayed. He made a point of arguing that These European powers are our allies. … We cannot blindly ignore their side of the colonial question without injury to our own security. In particular, we cannot ignore the legitimate economic interests


which European nations possess in certain dependent territories. Nor can we forget the importance of these economic interests to the European economy to which we have contributed so much support.117 Warming to the theme, Byroade went on to announce that There has been too much talk of the ‘economic exploitation’ of dependent peoples. Too little attention has been given to the fact that economic relations between the European nations and overseas territories are often beneficial to both parties. … The sudden withdrawal of European influence would remove one of the major hopes of the dependent peoples for continued economic progress.118 To a degree that may surprise those British historians keen to condemn John Foster Dulles, Byroade’s speech was typical of the American position on British ‘imperialism’ in the Middle East. In 1956, Dulles actually took a stand to ensure that anti-colonial rhetoric did not feature prominently in American publicity. In January 1956, the US Embassy in Cairo proposed that the State Department should make a statement inviting ‘all states to cooperate in the orderly and rapid termination of colonialism in any of its forms, everywhere in the world’. Those territories and peoples currently under the colonial rule of foreign powers should receive aid and encouragement so as not to ‘further delay the development of these peoples to the end that they may freely select their own political, social and economic order’.119 Such a statement was intended to ‘recapture for the United States its traditional leadership in the world effort to raise the standards of backward peoples, dramatizing … the immense moral as well as material resources of the United States’.120 Pressure for a public statement of American anti-colonialism continued to grow and Dulles continued to resist it. Henry Cabot Lodge, ambassador to the UN, expressed concern that American policy was increasingly regarded by world opinion, particularly the young, as overly sympathetic towards the colonial ‘Colonel Blimps’ and recommended that the US should ‘go much harder on the anti-colonial side than we are now doing’. Lodge appreciated that ‘colonial powers like Great Britain and France would not welcome this resolution’ but suggested that it was ultimately ‘in their interests for us to have a good standing in areas where they cannot have it’.121 Dulles refused to budge. He informed Lodge that ‘although the President and I have frequently discussed a change in our public attitude on this subject … conditions


are not yet ripe’.122 Perhaps one explanation of Dulles’ resistance to initiatives of this kind was a belief that the existing policy of distancing the US from Britain was bearing fruit. Byroade announced to the State Department in April 1956 that the Egyptian press was clearly distinguishing between an American policy of ‘justice’ and a British approach characterised by its ‘denial of the rights of peoples and their liberties’.123 This may have been a major problem for the Foreign Office, but it was not unduly troubling for Dulles. By the mid-1950s, the Eisenhower administration had convinced itself that the days of ‘old school’ imperialism were over and that Britain would voluntarily adjust its Middle Eastern policies. British efforts to remake their image in the new language of ‘equal partnership’ reinforced this impression and, in January 1956, the Cairo Embassy announced that the recent British colonial record, rather than being a source of embarrassment, had been ‘in general good’.124 The key for USIA and the State Department was that US spokesmen should retain the ability to dodge the criticism and invectives hurled at ‘imperialists’ when British policies did fall foul of Arab nationalism. The Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) summarised American policy in a 1953 strategy paper which argued that although the British constituted a ‘serious psychological burden’, the US would ‘carefully weigh its position vis-à-vis the … British in the Middle East on an ad hoc basis so as to obtain maximum psychological benefit from a position of independence or allied solidarity as the case requires’.125 Most British statesmen struggled to comprehend this American balancing act and several concluded that American propaganda undermined Britain’s position in the region. Some were capable of remarkable outbursts of anti-Americanism, denouncing Americans as the dupes of manipulative Arab politicians. Such views were typified by Sir Alex Kirkbride’s bitter observation that The most pathetic aspects of the question are the belief of the average American that he deserves to be liked and his inability to understand why he is not when the fact becomes too obvious to be overlooked any longer. He finds consolation in blaming the whole trouble on the British.126 This was a crude caricature, and one has only to cite C.D. Jackson’s comment to the NSC in October 1953 that ‘we don’t want to be loved anyhow but simply to be respected’, to expose it as such.127


From the British Embassy in Cairo, Robin Hankey developed the anti-American theme, arguing that The fundamental obstacle … to a real unity of purpose between the Americans and ourselves in approaching the problems of the Middle East is the underlying fixed, even if almost subconscious, idea which they have of us as ‘imperialists’ and oppressors of backward races, as distinct from themselves, whom they feel to be the liberators and uplifters of the oppressed. Hankey bemoaned the failure of the British to bring home to US officials their own responsibility for Western unpopularity in the region, referring contemptuously to an Arab reaction against ‘so-called American civilisation’.128 British officials were hardly in the position to play the role of the betrayed partner as they were quite prepared to engage in decidedly ‘unfaithful’ behaviour themselves. An example can be found in a pamphlet produced by RIO Beirut in 1953. Responding to criticism from the British information officer in Baghdad that its ‘brutal frankness’ would offend nationalist sensitivities,129 RIO Beirut’s Leslie Glass explained how the leaflet was intended to serve British propaganda objectives over the future of the Suez Canal Zone base. The leaflet reproduced an article originally published in an independent American magazine, United States News and World Report, which had itself been based on information leaked to an American journalist by British military officials. It explained the strategic significance of the Suez base from an American perspective, providing a refutation of the charge that British and American views on the issue had diverged. RIO Beirut was fully aware that the leaflet might be offensive to Arab readers and pointed out that ‘we have deliberately (though of course we should deny it if challenged!) printed the little pamphlet … in order to leave room for the misapprehension that the leaflet was issued by American sources’. ‘Since the article was written by an American’, Glass continued, Any crudity or ‘brutal frankness’ in it will presumably be blamed on the American author and not on the British – while the main argument seemed to us important to put over, as also the implication of Anglo-American solidarity on the strategic issue. I admit we might hesitate to say some of the remarks about the Arabs ourselves – but the facts are correct, it suits us that such plain-speaking should be


made and this seems a good opportunity to quote the remarks from an American source.130 This was hardly the behaviour of an entirely well-meaning ally. The argument that the Americans undermined Western interests by appeasing Arab nationalism falls down on a number of counts. For one thing, it fails to consider the fact that British propaganda success against Egypt and Saudi Arabia came when it was possible to make a convincing case that the Arab states had expansionist or ‘imperialist’ motives of their own. When it came to a propaganda battle with Nasser over the Baghdad Pact or Britain’s support for conservative regimes in Jordan and Iraq, this case against ‘pseudo-nationalism’ was far harder to make and the credibility of British propaganda declined accordingly, regardless of whether or not American support was forthcoming. Second, the argument relies on a one-dimensional view of American policy. As a Chatham House study group chaired by Sir Knox Helm (and including among its members such varied political personalities as Sir John Troutbeck, Denis Healey and D.C. Watt), pointed out in its published report in 1958: America’s own traditional dislike of colonialism led easily to the assumption that the emergent ‘ex-colonial’ states would see their interests in the same terms as America did. … These emotions die hard and we cannot expect even yet that they have totally disappeared from American thinking. But at least American policy now admits that more complicated techniques will be needed to win over these former protectorates and mandated territories; and there is no longer the assumption that, because they have, like the United States, won their freedom from a colonial régime, they will be certain to follow policies which harmonize with those of America.131 Finally, and in relation to this point, the case against Dulles founders on its underestimation of the extent to which he was prepared to join with the British in the bid to counter Egyptian and Arab nationalism and minimise the regional influence of Nasser. During the 1950s, the Anglo-American partnership in the Middle East increasingly took on the appearance of a complex tangle of loyalties and interests and there is little to suggest that a major schism over the question of how to deal with Nasser and Arab nationalism was inevitable. The following chapter demonstrates the extent to which Anglo-American co-operation against Nasser was possible, remaining so until the British wilfully split from the American programme during the Suez Crisis. The study of propaganda


policy towards Arab nationalism in the 1950s, meanwhile, strongly suggests that growing Anglo-American tensions had more to do with the American belief that Western interests were better served by the maintenance of a safe distance between themselves and the British any deliberate American policy of sacrificing British interests to appease Nasser. Nevertheless, the stability of the Anglo-American relationship did come to rest on the extent to which the British were prepared to accept the unpleasant role of a protective buffer for the Americans and it was perhaps inevitable that resentments would build up over time. The cause of the eventual Anglo-American split was not that the United States was explicitly anti-British in its attitudes, it was that British pretensions to a senior role in the Anglo-American partnership were embarrassingly out of step with political reality. It was this misperception that pushed British leaders away from the policy of attempting to reinvent their relationship with Arab nationalism towards an aggressive and ultimately self-defeating defence of their own diplomatic independence.

7 ‘The Last Trump’ Anti-Egyptian Propaganda from ‘Omega’ to the Eisenhower Doctrine

It is easier to see how to use a stick to Nasser than to think of any safe carrot. Harold Caccia, 23 September 1955 O you coward, you have said that imperialism created Israel ‘to turn us into groups of refugees’. You have added that you would defend nationalism and work for extending the Arab homeland from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf. O liar, o hypocrite, o impostor, do you want the Egyptians and Arabs to laugh at this empty talk? Sincere Arabs are shedding hot tears in grief at the state into which Arabs have sunk so as to make it possible for a man like you to make such bombastic speeches and to talk about the Atlantic and the Persian Gulf at a time when you do not even think of delivering Palestine. You have broken the promise you made. You have become accursed in this and the other world. Clandestine anti-Nasser radio broadcast, 2 August 1956 This chapter examines the propaganda and psychological warfare techniques employed against Egypt in the period from the creation of the Baghdad Pact through to the 1956 Suez Crisis and the enunciation of the ‘Eisenhower Doctrine’ in January 1957. From September 1955 to July 1956, the perception of a growing Egyptian threat acted as a unifying force within Anglo-American relations in the Middle East. The identification of Nasser as the major obstacle to the pursuit of Western objectives and the bid to forge a joint policy to counteract his influence 192

‘The Last Trump’ 193

signified a major attempt to bring British and American policies back into line. Nevertheless, even before the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company in July 1956 and the Anglo-American schism that followed, it was apparent that British and American policy makers held very different views of what Nasser was a threat to and what the best means of countering his activities were. Rightly or wrongly, both Britain and the US had come to see Egypt as the chief obstacle to an Arab–Israeli settlement. At the same time, however, the main source of British hostility to Nasser was the belief that he was seeking to undermine British influence in Iraq, Jordan and the Persian Gulf. It was this idea of Nasser as an ‘Arab Mussolini’ bent upon the elimination of British influence in the Middle East that convinced Eden that the Egyptian President was a mortal danger to British interests who had to be broken. It was this sense of urgency and crisis that distorted the judgement of British leaders and created the possibility of a serious split in Anglo-American policy towards Egypt.

From alpha to omega The announcement of the Czech–Egyptian arms deal in September 1955 came as a rude awakening to complacent Western diplomats. The Foreign Office was well aware of the deal’s popularity in the Arab world and of how awkward it would be to formulate an effective public response. The initial British reaction was that direct action against Nasser was premature and might prove counter-productive. ‘We should prefer’, the Foreign Office informed British delegates at the UN, to see the effect of positive acts … before a decision is taken that we … must try to oust Nasser. It may come to that later. Even then, we should be careful not to damage our best candidate by too obvious or too early sales-promotion.1 Given the popularity of the deal, it seemed sensible to avoid mentioning it more than was strictly necessary, a consideration implicit in Macmillan’s instruction to British diplomats that ‘our objective should be … to play down as much as possible the extent of the diplomatic defeat which this deal represents for the West’.2 As African Department’s T.E. Bromley put it, ‘We do not wish … in any way to play up Egypt’s success in “tweaking the West’s nose” ’.3 Aware that Arab leaders were watching to see whether Nasser’s gamble would pay off, Harold Macmillan argued that what was needed was ‘to show that it pays to refrain from


having dealings with the Soviet Union’.4 Robin Hooper cabled the Foreign Office from Baghdad, observing that ‘Iraqis … are waiting to see whether the Egyptians, by following a “tough” policy with the West … secure for themselves a better deal than Iraq by friendliness.’5 In their efforts to present the deal as an act of irresponsibility, Western officials preferred to point the finger of blame at the Soviet Union rather than at Egypt. American Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) contrasted the ‘destructive effects of the Soviet move’ with the ‘constructive nature’ of Dulles’ speech of 26 August.6 USIA announced that ‘Our job during these developments of grave concern to the Near East is to … inform the people of the area of the past record of the USSR and the designs of international communism generally; to warn them against other communist bloc overtures … and to make clear US reasons for not wishing to see an arms race in the Near East.’7 In theory, British diplomats agreed that the best propaganda points against the deal were ‘that the result can only be an arms race and … that there is no reason to suppose that Russian motives are anything but a desire to trouble the waters in order to improve the fishing’.8 In practice, they could pursue a tougher line through the broadcasts of Sharq al-Adna. On 29 September Sharq accused the Egyptian Government of ‘short-sightedness’ over the inevitable arrival of Russian ‘technicians’ who would ‘exert influence over Egypt’ and make it harder for the government to control the Egyptian Communist Party. All Egypt had really achieved, Sharq suggested, was the acquisition of ‘another collection of arms to add to the mixed assortment she already possesses’ while taking ‘a step toward becoming a Russian satellite’.9 It was never likely that such arguments would make headway in the face of the sheer popularity of the deal throughout the Arab world. Pontificating about the dangers of Soviet imperialism simply could not compete with the emotional power of Egyptian propaganda which vigorously asserted that Nasser had struck a decisive blow for the Arab cause in their efforts to defend themselves against ‘Zionist aggression’. Aware that the Soviets might seize the opportunity to present themselves as the defenders of the Arabs against Western-backed Zionism, the United States Information Agency (USIA) was forced into the feeble plea that its opposition to the deal was not founded upon ‘any desire to see the Arabs kept in an inferior arms position’ vis-à-vis Israel.10 Even Britain’s traditional Arab allies were silenced. ‘Not even Nuri can speak out publicly against the deal’, complained African Department’s A.J. Wilton in early October.11 As Western frustration with Nasser mounted, Britain had become increasingly dependent upon its ‘special relationship’ with Iraq.


Sterndale Bennett at the British Middle East Office (BMEO) accepted that when it came to Iraq and Egypt, Britain had interests on both sides, but concluded that ‘there can be no doubt with which our sympathies lie and obviously it is of great importance that we should not alienate our greatest friend in this part of the world or weaken his hand by any suggestion that we were luke-warm in his support’.12 Subsequently, the task of building up Iraqi prestige became an important objective. As relations with Egypt deteriorated during 1955, British attitudes hardened and by December, Eden’s response to the suggestion from Dulles that the British stall on the expansion of the Baghdad Pact to avoid antagonising Nasser was simply a bluntly stated ‘No’.13 Instead, Nasser’s continuing attacks on the Baghdad Pact reinforced Eden’s determination to promote Iraq as the leading regional power. Nuri’s authoritarian regime was presented as a progressive government acting in the best interests of its citizens and British propagandists worked tirelessly to contrast Iraq with Egypt in this respect. Standard material dealing with Middle Eastern development projects was ‘spun’ so as to advance Iraqi rather than Egyptian prestige. A series of articles in Al Aalam, for example, drew attention to the opening of Iraq’s first government-owned oil refinery, the modernisation of the Iraqi health service and hospitals, the creation of Baghdad’s own television station and the development of Iraqi telecommunications.14 The idea of encouraging Iraq to make an active contribution to the British propaganda effort had been circulating in the Foreign Office for some time. In 1948, M.L. Fitzgerald had wondered whether, given that ‘the whole sphere of public relations work is, broadly speaking, a closed book to Arab governments’, there was not a need ‘to remedy the defect’. Thinking specifically of Iraq, Fitzgerald argued that ‘our own specialists could give on the spot advice in forming and operating local information services’, a policy which would bring the additional benefit that ‘such services would … be largely dependent on us for their very existence, so that they would be all the more open to our own material and influence’.15 Progress in this direction, however, was painfully slow. In March 1954, Eden suggested that Iraq might be more forthright in its propaganda output16 but such hopes were frustrated as long as Arshad al-Umari remained in power. British representatives in Baghdad reported in June 1954 that Frankly, it is no good our talking to the present Iraqi Government of anything that smacks of propaganda of any kind. The Prime Minister is well known for his old-fashioned ideas about the impropriety of propaganda in general and since the present government have


come into power all propaganda and broadcasting arrangements initiated by the last two governments of Dr. Jamali have been suspended.17 Only when Nuri returned to office in August 1954 did the Iraqis begin to formulate a systematic response to Egyptian propaganda and even then British officials found it difficult to persuade them to play an active role in other Arab countries. In January 1956 the Levant Department noted that it would be desirable if the Iraqis, as the only Arab members of the Baghdad Pact, could be persuaded to challenge the Egyptian and Saudi ‘monopoly’ on propaganda in countries like Jordan, Syria and the Lebanon. ‘The more we can encourage her to exert her influence in the uncommitted Arab States’, it concluded, ‘the better our interests will be served’.18 Britain’s attempts to persuade Iraq to join the anti-Egyptian propaganda campaign must be considered within the context of the divisions within the Arab world exposed by the creation of the Baghdad Pact. Britain’s accession to the Pact in April 1955 sparked a bitter propaganda war pitching Britain and her Baghdad Pact partners against an Arab bloc comprising Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Egypt fired its opening salvoes through the broadcasts of the ‘Free Iraq’ radio station, a clandestine station first detected by American monitors on 28 April 1955. In its own words, ‘Free Iraq Radio’ claimed to be ‘an Iraqi transmission … by the righteous sons of Iraq … [from] … somewhere in Iraqi territory’. In the spring of 1955, it attacked the Baghdad Pact as ‘enslavement’, Nuri as ‘the great deceiver’ and the Iraqi Development Board as ‘an imperialist council’.19 In May 1955 the Iraqi Government issued a communiqué blaming Egypt for the broadcasts and threatening retaliatory measures.20 In fact, someone was already hitting back at Nasser via the clandestine ‘Voice of Free Egypt’, first monitored on 6 April 1955. The broadcasters identified themselves as Muslim Brethren but a number of factors cast doubt upon the idea that the Voice of Free Egypt was the work of an independent Muslim Brotherhood opposition group. In Washington, Henry Byroade suggested that the Voice of Free Egypt did not have the ‘full flavour’ of Muslim Brotherhood propaganda. Byroade believed that the statements monitored from this radio station are more moderate than those of the local Ikhwanis [Muslim Brethren], and generally speaking, the criticism can be characterized as secular in nature rather than Islamic, which would probably not be the case if it were Ikhwani


controlled. Even with its strong Ikhwani overtones Radio Free Egypt is more anti-Nasser in its approach than it is pro-Brotherhood. … In view of the nature of the material being broadcast, therefore, it appears likely that if Muslim Brothers are involved in this clandestine radio station they do not have a free hand to conduct it in accordance with their normal inclinations.21 The most plausible explanation is that the Voice of Free Egypt was an Egyptian opposition group operating under the covert guidance of the Iraqi Government, possibly with British involvement. There is certainly evidence to suggest that British propagandists were prepared to work with the Muslim Brotherhood. In December 1951, Chapman Andrews reported that his Oriental Secretary in Beirut had established links with an individual who, it was said, ‘carries a good deal of weight in the semiclandestine Moslem religious world’. Chapman Andrews remained mildly sceptical, but stressed that this ‘does not necessarily imply that we should avoid all contact, even clandestine, with the Brotherhood or that we may not on occasion be able to turn favourable opportunities or individuals to our advantage’.22 Considering this link to the Brotherhood, Eastern Department noted that ‘We have no particular tasks that we would wish to entrust to them for the moment’, but agreed that ‘occasions may be found to turn favourable opportunities or individuals to our advantage’.23 Evidence linking the Voice of Free Egypt to Britain and Iraq is patchy although suspicions that Iraq was behind the broadcasts were expressed in a number of State Department assessments. Byroade recalled an earlier Iraqi bid to use Muslim Brotherhood clandestine broadcasts against the Shishakli regime in Syria and drew attention to intelligence from an Egyptian source (considered to be a provider of ‘fairly good information’), which suggested that four Egyptian Muslim Brothers had recently departed from Damascus into Iraq. Further evidence can be found in a State Department telegram dated 12 April 1955 which stated that the Voice of Free Egypt was operating on a frequency ‘within the normal range of the new Baghdad transmitter’ and observed that during the clandestine broadcasts, regular Baghdad Radio programmes were nowhere to be heard.24 It is speculation to suggest that official Iraqi radio service had a hand in the ‘Free Egypt’ broadcasts, but it is known that the state broadcasting services were used for a ‘special series of radio broadcasts to counter Egyptian attacks’.25 On the basis of intelligence such as this, Byroade concluded that the Voice of Free Egypt’s broadcasts were ‘probably coming from a station located in Iraq’.26


The operators of a Jordanian anti-Egyptian radio programme can be identified with a little more certainty. ‘Radio Ramallah’ (or ‘the Arab Radio Station’) was launched in January 1956 in the aftermath of the riots provoked by clumsy British efforts to pressure Jordan into joining the Baghdad Pact. Radio Ramallah was an Anglo-Jordanian attempt to counter Egyptian and Saudi propaganda and its broadcasts forcefully asserted Jordanian independence in the face of Egyptian and Saudi intrigue. Two early commentaries illustrate this approach. The first, broadcast on 9 January, declared (according to a rather clumsy translation) that We in Jordan are most anxious to keep unity of Arab front. … What is painful is that we have not found response for this desire for unity in some sister [States]. To our strong desire for unity these have not replied by deeds and words full of understanding of the meaning of unity. … Is it not strange that we should be made aware only of the wickedness of our enemies but be obliged to take precautions against the intrigues of relatives and sisters? The time has come when silence concerning these sinister deeds is a dangerous crime not only against Jordan but the whole Arab nation. The following day, a second broadcast accused Saudi Arabia of ‘buying consciences’ and ‘wanting the Arabs to remain divided in groups so that it could squander the money of the Arabs on debauchery’. Egypt was condemned as a ‘stooge, an obedient tool’, that had sold out to the ‘primitive tribal party’ of the Saudis. These commentaries, purporting to be the work of the station’s ‘political commentator’ were in fact written by King Hussein himself and British officials were sufficiently impressed to arrange for them to be rebroadcast over Sharq al-Adna.27 Egyptian listeners were quick to detect a British hand at work. Cairo Radio linked the Jordanian station directly to Sharq al-Adna, observing that imperialism, now that it has been proved to it that people have turned away from its foreign Arabic transmissions [Sharq al-Adna] after the exposure of their real position, has contemplated the setting up of a new radio which it calls ‘the Arab Radio Station’.28 Radio Ramallah’s chief announcer, Younis Bahri, was a professional Iraqi propagandist who had been denounced as the ‘Arab Lord HawHaw’ during the Second World War. Bahri made his first broadcasts on 25 January 1956 but his rather crude brand of propaganda did not prove to be a spectacular success. His habit of shouting ‘Hayyal ’Arab’


(‘Hail, Arabs’) into the microphone at every available opportunity was intended to lend the station a veneer of pan-Arab credibility. Instead, it became an object of derision. From the US Embassy in Amman, Richard Parker reported that a hearty rendition of ‘Hayyal ’Arab’ at a Jordanian social gathering was a sure way to produce a laugh amongst one’s fellow guests. Indeed, Parker dismissed Bahri’s ‘crude collection of stale tricks’ as having achieved little more than the irritation of the few Jordanians who listened to him and the provocation of a minor Jordanian Cabinet crisis. Before long, Parker was reporting that ‘no one outside the King, his immediate circle, the Arab Legion, perhaps the British Embassy, and a few “loyalists” in government wants Bahri to continue his campaign’.29 The Arab Legion also contributed to the anti-Egyptian campaign. The US Embassy drew attention to one pamphlet that played upon the idea the idea that Egypt had betrayed the Arabs in their fight against Zionism. ‘Where were you in 1948?’ it asked, Where was the Egyptian Army which marched through the country and reached Jerusalem leaving behind it all Jewish posts and aimed only at reaching Jerusalem to win a campaign of propaganda and display the Egyptian flag there? Was it not the Egyptian Army which withdrew, as a result of jealousy and greediness, leaving half the country an easy victim for the Jews? Was it not the Egyptian Army which evacuated the cities of Bethlehem and Hebron and left them without any protection? Had it not been for the forces of the Arab Legion, they would have fallen into the hands of the Jews and would have been lost with the Negeb. ‘Leave Jordan alone’, Arab Legion propagandists demanded, ‘we do not want your poisoned assistance’.30 By the spring of 1956, conditions were ripe for the formulation of the Anglo-American OMEGA plan. At the beginning of March, Eisenhower received a letter from Eden arguing that ‘a policy of appeasement will bring us nothing in Egypt’ and that ‘our best chance is to show that it pays to be our friends’.31 Such thoughts found a receptive audience in Washington and by the end of the month the State Department had committed itself to an anti-Egyptian policy that necessitated a major revision of USIA’s aims and methods. On 28 March, Dulles informed Eisenhower that the time had come to ‘let Colonel Nasser realise that he cannot co-operate as he is doing with the Soviet Union and at the same time enjoy most-favored-nation status from the United States’. Dulles, however, offered little in the way of practical propaganda proposals,


other than to recommend that ‘expanded radio facilities … be offered to Iraq to counter Egyptian broadcasts’ and that plans be made ‘for making facilities available to other countries for interference by jamming of hostile Egyptian broadcasts’.32 In fact, USIA had been moving in an antiEgyptian direction for some months. Huntington Damon, USIA’s Assistant Director for the Near East, recalled that ‘since January 1956 … the Information Service has taken steps to cut back on materials that enhance the prestige of Nasser’ with an eye to ‘playing down’ Nasser and ‘playing up’ Iraq. With the acceptance of a clearer anti-Nasser policy in March, Damon outlined USIA’s contribution to the new approach. Specifically, he reported that USIA media chiefs have been briefed on the need to avoid use of materials that enhance the prestige of Nasser and of Egypt. This is already resulting in important shifts in our content, such as: a. A movie sequence showing Nasser reviewing troops had been prepared for an area newsreel. This sequence has now been dropped. b. A Twentieth Century Fox feature on Nasser has been considerably toned down. c. Radio and press stories that might possibly tend to build up respect for the RCC program are being avoided. d. The Aswan Dam is being given the deep freeze treatment by the VOA and Press Service. e. Stories on Egypt’s land reform program which formerly were given wide press coverage will now be avoided. …h. The Franklin Book Publishing Company, which concentrates on Arab translations of standard American works, has been asked to cut down on publishing in Egypt and to have a representative who will develop translations, review materials and publishing in Beirut, Baghdad and Jordan. Damon confirmed that USIA was increasing its ‘efforts to build up the prestige of other Arab countries, particularly Iraq’ and adopting a number of measures to enhance the prestige of Egypt’s traditional rival for Arab leadership, including: (a) Our regional correspondent will spend as much as half his time in Iraq producing stories on economic development; (b) Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, where possible without United States attribution, will push stories and pictures about Iraq; (c) The News Review … will carry more material on Iraq and Libya.33


USIA asked its officers in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan to ‘paint a picture of an Iraq emerging as a progressive and forward-looking modern state drawing on Western technological skills to increase benefits to its people’.34 On the same day that Dulles’s OMEGA memorandum was presented to Eisenhower, the State Department’s Near East desk produced a more detailed analysis of the policy and its propaganda implications. This paper envisaged OMEGA as a three-phase plan. During phase one, Nasser was to receive a clear warning that he was in danger of earning the hostility of the West, but to leave room for him to mend his ways and return to the fold. It was during this stage that facilities were to be provided to friendly Arab governments to enable them to jam Egyptian radio, and that the ‘possibility of offering to Iraq expanded radio facilities to counter Egyptian broadcasts should be studied’.35 These measures would be relatively unobtrusive and would not be apparent to the Egyptian public, unless disclosed by the Egyptian Government. If required, a second phase would begin, in which a ‘sustained effort to detach Saudi Arabia from the Egyptian orbit and to bolster the position of the West in Saudi Arabia’ would be made. Unfortunately, the paragraph outlining the covert propaganda plans to accompany this policy remains classified, but we can get some idea of the nature of the State Department’s thinking from the propaganda support for phase three of OMEGA, an all-out campaign of political warfare against Nasser. Themes to be stressed included: (a) Danger of Nasser’s imperialism and threat to the Saudi Arabian throne; (b) Existence of a police state in Egypt; (c) Inherent weaknesses of Egypt, including both its army and economy; (d) Egypt’s part in opening the Middle East to Communism.36 Perhaps the key aspect of OMEGA, at least as far as the Americans were concerned, was its flexibility. Nasser would receive ample warning of the consequences of his current policies in time to reverse them and reestablish relations with the West. For the State Department, the first objective was to bring Nasser back to a policy of co-operation on the West’s terms, rather than the immediate destabilisation of Nasser’s regime. It is doubtful that Anthony Eden interpreted the plan in quite the same way. American officials were well aware of the possibility that a more extreme British interpretation of OMEGA might arise. In May, a State


Department planning report by Robert Bowie argued that Britain was ‘prepared to risk drastic and even desperate action’ to protect its interests and identified an important division between the British and American governments in relation to the implementation of OMEGA. The American position was that if Nasser showed a disposition to modify his own policies, ‘we are prepared to explore the bases for a lasting accommodation with him’. The British, meanwhile, remained ‘strongly of the opinion that the West can reach no accommodation with Nasser’.37 Unsurprisingly, British policy in the spring of 1956 reflected this more radical interpretation. On 22 March, Ambassador Winthrop Aldrich reported a conversation with Selwyn Lloyd which appears to support the claim later made by Wilbur Eveland that the British were planning a series of covert operations against Egypt and Syria.38 Lloyd told Aldrich of a number of British projects, including a ‘frontal attack’ on Nasser and the use of Iraqi troops backed covertly by Turkey and Israel in the execution of a coup d’état in Syria. Lloyd suggested that as far as the future government of Egypt was concerned, it might be possible to install a member of the Egyptian royal family or to return Nasser’s rival, Mohamed Naguib, to power.39 Eden, having at last succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister, was impatient to put Britain’s radio propaganda facilities to work against Nasser, especially as the Americans were proving slow to implement their own broadcasting plans. At an Operations Co-ordinating Board (OCB) meeting on 11 April, the Departments of Defense, State, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and USIA had agreed to ‘examine as a matter of urgency the possibility of providing on a short-term basis radio transmitting equipment for use in countering the Voice of the Arabs emanating from Cairo’.40 A fortnight later, however, the OCB reported that ‘it had not been possible to work out such arrangements and that no further action was being taken at this time’.41 British projects were further advanced. In May, Eden ordered an enquiry into the state of British broadcasting in the Middle East and swiftly received a report from his Private Office identifying four main projects.42 The first involved the resurrection of long-delayed plans to develop the BBC’s ability to broadcast its Arabic Service on medium wave. In 1956 the Arabic Service was still restricted to short wave broadcasts and it had long been recognised that if the BBC were to compete with Egyptian, Syrian and Saudi stations, it would have to begin broadcasting on the more popular and accessible medium wave. To that end, work began on plans to provide the BBC with a high-powered medium wave relay transmitter on Cyprus.43 A second project arose from the necessity


of countering Egyptian propaganda in the Arabian Peninsula. The Foreign Office wished to provide Kuwait and the Aden Protectorate with VHF broadcasting facilities. Eden enthusiastically endorsed the plan on 15 May, and the Treasury agreed to fund a ‘pilot’ VHF radio scheme in Kuwait. At this stage, however, Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd intervened. Lennox-Boyd saw few advantages in the VHF scheme, preferring a plan to establish relay transmitters for Sharq al-Adna and BBC broadcasts. ‘We have … approved a Colonial Development and Welfare scheme for two new transmitters’, he informed Eden, ‘these should be in operation not later than mid-1957.’44 Convinced that time was of the essence, Eden argued that ‘The advantage of VHF is quickness and cheapness. How much will new medium and short wave transmitters for Aden cost? In any event, we cannot wait for another year before they begin to operate.’ The Prime Minister also betrayed his lack of confidence in the BBC, arguing that while ‘the provision of vigorous material is needed. … I do not see how we can rely on the BBC for this’.45 Despite Colonial Office stalling, the VHF project remained a priority and Jack Rennie visited the Persian Gulf in June 1956 to assess the progress being made. The third project concerned the strengthening of Radio Baghdad where the British were already providing assistance on ‘technical, administrative and programming’ issues.46 Again, Eden was impatient to see results, complaining that ‘It is sad and disappointing that although it is eighteen months since I was in Baghdad, when we agreed to give first priority to a broadcasting station for Iraq, this station is still not operating.’47 Optimistic estimates stated that only one of the four transmitters that the Marconi company was supplying to Iraq would be operational by mid-July, and the second not until the end of August, by which time, of course, British plans had been rather overtaken by events. In May 1956, Selwyn Lloyd informed Eden that he had despatched Donald Stephenson, a senior BBC official, to Baghdad ‘to draw up suitable programme and technical plans for the operation of their service and he is already in Baghdad’.48 Stephenson saw himself as facilitating the projection of ‘Iraq’s internal achievements, her influence in the Middle East and her enhanced status in world affairs’.49 He was particularly keen to connect Iraq’s propaganda effort to the public relations services of the Baghdad Pact and its Counter-Subversion Committee. Iraq, he argued, was the natural leader of any campaign to project the Pact ‘as a sensible, workable, mutually helpful, fruitful and in case of need strategically powerful, organism’.50 Ultimately, Stephenson looked forward to ‘an all-Pact-country simultaneous hook-up’ with Iraq acting as the ‘organizing centre’ for


‘contributions from each of the Pact broadcasting organisations’. He went so far as to imagine the content of such broadcasts, suggesting they might consist of Mainly music (which is the only light-entertainment element common to all nations) but linking narrative in all languages to have a strong ‘pep’ content (e.g. ‘over now to Ankara, capital of a population of _____ million virile workers and soldiers, guardian of the Straits’).51 Ideas circulating in Washington were remarkably similar; it was simply that the British plans were further advanced. When USIS staff in Baghdad enquired about the possibilities of providing assistance to Iraqi radio in May 1956, the State Department’s Jesse MacKnight observed that although USIA was ‘collaborating with other US Agencies in planning for creating area-wide radio capability’ he did not believe that the present quality of Iraqi radio was sufficient to allow it to compete with Egyptian broadcasts. MacKnight, however, did express concern that ‘the United States is going to miss the boat in terms of getting someone inside … on a permanent basis. That should be our number one objective’.52 From Tehran, Robert Payne suggested that USIA consider using American membership of the Baghdad Pact Counter-Subversion Committee to effect coordinated anti-Communist-pro-Pact propaganda campaign through all media in all member Middle East countries. … Such indigenous voices in this area could prove to be most advantageous to the cause of the West.53 In the event, State Department scepticism stifled this initiative. ‘What we need to be putting our mind to’, argued MacKnight, ‘is getting each of the participating countries to do their own job. It may be harder to do, but it will be theirs and not just another United States operation. I think that means the difference between something good and having us kid ourselves’.54 While the State Department pondered its options, the British were able to run far ahead of the Americans in terms of the implementation of plans to develop Iraq’s, and the Baghdad Pact’s, propaganda capabilities. The fourth British project, and the firmest evidence that Eden was already preparing for an all-out propaganda assault, was the development of clandestine broadcasting facilities. At the end of May, Philip de


Zulueta informed Eden that Work is being carried out on two sites in Cyprus. The Services are cooperating fully (we have obtained from them equipment and supplies with a book value of £60,000). Transmitters capable of laying down a signal in Aden, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Gulf should be ready to operate in a matter of weeks.55 Towards the end of June, another member of Eden’s private staff, Guy Millard, reported that the main black radio project in the region was a ‘medium wave station located in Cyprus to serve the whole Middle East. It should be ready to operate in a few weeks’.56 While the acquisition of Arab staff remained a problem, there were also concerns about the message to be broadcast. A ‘Note on British Propaganda and Egypt’ declared that ‘the case which we would like to establish against Nasser is that he is pursuing a policy of Arab imperialism and neglecting the true interests of his own and other Arab peoples’.57 Such themes were similar to those envisaged by State Department planners during the third phase of OMEGA and ran far ahead of mainstream opinion in the Foreign Office. In a policy summary for the Prime Minister, Millard noted that Rightly or wrongly, the Foreign Office do not believe it is wise to challenge Nasser to a contest by a direct attack on his regime and policies. … The Foreign Office think that Nasser has the power to do us worse damage if he decided to throw off all restraint. … Until we can stabilise the situation in countries like Jordan and Libya, Nasser still has the power to cause us great embarrassment.58 Clearly, the Foreign Office still hoped that a propaganda war with Egypt could be avoided and that Nasser could be ‘encouraged’ to behave himself before the West embarked on a policy that would alienate him completely. In that sense, the Foreign Office’s position was closer to the State Department than the British Prime Minister. Guidance issued to information officers instructed them to ‘avoid indicating U.K. approval for the present regime in Egypt, but refrain from general attacks on the Egyptian Government. Criticism should be limited to specific and factual causes for complaint affecting British interests’.59 In the spring of 1956, therefore, signs of the two-tier policy-making structure that was to blight Britain’s handling of the Suez Crisis were


already very much in evidence. A melancholy observation made by Philip Adams from the Regional Information Office (RIO) Beirut is illuminating in this respect. Writing in April 1956, Adams noted that We have a fairly good machine for handling publicity in the Middle East region but we have extraordinarily little fresh material on which to work. By this I mean that we seem to have the means of making HMG’s policy known but that we are ourselves largely in the dark as to what it is.60 In May 1956, the Foreign Office remained committed to a cautious information policy that left room for the rehabilitation of AngloEgyptian relations and which saw OMEGA as a flexible, long-term project. Eden, on the other hand, saw OMEGA as the means to launch an immediate campaign of political warfare against Nasser. The fact that propaganda policy was increasingly being driven by Number 10 rather than the official information services is testimony to the fact that Eden was not only well ahead of the Americans in his desire to see Nasser destroyed, but out of step with his own Foreign Office. The tensions inherent in this fractured policy-making system contributed to the collapse of the joint Anglo-American policy in the second half of 1956. OMEGA was being undermined, almost before it had begun.

British propaganda and the Suez crisis Scott Lucas’ observation that British policy making during the Suez Crisis displayed an alarming vulnerability to ‘intrigue and mishap … confusion and “maverick” activity’ that produced ‘not one but several contradictory foreign policies’61 provides us with an important explanation for the failure of British propaganda. The ‘Last Battle’ mentality of senior officials combined with institutional flaws in the policy-making machine to render the effective handling of psychological operations during the Suez Crisis a practical impossibility. Nevertheless, there have been a number of revisionist efforts to rehabilitate Eden’s handling of the Suez Crisis and to suggest that the Prime Minister genuinely sought a peaceful solution before concluding, reluctantly, that Nasser’s obduracy made recourse to military action unavoidable.62 The analysis of British propaganda, however, suggests that Eden and his inner circle were seeking Nasser’s overthrow well before July 1956 and that they saw the Suez Crisis as an opportunity to bring this about using military force if necessary. The restructuring of the British propaganda instrument


does not make sense away from the context of preparations for military operations. It is difficult to explain the Egypt Committee’s creation of the Information Co-ordination Executive (ICE) under the Information Research Department (IRD) chief, Jack Rennie, effectively a ‘political warfare executive’, in any other light. As Tony Shaw points out in his account of Eden’s Suez propaganda, British psychological objectives essentially boiled down to a bid ‘to persuade domestic and international opinion of the justification of the use of force against Egypt’.63 Ivone Kirkpatrick informed overseas posts of ICE’s existence on 21 August, stating that ‘for purposes of cover and administration ICE will form part of IRD’.64 The creation of ICE was the logical culmination of Eden’s interpretation of OMEGA. Well before the Suez Crisis, the nature of IRD’s work in the Middle East had been radically changed. On 13 April 1956, at the Cabinet’s Official Committee on the Middle East, Evelyn Shuckburgh had pointed out that The Head of the Information Research Department in the Foreign Office has been given a specific brief to counter Egyptian propaganda. It might be necessary at a later stage to ask the Committee to consider whether more funds should be made available to carry out an intensive campaign.65 That Nasser now registered higher on IRD’s Middle Eastern target list than the Soviets was confirmed by a note of May 1956 informing Middle Eastern posts that The broad decision has been taken that we should counter subversion in the Middle East from whatever source it may come, and, in particular, that we should aim at diminishing Egyptian political and propaganda influence in the area. … Information Research Department has been given a new charter to include anti-subversive work in general in the field of propaganda and publicity, and, as an immediate objective, this work in the Middle East will, in IRD, take priority over anti-Communism. It has been arranged that Jack Rennie will, until further notice, devote himself to the subject, and that Norman Reddaway will take over the day-to-day running of IRD.66 By the time of the Suez Crisis, this bellicose mood had been reinforced by the prominence of Special Operations Executive (SOE) and Political Warfare Executive (PWE) veterans in the political warfare bureaucracy. Douglas Dodds-Parker, a former SOE agent, chaired an inter-departmental


advisory committee on propaganda in the Middle East and the attendance of his former SOE chief, Sir Charles Hambro, reinforced the wartime spirit. Ralph Murray, a PWE veteran and the founding head of IRD, had been called to London in April 1956 to oversee the black elements of the OMEGA programme.67 When the Suez Crisis broke, Murray was assigned to Cyprus as a psychological warfare advisor to General Keightley.68 William Stevenson (SOE’s representative in the US in 1940) and Sefton Delmer (a PWE veteran whose mastery of the propagandist’s ‘black arts’ made a lasting impression upon C.D. Jackson) were both seconded to the Arab News Agency in Cairo where their activities promptly led to the closure of the Agency’s Cairo office and the arrest or expulsion of its staff.69 Delmer was among those expelled, but he remained ‘on call’ throughout 1956 and visited Cyprus in November to investigate the feasibility of ongoing ‘black’ operations against Nasser.70 With ICE up and running by mid-August, the next task was the creation of a psychological warfare unit to be attached to the military forces preparing for operations against Egypt. Keightley made it clear in his report on the Suez campaign that he had hoped to recruit a Second World War psychological warfare veteran but settled in the end upon Brigadier Bernard Fergusson, who confessed to having no qualifications for the post of Director of Psychological Warfare other than the fact that he was available at the time.71 Unsurprisingly, his psychological warfare unit failed to distinguish itself during the Suez campaign. Another significant change to the British propaganda instrument came when the clandestine radio stations became operational. In conversation with Dulles at on 21 September, Selwyn Lloyd admitted that Britain was operating ‘two secret radio stations with which we could attack Nasser outright’.72 One of these, SCANT, operated on two transmitters with a total power of 12.5 kW and broadcast approximately one hour of spoken material at peak times to listeners across the Arab world.73 Much of the confusion regarding black radio operations during the crisis stems from the fact that a number of clandestine stations were operating under similar names. ‘Free Egypt’ or ‘Free Egyptian’ monikers were standard fare in the anti-Nasser black radio business in the 1950s and if, as seems likely, British stations operated under the names the ‘Voice of Free Egypt’ and the ‘Free Egyptian Broadcasting Station’, they are easily confused with a similarly named French station.74 This station, which began broadcasting within 48 hours of the nationalisation of the Canal Company, has often been identified as British, with Stephen Dorril claiming that the idea that it was French stemmed from IRD’s ‘mischievous corroboration’ of a mistaken Egyptian report.75 American


intelligence officials, however, identified the station as French in late August. ‘Technical evidence and analysis of the material broadcast’, they concluded, suggested that the broadcasts originated from ‘a Radio Diffusion Francaise transmitter located some fifty miles southest [sic] of Tours near the villages of Issoudun and Allouis’.76 This has not stopped Richard Aldrich from suggesting that the station could still have been connected to a British campaign, an argument which raises the interesting possibility of joint Anglo-French clandestine radio operations.77 It is probable that a British ‘Free Egypt’ radio operation was run (perhaps from Aden) during the crisis. By December, US monitors were listening to the ‘Voice of Free Egypt’, a station they regarded as distinct from the French ‘Free Egyptian Broadcasting Station’. This station was more restrained than the French broadcasts, its style and content being more closely related to a third station, the ‘Voice of Justice’, which can be identified much more clearly as a British intelligence operation. Rawnsley has suggested that the Voice of Justice was a CIA operation, claiming that a station under that name was first monitored in early 1956 but quickly disappeared from the airwaves, only to re-emerge in 1958. Pointing to the revelation by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross that these 1958 broadcasts were run by the CIA and the Agency’s later admission that it had been ‘responsible for several black anti-Nasser propaganda stations’, Rawnsley concludes that the 1956 Voice of Justice was probably an American operation.78 Although the Americans were probably conducting black propaganda against Nasser (Mohamed Heikal has claimed that clandestine American stations directed against Egypt, including one based on Rhodes, were operating in late 1955 and early 195679), little direct evidence has emerged regarding American anti-Nasser radio stations during the Suez Crisis. The Voice of Justice run by the Americans in 1958 may well have been related to the station responsible for the 1956 broadcasts, but that does not necessarily mean that CIA agents were the original operators. In the aftermath of the Iraq coup in July 1958, the British and US Governments negotiated the handover of a number of clandestine radio facilities on Cyprus. According to a July 1958 OCB report, Selwyn Lloyd had decided that four short wave transmitters, ‘formerly used by the British for gray broadcasts beamed at Syria and Egypt posing as the Voice of Truth’, were now surplus to requirements and that the Americans might make use of them. The OCB concluded that ‘some or all of these transmitters can be reactivated for such gray and black broadcasts as may be jointly desired’.80 It seems most likely that the 1956 Voice of Justice was a British station and USIA linked it directly to Sharq al-Adna


when alert monitors recognised the voices of two announcers after a microphone was inadvertently left open during a test transmission on 18 September. USIA intelligence staff concluded that ‘It is possible that the British, knowing that they, rather than the French, were being blamed for the broadcasts of the first station decided that they might as well institute programming of their own.’81 While USIA staff underestimated the scale of the British clandestine programme, they had stumbled across the most likely source of the Voice of Justice broadcasts. Another shift in British broadcasting strategy came at the end of October 1956 when the Government formally requisitioned the facilities of Sharq al-Adna. Sharq’s value had been declining throughout 1955, as the station found it increasingly difficult to maintain its nationalist credentials while pursuing an anti-Nasser agenda. In October 1955, Nasser launched a major propaganda attack on Sharq and cut off its supply of Egyptian musicians and entertainers. Ralph Poston, the Managing Director of the station, was forced to make a public apology, promising that greater efforts to accommodate the Egyptian point of view would be made in future.82 As Partner points out, ‘If this had happened before the British Government had adopted a position of open hostility to Egypt, what was likely to happen when Sharq al-Adna was ordered to carry out “offensive propaganda?” ’83 By October 1956, BBC officials had concluded that it was no longer possible ‘to justify Sharq on political or anti-Communist grounds’.84 The Foreign Office’s Paul Grey later recalled that Sharq … failed because, although it was supposed to be secretly under our control, the secret got out while the control became ineffective. At the same time it was given the impossible task of pretending to be an Arab station while still broadcasting material favourable to the British cause.85 When Sharq was requisitioned at the end of October, its regular broadcasts were replaced by those of the Voice of Britain, among the most heavily criticised of Britain’s propaganda initiatives during the entire crisis. Sir Ian Jacob condemned it as amateurish,86 while the Foreign Office received numerous reports that Arab listeners regarded it as ‘a very poor substitute’ for Sharq and ‘not worth listening to’.87 It might be thought that the creation of the ICE would have led to the creation of a more efficient propaganda instrument. In fact, this does not appear to have been the case. The main reason for this lay in the manner in which control of British policy was kept in the hands of a


closed circle around the Prime Minister. On 24 October, the same day that Patrick Dean, with the full knowledge of Selwyn Lloyd (whose Private Secretary, Donald Logan, accompanied Dean), signed the infamous Sèvres Protocol, a memorandum was issued under Lloyd’s name on behalf of Dodds-Parker’s Advisory Committee. The memorandum was based on the assumption that there would be ‘a prolonged period of negotiation and/or political and economic pressure on Nasser. If at any time the decision is taken to use force the position will change and immediate tactical needs will be paramount rather than long-term strategy’.88 This assumption was about to be made startlingly obsolete and, with the beginning of hostilities so near, it seems doubtful that the ICE could possible have had time to prepare for such a radical shift in policy. Ironically, Lloyd’s memorandum addressed this very point, stressing the Advisory Committee’s plea that it be kept informed of policy and events. Considering the possibility of a ‘new phase’ in British policy, Lloyd noted that Where such a move is contemplated, it is important that all the organs of propaganda should have as long notice as possible. Not only must propaganda agencies be given a chance to prepare the ground for any such change, and incidentally be prevented from being left too far out on a limb, but it may sometimes be possible, given sufficient advance notice, for propaganda to be used to help solve an awkward problem.89 The fact that the Committee believed the most likely shift in policy would be dealing with the standing down of military forces rather than their imminent deployment, shows exactly how far ‘out on a limb’ it was. Dodds-Parker was later to recall that his Committee had suffered from the fact that ‘no guidance and little information reached us, to enable us to formulate worthwhile proposals’ although his suggestion that the Committee was deliberately kept in the dark to ensure that no clandestine operations against Nasser were put into practice is difficult to accept.90 Despite these structural flaws, British propagandists were consistent in their efforts to promote an anti-Egyptian message in the Middle East throughout the crisis and its aftermath. Ministerial statements formed the foundation of the overt information strategy. Major statements by Eden and Lloyd in the opening weeks of the crisis were designed to put Britain’s case across to world opinion and they established the key themes of British overt propaganda in the Middle East. The idea was to


present the British position as the epitome of fairness and reason while portraying Nasser’s actions as illegitimate and reckless, a theme that emerged clearly in Eden’s parliamentary statements of 27 July and 2 August, and the BBC broadcasts of Eden and Selwyn Lloyd delivered on 8 and 11 August respectively. On 2 August, Eden attacked Nasser personally, accusing him of tearing up agreements. ‘One can have no confidence’, declared the Prime Minister, ‘in a man who does that’.91 The nub of the argument was that the canal was of too great importance to too many powers to be left in the hands of a man who could not be trusted to manage it responsibly. The information services immediately set to work plugging these themes. The London Press Service had begun to transmit initial British press reaction within hours of the announcement of nationalisation.92 Guidance issued on 30 July instructed information officers that they should ‘make full use of the Prime Minister’s statement to the Commons … and any future statements’, exploit Nasser’s claim that the Canal was an ‘Egyptian asset’, and draw attention to Nasser’s threat to imprison the former employees of the Canal Company if they refused to work for the Egyptian regime. A major early objective was to legitimise Britain’s quarrel with Nasser by presenting it as being in defence, not merely of British interests, but of the interests of the international community as a whole. The Foreign Office suggested naming Asian countries such as India, Ceylon and Pakistan as examples of the nations whose interests Britain was working to protect.93 By the time of Eden’s television broadcast of 8 August, the Prime Minister’s rhetoric had noticeably sharpened. Eden now declared that ‘our quarrel is not with Egypt, still less with the Arab world. It is with Colonel Nasser. He has shown that he is not a man who can be trusted to keep an agreement.’ The implication that Nasser’s Government was illegitimate, in that it did not represent the wishes of the Egyptian people was pursued to an extreme conclusion. ‘We all know’, Eden pronounced with an air of solemn foreboding, ‘that this is how Fascist governments behave. And we all remember, only too well, what the cost can be of giving in to Fascism’.94 Much has been made of the British attempt to cloak the events of 1956 in the rhetorical garb of the 1930s. Eden, in his memoirs, strengthened the comparison of Nasser with Hitler, accusing the Egyptian President of creating ‘concentration camps’ and of distributing Mein Kampf to his army officers.95 During the crisis itself, he preferred to equate the Egyptian leader with Mussolini, writing to Eisenhower on 5 August to observe that ‘I have never thought Nasser a Hitler, he has no warlike


people behind him, but the parallel with Mussolini is close.’96 The Information Policy Department (IPD) also made it clear, in response to a suggestion that Nasser’s actions in dealing with the Soviet Union might be compared with Hitler’s pact with the Soviets in 1939, that ‘In general we prefer to link Nasser with Mussolini and the jackals rather than Hitler and the wolves.’97 Lloyd’s broadcast of 14 August linked the appeasement analogy to the familiar theme of Nasser’s irresponsibility, arguing that We have to remember that the present ruler of Egypt is a military dictator. He played a leading part in overthrowing the Egyptian monarchy by a military coup. He removed his own leader, General Neguib, by similar methods. He now rules supreme. He can change his mind overnight. He can denounce an international agreement or imprison a British subject according to his mood of the moment. He maintains himself in power by methods so well known to us from what happened in certain countries in the inter-war years.98 Statements of this kind, however, seriously reduced the Government’s room for manoeuvre. As the crisis wore on, John Drew (the Director of Forward Plans responsible for military deception at the Ministry of Defence) pointed out that the bellicosity of early ministerial statements made it difficult to present any future settlement as anything other than a British climb-down.99 Americans observers viewed things similarly and the National Security Council (NSC) staff noted that the British were ‘deeply concerned at how they could square … a compromise with the strong positions their Government has taken publicly’.100 Another flaw in Britain’s early crisis propaganda was the manner in which the ‘appeasement’ theme tended to inflate Nasser’s stature. It was not until January 1957 that the Dodds-Parker’s Advisory Committee belatedly concluded that ‘We must avoid personal abuse and in particular any comparison with Hitler; we should whenever possible try not to name Nasser in order to avoid building him up.’101 Further difficulties stemmed from early efforts to formulate a ‘one size fits all’ message for a worldwide audience. Propaganda directed at the US, for example, was unlikely to be suitable for the Arab states, a fact pointed out by Ambassador Duke in Jordan. Duke considered that for Arab audiences, it was not a good idea to stress European dependence on the Canal, nor did he think it wise to claim that the Egyptians would prove incompetent managers of the Canal. The first theme might well appeal to American officials concerned with NATO and Western European


defence, but it could also give heart to Arab nationalists who would be delighted to find that Nasser had achieved such power over former colonial masters. As to the idea of stressing Egyptian administrative incompetence, Duke argued that this would simply cause offence and would, as likely as not, be rejected outright. Duke suggested instead that British propaganda should instead drive home the idea that Nasser’s coup would not achieve those benefits for the Egyptian people that he claimed.102 These protests struck a chord in London and a Foreign Office meeting the following day outlined the following themes to be ‘plugged’ more heavily in the Middle East: (i) Issue is not one between Western finance and the Arab world. Bandung, Asian and Southeast Asian countries are also affected. (ii) Nasser is an adventurer and a small-town Mussolini, and the Arab countries are discrediting themselves by supporting him. (iii) Nasser is not subject to Parliamentary restraint. Egyptian nationalisation of the Canal would, therefore, bring the Canal under dictatorship of one man. From an international point of view this is clearly not acceptable. (iv) In the long run, no financial good will accrue to Egypt from nationalisation, it will merely impose a further burden on her economy. (v) Nasser is given to taking unilateral action, but dislikes it in others. If the Arabs ‘rubber stamp’ his action they will then lose all dignity and become mere satellite powers. (vi) The Western powers are not incensed against the Egyptian people; they wish to be friends. Indeed, under the international scheme promoted by them, Egypt will receive substantial benefit, as is her due. (vii) If the seizure of the Canal is not opposed, there is no doubt that Nasser will then try to extend his influence over Saudi Arabia and its oil. Undoubtedly, by laying his hands on all sources of oil in the area, Nasser hopes eventually to control the whole of the Middle East.103 The key objectives were to refute the accusation that Britain’s motivations were ‘imperialist’, to undermine Nasser by playing upon rivalries and divisions in the Arab world and to suggest that Nasser was a ‘panArab imperialist’ who wished to impose Egyptian hegemony over the entire Middle East. By presenting Nasser as a tyrannical demagogue and an Egyptian imperialist, British propagandists hoped to minimise the impact of Nasser’s appeal to the wider Arab world.


Progress reports issued by the ICE reinforce these impressions. Confirming the British emphasis upon the theme of ‘pan-Arab imperialism’, these reports also cast light upon the clandestine propaganda campaign waged against Nasser. In September 1956, the US Embassy in Cairo reported the circulation among American oil companies of a pamphlet suggesting a programme to establish an Egyptian-controlled Arab committee for the purpose of ‘exploiting all Arab oil [which] would deny oil to “enemies” and supply “friends” ’. The pamphlet was designed to look like an official Egyptian Government information leaflet, its authors having taken an existing Egyptian publication on the subject of American oil exploration in Egypt and simply inserted their own ‘oil grab’ theme. US officials recognised the pamphlet as ‘black propaganda’ but failed to identify its source.104 However, an ICE progress report conclusively identifies this pamphlet as part of a British clandestine campaign. The report noted the existence of a project to copy official Egyptian publications and, in one case, incorporate an amended passage designed to suggest that the Egyptians intended to seize control of the entire Middle Eastern oil trade.105 ICE reports also demonstrate the importance of economic propaganda in the anti-Nasser campaign. It was proposed that officials watch for signs of price rises in Egypt which could be presented as evidence of the malign impact of Nasser’s policies on the Egyptian ‘man in the street’. Efforts to undermine confidence in Egypt’s financial credit and prospects of capital development were also made.106 Variations on these themes made up a significant proportion of the output of the black radio stations. One SCANT broadcast announced that In his eagerness to prove that the Canal was indispensable to the Western nations, Nasser forgot that it was also indispensable to Egypt. … Egypt has been losing money fast owing to the diversion of shipping from the Canal and the refusal of the majority of Canal users to pay shipping dues to Nasser’s authority. … Egypt’s receipts from an international waterway which costs some £E.2 million a month to maintain, will fall to the ridiculous figure of about £120,000 a month! In other words, the Egyptian people, far from receiving any benefits from the Canal, will be paying well over 1.5 million pounds a month for a useless asset! O Brothers! Nasser’s Canal venture costs the people 1.5 million a month. This is the pass to which Nasser’s self conceit and infantile policies have brought us all!107 Developing this theme, the Voice of Justice spoke of Iraq becoming ‘independent of the Canal and of Abd al-Nasir. They will extend a new


pipeline from Kirkuk to Banyas in Syria to carry 16 million tons of oil yearly. This will make the Iraqi people prosperous while Egyptians will lose 3 million pounds every year.’108 This story developed from Eden’s demand that ‘immediate steps should be taken to publicise in the Middle East any projects for new pipelines to bring oil from Iran to Iraq to the eastern Mediterranean seaboard’109 and his suggestion that the clandestine stations be used to publicise material of this kind. Within days, the Voice of Justice broadcast upon this very theme, strongly indicating that the Prime Minister was in close contact with the station’s operators.110 As well as focusing on economic themes, covert broadcasts promoted more general scare stories. The Voice of Justice claimed that Nasser’s leadership had brought severe medical shortages and that Egyptian hospitals were being forced to rely on Soviet drugs of ‘inferior quality’.111 SCANT argued that if Britain were to tear up the international agreement guaranteeing Egypt’s rights to Nile waters, There would be no water to irrigate the land, and the cotton crop … would wither and die … there would be no crops to feed the people! In other words Egypt would be ruined, brothers, utterly and completely and her people would die of starvation.112 The Voice of Justice issued a similar warning on 14 October, wondering what Egypt’s destiny should be if either ‘Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Uganda, which is a British Colony, through which the Nile passes, exercise their rights in respect to the Nile waters. There is no doubt that disaster would befall the Egyptians’.113 The logical conclusion was that Egyptians should seek to rid themselves of ‘Abd al-Nasir and his gang. It is necessary to stop the men who are leading you toward destruction’.114 The search for a pretext for British military intervention formed a vital part of Egypt Committee planning, particularly once the initial international shock at the act of nationalisation had died away. In September, this resulted ‘Operation Pileup’, a plot to bring Suez Canal traffic to a standstill. The Foreign Office and Ministry of Transport put pressure on the Suez Canal Company and the International and British Chambers of Shipping to persuade canal pilots to quit their posts on 15 September. In the meantime, Ministry of Transport plans explained how On and after September 15th sufficient ships should be routed to Suez and Port Said to cause serious congestion at entrances to Canal well beyond the capacity of remaining force of pilots to clear. All


offers of compromise methods of transit … must be refused as unsafe. Barrage of complaints to Nasser and to UK and France about unavailability of transports and unsafe conditions must be organized. … Countries concerned exercise their treaty rights to station warships at each end of the Canal. Suez Canal pilots to be placed on these ships and to be offered to ships of any nation that are held up. If by this time international body is functioning, this should be the authority under which passage of the Canal should be organised for these ships. If not, UK and France would act in its name. As soon as a convoy was organised demand should be made to Nasser for its free and unobstructed passage. If not, warships might be used to lead the convoy.115 The aim was to provoke an incident that would discredit Nasser internationally and provide justification for the use of force by Britain and France. In the event, Egyptian pilots easily overcame Anglo-French efforts to overload the system. The affair was a propaganda disaster for the British, since it demonstrated to the world that the Egyptians were more than capable of operating the Canal efficiently although this did not prevent the British from attempting to salvage some propaganda capital from the wreckage. Publicly, the Minister of Transport, Harold Watkinson, claimed that the events of 15–16 September showed that Egypt ‘has not been able to run the Canal by herself’ and that her ability to operate the Canal effectively in the future ‘remains to be seen’.116 Privately, Watkinson admitted to US diplomats that ‘the British and French have been disappointed in the Egyptian performance to date for it has belied the Suez Canal Company’s arguments that Nasser would not be able to do the job so well’.117 The secret planning and collusion that eventually led to the military phase of the crisis left British propagandists utterly unprepared and confronted them with a set of unexpected challenges. Most obvious was the need to support the official cover story, denying that British action constituted aggression and absolving Britain of the charge of collusion with Israel. Overt propaganda dedicated itself to the maintenance of the increasingly untenable position that British actions reflected the interests and values of the international community. The London Press Service (LPS) consistently referred to the British invasion of Egypt as ‘the Arab–Israeli crisis’, and IPD scoured overseas newspapers for evidence of foreign support for Britain’s position. Ministerial statements concentrated on presenting the hostilities against Egypt as a ‘police action’ designed to keep Israeli and Egyptian troops apart. The pretence was flimsy and both Lloyd and Eden lied to Parliament in denying collusion


with Israel. Lloyd’s statement of 31 October that ‘It is quite wrong to state that Israel was incited to this action by Her Majesty’s Government. There was no prior agreement between us’118 was subsequently used as the key statement in official guidance aimed at ‘killing the collusion bogey’.119 A series of mishaps beset British radio propaganda after Sharq al-Adna was taken over by the British authorities in Cyprus and relaunched as the ‘Voice of Britain’. The original plan had been to use the station to relay BBC programmes but as Paul Grey noted on 3 November, Because of the present style of the BBC Arabic broadcasts we have not carried out our original plan to relay them on medium wave from Cyprus. We have instructed Cyprus not to carry them until further notice.120 This created the immediate problem of having to fill hours of broadcast time with original material, a problem which reached acute proportions when Sharq’s Arab staff walked out en masse on 2 November.121 The following day, Sharq’s former director, Ralph Poston, made an unauthorised broadcast stating that the Arab staff remaining at the station were ‘no longer free agents’.122 BBC officials, possibly with some satisfaction, watched as the Voice of Britain was forced to begin relaying the BBC’s Arabic Service after all, and Walter Monckton was reduced to pleading with the BBC to help alleviate staff shortages.123 The appearance of BBC programmes alongside material produced by government propagandists gave the Voice of Britain a decidedly twofaced appearance, with listeners able to detect contradictions between the BBC news bulletin broadcast at 12.00 GMT and the Voice of Britain’s own bulletin at 15.00 GMT.124 Disgusted British MPs later questioned whether a station widely regarded as an official voice of the British Government should have been engaging in broadcasts accusing Nasser of having ‘gone mad’ and asking Egyptian listeners how they would like ‘to feel the cold steel of a British bayonet’ in their backs.125 A second task concerned the beginning of psychological warfare in support of military operations. The clandestine radio stations, the Voice of Britain and Fergusson’s sickly psychological warfare outfit took on the task of undermining Egyptian military and civilian morale, and calling for the overthrow of Nasser. At times the psychological warfare campaign, described by Fergusson himself as ‘ludicrously bad’, seems to have come close to farce. The printing press in Nicosia broke down, the delivery mechanism for propaganda leaflets was found to be faulty and,


when these problems were rectified and two million leaflets produced, the RAF announced that it was too busy to drop them. The RAF was probably not Fergusson’s favourite branch of the armed services by the end of the campaign. Not only did it fail to bomb Radio Cairo off the air, it damaged in transit the British radio transmitter intended to broadcast on Cairo’s frequency and when Fergusson’s ‘voice aircraft’ finally arrived in Cyprus, it was discovered that its loudspeaker equipment had been removed during a stopover in Aden.126 After the announcement of the ceasefire on 6 November, British propagandists were engaged in a process of damage limitation. Perhaps the most immediate issue was the Egyptian claim of British atrocities against civilians at Port Said. Paul Grey initially suggested that a foreign policy departure might serve to divert attention away from the issue but eventually conceded grumpily that ‘if no one has any bright ideas, my thesis falls to the ground’.127 Al Aalam magazine did attempt to deploy diversionary tactics of a sort, which if not exactly successful, were at least indicative of an impressive ability to ignore the realities of the situation. After the September edition had been dominated by an extended article on Libyan sheep farming,128 the December issue appeared to have been produced in the hope that a selection of images from the recent Miss World competition would distract Arab attention from the reports emerging from Port Said.129 The Foreign Office had few illusions about the potential impact of the Port Said allegations, particularly given Pierson Dixon’s warning that ‘the good name of the British Services really is involved’. Dixon stated that The enemy are sinking to the lowest depths, aided by unfriendly neutrals, to portray us as barbarians and we must have some counterevidence. I honestly believe that this is more important that any other single thing at the moment. The stink will last for years unless we mount a major operation in reply.130 Britain’s information services were mobilised to counter the Egyptian allegations. With Egyptian diplomats arranging screenings of a film purporting to show large scale civilian casualties and widespread damage to Port Said, in numerous foreign embassies, the Central Office of Information (COI) was ordered to respond in kind. It arranged for the production and distribution of three films: ‘The Facts about Port Said’ and ‘Report from Port Said’, which aimed at newsreel and television audiences and were made with the specific intention of refuting Egyptian


allegations of widespread death and destruction in the town, and a more general film, ‘Suez in Perspective’, which focused on the reasons for Britain’s actions at Suez (and which again stressed the care and precision with which the military operation in Port Said was carried out). ‘The Facts About Port Said’, was a detailed refutation of Egypt’s version of events. The commentary cast the Egyptians in the role of ‘propagandists’ and, over a sequence of aerial pictures of the town, claimed that Port Said’s public utilities, such as the water and sewage systems, the telephone communications system, and oil storage facilities were left undamaged or were back to normal operation within days of the cessation of military operations.131 When the work of Perdon Andersson, a Swedish freelance journalist who had been sending pro-Egyptian copy to the International News Service in Cairo, began to gain significant publicity in Scribe magazine (produced, it was believed, by an Egyptian Government agency), the British information services embarked upon a calculated smear campaign. Andersson, it was claimed, was a former member of the Swedish Nazi Party who, since 1945, had been working for the Russians before being arrested by the British authorities in Germany while masquerading as an American journalist.132 Foreign Office guidance telegrams went out to overseas posts with the result that the Foreign Office was able to declare that ‘Andersson’s activities and past are doubtless better known now, and he personally discredited.’133 Official Foreign Office guidance on the ceasefire and the question of British military withdrawal attempted to foster the illusion that Britain’s objectives had been achieved and that the ‘police action’ would now be carried on under the auspices of the UN.134 This was, unsurprisingly, an unrewarding task, as can be seen from the following ‘post-mortem’ drawn up by the British Press Section in Tehran: From the publicity viewpoint the manner in which the military operation was carried out was disastrous. … Once the operations had ended, our main aim was clearly to show that the Egyptians had sustained a crippling and humiliating military defeat and the Soviet Union a serious political setback. … What we needed from the beginning was graphic proof of Egyptian disaster. For a day or two it was enough to talk of Egyptian aircraft destroyed and tanks captured: thereafter pictures and films were needed. We have not yet received a single photograph of Egyptian tanks and prisoners taken by the Israelis. Nor have we seen one picture of Egyptian aircraft burning on the ground. To present our action in Egypt in its best light it was


necessary to show the destruction by men of machines, and to pass a veil over the inevitable destruction by machines of men.135 In these circumstances, the challenge of persuading Middle Eastern opinion that Suez represented a defeat for Nasser largely fell to the clandestine radio stations. The Voice of Justice continued to cry for Nasser’s removal after November 1956, and even tried to use Egyptian atrocity stories against the Egyptian leader, demanding that Egyptian ‘compatriots’ begin the fight to rescue our country from the injustice and oppression of Abd al-Nasir’s regime. The blood of our children, wives and brothers who were killed in Port Said because of the foolish acts of Abd al-Nasir, requires us to wreak vengeance on rapacious Abd al-Nasir.136 The campaign continued into January 1957, with the station responding to British troop withdrawal by claming that ‘even if your enemy Eden will show mercy towards you, we shall not. We shall continue to announce all your faults and crimes’.137 In the months after the ceasefire and in keeping with a shift in approach agreed by Dodds-Parker’s Advisory Committee, the station focused more on Egyptian and Syrian links with communism and on the repressive nature of the Egyptian regime, a development which was probably meant to foster the impression that British propaganda against Nasser throughout the crisis had been ‘right all along’. Syrian leaders were denounced as agents of ‘Russian imperialism’ and a broadcast of 13 January likened the Syrian trials of those arrested in the aftermath of the bungled Anglo-American coup plot (Operation ‘Straggle’) ‘to those we are accustomed to seeing in Cairo and Moscow and which are like those of the Middle Ages’. Arab listeners were invited to ‘judge for yourselves the extent of the Communist chaos which has beset our countries in the Middle East’.138 Other clandestine broadcasts played on the theme of Egyptian military defeat. In early 1957, one broadcast declared that We know that the Air Force was totally ruined although it did not participate seriously in the fight against Britain, France, and Israel. The officers also know that … Nasir prohibited the Army from fighting in Sinai, Gaza and Port Said.139 The clandestine stations were also quick with the charge that Nasser had let down the Arab world in its struggle with Israel. The Voice of Free


Egypt claimed that one consequence of the military débâcle had been the capture of ‘hundreds of Egyptian soldiers … by Israel’ and that for all the fuss made over Egypt’s arms deal with the communists, those weapons had now fallen into Israel’s hands. The station asked whether Nasser would still be in power had his military defeat been at the hands of Israel alone and urged listeners to remember Nasser as the man who had handed Aqaba, Gaza and Sinai to the Jews.140 British propaganda during the crisis was a complex and often contradictory set of processes in which, inevitably, some themes and techniques worked better than others. The fundamental problems arose from the nature of a decision-making structure that served to isolate the propagandists from the centre of power. Levant Department’s William Speares bemoaned this fact in December 1956, complaining that ‘Since none of us had any advance knowledge of the Suez operation it was quite impossible to make any advance preparations in the field of publicity or anywhere else.’141 British propagandists were aware of their own shortcomings but deeply resented the political criticism that came their way after Suez. Under attack by both the Labour opposition and senior figures in the government itself, many of those responsible for British propaganda reacted with understandable defensiveness. Perhaps, however, detailed criticism of British propagandists and their work during the crucial days of 29 October to 6 November was missing the point. The task of selling a policy so utterly out of step with Middle Eastern opinion was, in all probability, doomed from the outset. The Eden Government had forgotten the 1953 Drogheda Report’s maxim that Propaganda is no substitute for policy; nor should it be regarded as a substitute for military strength, economic efficiency or financial stability. Propaganda may disguise weakness, but the assertion of strength will deceive nobody unless the strength is there.142 When the Suez Crisis began, the official information services were preparing for a long-term campaign to discredit Nasser, largely in line with the Anglo-American OMEGA proposals. Instead, the clandestine diplomacy of Eden and his inner circle, publicly declaring a willingness to negotiate while secretly preparing for an underhand attack on Egypt, presented the propagandists with an impossible task. As Dodds-Parker, observed wearily on the last day of a traumatic year, ‘The Archangel Gabriel transmitting with Infinite Power on The Last Trump could not, prior to an Arab–Israeli settlement, sell British co-operation with France and Israel to the Arab world.’143


US propaganda and the Suez crisis If British propaganda was ultimately shaped by the Eden government’s determination to ‘get Nasser down’ and by the underhand manner in which this objective was pursued, the propaganda policy of the Eisenhower administration was dictated by a quite different set of priorities. The American decision to move against Nasser had already been made and was formally acknowledged in the OMEGA proposals. In this sense, Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company did not fundamentally change policy towards Egypt. While OMEGA was still operational, there was no need for any precipitous response that could threaten American interests in the Middle East and elsewhere. When the news of Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company broke, the advice offered to Foster Dulles from his ambassador in Cairo was unambiguous. ‘From lessons I have learned in this area since 1944’, wrote Henry Byroade, I offer my conviction that any participation in or even tacit condoning by United States Government of British military measures against Egypt would be heavily counterproductive to United States long-term and immediate interests throughout Arab countries of Near East. I can think of nothing that would set us back quicker and farther. British economic retaliation in some form would probably be expected here and would be less reprehensible than readiness to take life, but I would most strongly recommend we not associate ourselves with such steps.144 American propaganda during the crisis consistently adhered to this advice, to the extent that it seems astonishing that US policy over Suez can still be characterised as an example of ‘American duplicity’.145 Dulles set the tone for US publicity policy on 3 August. The key themes were those of moderation and respect for international law, while the use of force was explicitly ruled out. Dulles argued that military retaliation against Egypt would be against the principles of the UN Charter and would constitute a threat to global peace and stability.146 Unsurprisingly, given the emphasis on ‘waging peace’ in his re-election campaign, Eisenhower reinforced this message in his press conference on 8 August. He risked offending the Egyptians with a blunt description of the canal as an ‘international waterway’147 but the main thrust of his statement was to promote the idea that ‘the United States has every hope that this very serious dispute will be settled by peaceful means. … I can’t conceive of military force being a good solution’.148 This position


foreshadowed the argument set out in a letter to Eden in September. ‘We have two problems’, Eisenhower argued, the first of which is the assurance of permanent and efficient operation of the Suez Canal with justice to all concerned. The second is to see that Nasser shall not grow as a menace to the vital interests of the West. … The first is the most important for the moment and must be solved in such a way as not to make the second more difficult. … Suez is not the issue on which to attempt to [deflate Nasser] by force.149 The USIA faithfully reproduced this official line, with PAOs instructed that the August statements of Dulles and Eisenhower were to ‘guide all USIA output’.150 The moral high ground was firmly claimed by the US, but not initially against Britain and, until the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt, American statements were slanted against Nasser as policy continued to be governed by the OMEGA proposals. Dulles’s early statements condemned the nationalisation as an act of retaliation151 and criticised Nasser’s actions as contrary to reasonable standards of international behaviour. A rather awkward balance was struck, with US spokesmen seeking to support the principle of Egyptian sovereignty whilst questioning Nasser’s motives in actually exercising that sovereignty in the first place. USIS posts were instructed to gain publicity for the argument that The manner in which Egypt purported to nationalize the Canal does not inspire confidence that the interests of the international community or accepted standards of international conduct will be respected. Appropriate quotations from Nasser’s speeches of July 24 & 26 … may be used to expand this point.152 This was not far removed from the more moderate lines emerging from London. Moreover, Dulles’s statement of 26 September presented a number of themes that were clearly intended to undermine the prestige of the Egyptian President in a manner similar to that being developed by the British. Dulles stressed that Nasser’s actions were of doubtful economic benefit to Egypt, arguing that the ‘intensively anti-Western’ tone of the Egyptian government and press was frightening tourists away and costing Egypt the ‘foreign exchange needed to pay for the imports which the Egyptian people want’. He claimed that Egypt’s ‘rejection of interdependence’ was causing the collapse of commercial activities


dependent on foreign markets and investment before going on to argue that Nasser’s behaviour was leading international business interests to abandon thoughts of ‘enlarging and deepening the Suez waterway with consequent benefit to Egypt. … Now their thoughts are of big tankers and additional pipelines which will make it possible for nations to be less dependent upon the Suez Canal.’153 Accompanied, however, by the consistent rejection of the use of force and specific instructions to ‘avoid any personal attacks on Nasser’, American propaganda was clearly distinguishable from the kind of material emanating from British sources. News Review’s coverage of the crisis provided many clear examples of the American attitude towards the use of force. Headlines such as ‘Eisenhower Urges Continued Search for Peaceful Suez Settlement’ (13 September) and ‘U.S. urges Practical Suez Settlement – Will Not Use Force’ (27 September) set the US position out in the clearest possible manner. The divergence of British and US propaganda strategies over Suez can thus be traced back to Eden’s more radical interpretation of the OMEGA programme. If British and American objectives were broadly compatible, the methods by which those objectives were being pursued were growing increasingly far apart. One problem peculiar to American propagandists during the crisis was the need to prevent any public linkage between the Suez and Panama canals. Eisenhower and Dulles were all too aware that in stressing the importance of international control of the Suez Canal, they opened themselves to some awkward questions about the US position in Panama. A defensive propaganda campaign was launched extremely swiftly. Eisenhower expressed concern about the linkage of Suez and Panama as early as 27 July154 and at a meeting with Dulles on 8 August snapped that if the US were induced to leave the Panama Zone ‘we would take the locks with us’.155 In public, Eisenhower was more conciliatory, arguing that conditions in Suez were completely unlike those in Panama, which he described as ‘a completely national undertaking carried out under bilateral treaty’.156 The State Department’s concern was demonstrated by a memorandum drawn up with the stated objective of enabling the US to avoid ‘any precedent or step which might result in demands, from Panama or any other source, for internationalization of the Panama Canal being considered in the UN or OAS forums’.157 Guidance issued to USIA placed the need to ‘avoid any linking of the Suez and Panama Canal situations’ at the top of its list of themes to avoid in USIA output.158 The crisis for US propagandists occurred when, with the Israeli invasion of Sinai and the Anglo-French ultimatum to Egypt, it became clear that Dulles’s diplomatic balancing act between the Anglo-French


and Egyptian positions had failed. USIA turned to its radio arm to deal with the crisis. VOA’s daily broadcasting time was increased from three to eight hours on 1 November, a schedule maintained until 2 January 1957.159 Suez provided an opportunity for the Voice of America (VOA) to prove its worth after the barrage of criticism to which its Middle Eastern services had been subjected throughout the 1950s. PAOs in Beirut and Damascus subsequently expressed their satisfaction with the quality of VOA broadcasts in November 1956 and reports of a large Arab audience in Syria stood in marked contrast to reports received from that country just two years earlier.160 In its annual report to the NSC, USIA stated that the Suez Crisis had presented information problems of ‘unusual complexity’. Whilst ‘there was no question that Egypt was wronged by the invasion’, USIA’s task was complicated by the involvement of America’s NATO allies and the fact that ‘Egyptian provocations contributed to the wrongful actions’.161 Appraising its performance in November 1956, however, USIA felt able to report that ‘the adherence of the US to principle in the Suez affair was a clear fact which it was possible to exploit’.162 As had been the case during the diplomatic phase of the crisis, USIA’s output during the period of military operations was dictated by a high-level policy statement, in this case, Eisenhower’s speech of 31 October. Richard B. Gregg has identified the key themes of the speech as ‘idealism, upholding principle, law, and international commitment, all in the name of securing peace’.163 Gregg may have developed his concept of the ‘rhetoric of distancing’ in order to characterize Eisenhower’s communication of foreign policy decisions to the American electorate, but it serves equally well to describe the US approach to Britain in its Suez publicity. This is certainly true of one of the best-remembered passages, the angry assertion that ‘The United States was not consulted in any way about any phase of these activities. Nor were we informed of them in advance.’164 The speech, written by Emmet Hughes, was influenced by C.D. Jackson and his assessment of the requirements of the re-election campaign. Jackson had advised Hughes on 26 October that From here out let’s not talk about colonialism or France or Great Britain. The American people don’t really give much of a damn about France or England. What they are really and correctly interested in is America. That does not mean that there are not strong bonds, and that we are not delighted to have them as allies. It does mean that Eisenhower’s Suez rationale, if it is to have bite, must be in American terms, rather than British or French. … America wants international law to be respected and applied.


Jackson argued that US propaganda on the Suez issue should be geared to ensuring that ‘Law and Justice are invoked [and] our moral position is unassailable’.165 USIA consistently acted in accordance with this advice. Having already emphasised US support for a UN-negotiated settlement that took respect for Egyptian sovereignty into full account, News Review (which, it should be remembered, did not serve as a topical newspaper, but a summary of events usually running one or two weeks behind the daily press) was at pains to place as much distance as possible between the US and its rogue allies. US condemnation of Israel was given particular prominence, as was the Anglo-French veto of the American Resolution calling for an Israeli withdrawal and an immediate ceasefire. Within 24 hours, the Near East Regional Service Center (NERSC) Beirut had printed and distributed 64,000 copies of the text of the American resolution, to be given away in USIA’s Middle Eastern publications.166 The United Nations occupied a central place in USIA’s treatment of the crisis. A second American resolution calling for a ceasefire and withdrawal of foreign forces from Egypt was reported as having been ‘warmly endorsed’ by African and Asian countries.167 Over the following weeks, VOA and News Review would stress, time and again, the positive role of the UN and US support for the principles of international law and the independence of the peoples of the Middle East. While British propagandists adopted the language of Cold War conflict largely as a means of attracting sympathy and support in the US (for example, comparing Suez in 1956 with Greece in 1947 and publicising the details of Soviet military equipment captured from the Egyptians), the Americans saw British policies as weakening the West’s Cold War position in the non-committed countries. By mid-November, USIA staff in Jordan were warning that public opinion was shifting in favour of the Soviets168 and a Policy Information Statement was issued to USIA to counter the trend. Its declared objective was to minimize acceptance of the view that Soviet threats of action outside the UN have contributed to a settlement of the UK-French-Israel conflict with Egypt. We want to emphasise the role of the UN in handling this crisis, and the support which the US has accorded the UN in its task.169 A range of relevant themes were suggested. USIS officials were instructed to gain publicity for the lines that ‘the United States has taken the leadership in seeking a solution through the United Nations and in supporting UN efforts’ and that ‘the United Kingdom and France had


indicated their willingness to accept a cease-fire before the Soviet “threats” were made’. They were also told to publicise the more aggressive theme that the Soviet ‘threats’ of independent action outside the United Nations were directed not only against Britain, France and Israel, to whom the Soviet notes were addressed, but against the entire world community and world peace, inasmuch as they flaunted the considered opinion of the vast majority of the United Nations, and threatened to widen the area of hostilities to include other areas. … The Soviets seek to capitalize on the dispute to expand their own influence and to subvert the freedom of the Arab peoples.170 It has often been argued, not least by those engaged in the struggle at the time, that the Anglo-French escalation of the Suez Crisis squandered a golden opportunity for Western propagandists in that it completely distracted world attention from events in Hungary, with C.D. Jackson going so far as to describe Suez as a ‘Satan-sent diversion’.171 In fact, USIA made a determined effort to link the Suez and Hungarian crises, at least in its output to the Middle East, the main thrust of the argument being that Hungary exposed the hypocritical nature of Soviet position over Suez. Following Eisenhower’s speech of 31 October, USIA used the Hungarian crisis to focus on the danger to small nations of close involvement with the Soviet Union while the OCB’s Ad Hoc Committee on Middle Eastern Informational Activities specifically recommended the use of this theme in Syria. The Committee also decided that the recent joint statement by Prime Ministers of the ‘Colombo Nations’ (India, Indonesia, Burma and Ceylon) should be circulated through the United States Information Services (USIS) media in the Middle East since ‘it deplored the use of Soviet troops in Hungary and called for an end to big-power military intervention in small countries’.172 Using a similar approach, a denunciation of Soviet actions by Tito was also picked up and distributed. USIA’s media, the daily wireless file, the VOA, and various publications all did their utmost to draw the attention of their Arab audiences towards events in Hungary. When that proved unrealistic, USIA switched tactics, attempting to contrast the triumph of the (American-led) UN and the rule of law in the Middle East with Soviet refusal to allow UN observers into Hungary.173 Typical material included the following VOA commentary, broadcast on the morning of 2 November, in which it was pointed out that In Hungary, the Soviet Union is neither condemning the use of force, nor is it supporting the cause of justice. It is reportedly sending troops


into Hungary against the express wishes of Premier Nagy’s government. In the light of this development, the Soviet position in the United Nations with regard to the Middle East has occasioned, among observers, considerable skepticism. … Soviet official thinking has not accepted the principle that one code of justice applies equally to all the peoples of the world.174 That the United States reaped a short-term propaganda benefit from its policies during the Suez Crisis is clear. Indeed Eisenhower’s opposition to Israel, France and Britain could hardly have failed to boost American prestige in the Arab world. The immediate challenge came from the Soviet Union and in that contest, USIA was able to exploit the situation in Hungary to undermine Soviet protestations of concern for Egypt and the Arab world. The success of US information officers in getting the Hungarian message across to a largely uninterested Arab world was mixed, but the boost to US popularity amongst the Arab nations as a result of Suez was easily discernible. In the immediate aftermath of Britain’s humiliation, American prestige reached levels not seen for years, a fact not lost on embittered British officials. Angus Malcolm, a former head of IPD, reported that USIS officials in Tunisia were ‘not on our side’ but were cast in the role as ‘saviours of the Arabs and revelling in it’.175 In this climate, photographs of Pierson Dixon voting against the US at the UN, or of American Red Cross workers unloading medical aid at Port Said were grist to USIA’s mill. From Libya to Iraq, press reports testified to the increased prestige of the US after its stand against British aggression. The US, it was thought, had proved the sincerity of its pledges of friendship to the Arabs and the OCB was able to report that ‘USIS Cairo may be in its most favorable position since 1948’.176

The Propaganda failure of the Eisenhower doctrine The boost to American popularity provided by Eisenhower’s principled stand against Britain, France and Israel in November 1956 seemed to give USIA an unprecedented opportunity to reverse the decade-long anti-American drift in Arab opinion. Before the year was out, however, US officials were embroiled in precisely the kind of public relations disaster that they had been so adept at avoiding while Britain remained in the front line of Middle Eastern affairs. Although the Eisenhower Doctrine was not officially announced until 5 January 1957, a new policy had been in development since November 1956.177 Salim Yaqub has


argued that the Doctrine had its origins in the mood of optimism that followed Eisenhower’s election victory, with the President urging the State Department to take the lead in orienting the Arab states towards the West and calling for a major regional economic assistance programme.178 As Eisenhower saw it, if the US could harness its recently gained popularity, an accommodation with Nasser might be reached, rendering the OMEGA programme redundant. The State Department was more pessimistic. On 28 November, White House staff, in noting that Herbert Hoover ‘has emphasized within State our ultimate objective of peacefully eliminating Nasser’, revealed that OMEGA was still central to State Department thinking.179 Nevertheless, on the grounds that it ‘seemed basic that the United States must make its presence more strongly felt in the area’, the State Department also began casting around for a policy initiative. Three options suggested themselves: US accession to the Baghdad Pact; the formation of a new regional defence organisation or the construction of a system of bilateral agreements backed up by a Congressional resolution authorising the use of military force to aid Middle Eastern governments requesting assistance.180 By late November, Eisenhower’s hopes for reconciliation with Nasser had faded and the President informed Hoover, Allen Dulles, Rountree and Bowie that ‘we should work toward building up King Saud as a major figure in the Middle Eastern area’.181 Believing that the propaganda capital earned during the Suez Crisis had provided them with the freedom of action to secure some longstanding strategic objectives, Eisenhower opted for the third of the State Department’s policy options, a series of bilateral agreements backed up by a Congressional resolution. In so doing he blundered into a public relations quagmire. During the period in which the statement was drawn up, Robert Bowie noted that it was essential to avoid offending Arab nationalist opinion or to give the impression that the statement marked a US attempt to ‘replace British domination in the area’. ‘Judged by these standards’, Bowie argued on 27 December, ‘the message needs to be considerably revised’.182 Any intended revisions were rendered irrelevant when, on 29 December, the US Embassy in Cairo reported that the Egyptian press was carrying damaging reports about a forthcoming presidential request for Congressional authorisation for the use of force in the Middle East. British radio stations, in a move hardly calculated to delight American officials, were quick to treat these reports as evidence of a ‘reversal [of the] American policy against [the] use of force and against unilateral actions outside [the] UN’.183 On 31 December, Dulles admitted to


Eisenhower that he was ‘partly responsible’ for the leak after ‘giving out background’ to US reporters, whose reports had been seized upon by the Arabic press.184 US officials in the Middle East, meanwhile, sought immediate guidance to enable them to deal with the breaking storm. From Damascus, it was reported that Syrian radio had predicted a ‘wave of unrest’ in the Middle East and, in a pointed attack on the new proposals, had asserted that the Arabs themselves could fill any ‘socalled Middle East vacuum’.185 Even in Jordan, US officials noted that ‘editorial opinion appears to be crystallizing against such features of plan so far reported’, with one newspaper denouncing the proposals as ‘the democracy of the dollar and of horsemen of American movies’. A typical attack neatly summarised the propaganda fiasco into which Dulles and Eisenhower had blundered: Arabs believe that Israel is the danger that threatens them while in opinion [of ] Americans it is Russia which constitutes threat to this area. … Arabs themselves are the only ones charged with defending their homeland not Americans or others. If America wishes to win sympathy of Arabs and their cooperation in this area, then it should come to us on basis that enemies of Arabs are the Jews, British, French and imperialism. Otherwise it would be better for America to quit the East and its people.186 Unwilling to admit openly that the containment of Arab nationalism was at the heart of the Eisenhower Doctrine, the emphasis placed on the Soviet threat simply opened the United States to the charge that it was asking Arabs to abandon their existing grievances and fears. Another Jordanian newspaper report announced in the first days of 1957 that Arabs do not remember that Russia has ever attacked them in the past or is doing so at present. But Arabs know very well that Western Powers have exhausted the Arabs with aggressions. … America insists despite black history of West dealings with us that we should ignore an imminent danger and focusing our attention on an unexisting [sic] danger. It is not our concern to convince America of soundness of our viewpoint or weakness of its viewpoint. But it is our right to ask America with what authority does she speak of the Eisenhower Doctrine in Arab East? Who has asked her to come and defend us?187 From Cairo, Raymond Hare reported widespread Egyptian ‘mystification’ at American policy188 and almost all posts announced a strong reaction


against the implication that a ‘power vacuum’ existed as a result of the contraction of British and French influence. As American officials in Amman noted, Jordanians feel this slur on new found Arab independence which proves increased US interest this area merely replacement one imperialism by another. Some other phraseology new US goals here desirable in securing Arab support Eisenhower Doctrine, preferably which acknowledges claimed Arab political advances or dominant theme of independence now achieved.189 The State Department was slow to respond. Guidance issued on 3 January merely reinforced the impression that the US saw the Middle East as a Cold War battleground in which ‘UN processes may not always be completely adequate in coping with Soviet power.’190 Such statements simply fuelled Arab resentment and provided the Soviets with a receptive audience for their own propaganda. From Moscow, Charles Bohlen announced that the TASS news service was characterizing Eisenhower’s speech as ‘imperial’ and ‘colonial’191 and on 10 January, he warned that the Eisenhower Doctrine was ‘fast becoming [the] principal Soviet propaganda bogey’.192 In the first days of 1957, therefore, rather than basking in the glow of their post-Suez popularity, the State Department and USIA found themselves embroiled in a desperate campaign to explain an unpopular policy to an hostile audience. A Policy Information Statement was issued to USIA on 11 January, setting out the main themes to be employed in ‘selling’ the Eisenhower Doctrine in the Middle East. USIA was told to stress US support for ‘the full sovereignty of each and every nation in the Middle East’ and to deny any change in US attitudes towards the UN or the use of force. Most important was the need to counter the adverse publicity being generated by the concept of a ‘power vacuum’. The State Department instructed USIA to Avoid ‘power vacuum’ or ‘vacuum’, except where use of the term is required to disavow U.S. intention of trying to fill a vacuum. Refer instead to vigorous action of the nations of the area to remain free, and the willingness of the U.S. to assist them in this connection if they so desire. Finally, USIA was charged with the task of refuting British arguments that the Eisenhower Doctrine retrospectively justified the Anglo-French


military action in Egypt by ‘emphasizing that U.S. action under the proposed resolution would be taken only at the request of Middle Eastern states’.193 News Review set out to assuage the hostile reaction by stressing the continuity of the Eisenhower Doctrine proposals with the long-term American respect for the independence of the Middle Eastern nations (an argument that begs the question of why a new policy announcement was deemed necessary in the first place). Again, attention was paid to the task of dismissing the ‘power vacuum’ misunderstanding although this often resulted in an uncomfortable attempt to explain the difference between a ‘power vacuum’ and a ‘power deficit’.194 Such anaemic lines illustrate the awkward position in which American propagandists had been placed. Denials that the US was aiming to establish its own military presence in the area (necessary if Arab audiences were to be convinced that the US was not out to ‘replace’ Britain) could be twisted by hostile commentators into a statement of support for the British-led Baghdad Pact. Stressing the dangers of Soviet communism not only echoed British propaganda, it also seemed to vindicate the Arab criticism that the US was building up the Soviet threat as a means of distracting Arabs from the threat posed by Israel. Undeterred, USIA embarked upon what proved to be one of the biggest single-issue campaigns that it had yet undertaken. At a meeting of the OCB’s Ad Hoc Committee on Middle East Informational Activities on 10 January, Huntington Damon revealed that USIA’s Wireless File had been dominated by material on the President’s Middle Eastern initiative and announced plans to ‘start a new campaign in the field to gain favorable reaction to the new policy by use of contests, displays and other means’.195 On 16 January, the White House’s Staff Research Group was informed by Alfred Boerner, Chief of Plans, Policy and Programs at USIA, that the Eisenhower Doctrine had ‘been given top priority in USIA worldwide press and VOA output’. Boerner drew particular attention to the fact that ‘VOA broadcasts to the Middle East … have been stepped up, and field posts in the Middle East are instituting program actions to gain popular understanding and support.’196 Initially, USIA sought to place official advertisements in major Middle Eastern newspapers explaining the new policy. By mid-January, however, with many Egyptian newspapers refusing to accept these advertisements, USIS staff embarked upon a massive leafleting campaign. Boerner announced on 21 January that USIS Cairo was in the process of distributing more than 400,000 pamphlets, a higher figure, he pointed out, than the combined circulation of the Cairo Arabic daily newspapers.197


By March, Boerner could report that In USIS Cairo’s major campaign to publicize the Eisenhower Middle East Plan over 776,000 copies of the President’s speech, explanatory pamphlets, leaflets and newsletters were distributed. In addition, paid advertisements explaining the proposal were placed in the major daily and weekly Arabic language newspapers.198 It is to be doubted that even a campaign which eventually led to the distribution of over a million leaflets and news releases199 could be of much effect in the face of the implacable hostility of the Egyptian Government. Anwar Sadat, one of Nasser’s closest political allies, was particularly colourful in his denunciations of American policy. US officials in Cairo reported that Sadat had dismissed Eisenhower’s statement as a bid to ‘impose American protection on Mid-East with dollars and with soldiers and with tanks’ before accusing the President of ‘kindling the first sparks of World War III’.200 On another occasion, Sadat described Dulles as being ‘as arrogant as Eden at his peak’.201 For the first time, USIA was faced with a large-scale Arab propaganda campaign to depict the US as ‘imperialist’ and its staff were somewhat at a loss as to what was to be done. Certainly officials were taken aback by the local hostility with which the Eisenhower Doctrine was received. In March, USIA was informed that the Egyptian Ministry of Education had ordered ‘the destruction of materials on the Eisenhower proposals’ which USIS staff had arranged to be delivered to ‘all of the schoolmasters and teachers in Egypt’.202 In April, USIA reported that Nasser was stepping up both his attacks on the US and his counter-propaganda campaign against USIA’s efforts to promote the Eisenhower Doctrine. Boerner informed the White House on 15 April that A vicious anti-American pamphlet, attacking the President’s Middle East Plan is being widely distributed and advertised in Egypt in a campaign that in many ways parallels the techniques used by USIS to spread information on the Eisenhower proposals. Violently nationalistic in tone, the pamphlet is believed to be subsidised by the Egyptian Government to offset the impact of the previous USIS pamphlets explaining the US stand on the Near East.203 The indecisive nature of the American response is clear from the halfhearted guidelines adopted to govern anti-Egyptian themes and USIA output on Nasser. In January, the OCB had suggested providing


‘appropriate publicity of the illegal activities Egyptian military attaches and Egyptian teachers, and expulsion of foreign students from Egyptian schools for refusal to demonstrate against Great Britain’ as one of the specific information projects to be undertaken in the Middle East.204 By March, however, despite the intensification of Egyptian anti-American propaganda, USIA was informed that ‘USIA output on Nasser should not be actively hostile’. The State Department continued to advocate a policy in keeping with the early stages of the OMEGA proposals. USIA was not ‘to take a “soft” attitude towards Egyptian actions which cause concern’, but it was stressed that ‘an unpublicized diplomatic effort rather than public attacks on Nasser offer the best possibility for obtaining a reasonable Egyptian response to our efforts to settle outstanding problems’.205 Given that American propagandists had long understood the difficulties faced by British officials operating under the disadvantage of being identified as ‘imperialist’, it is remarkable how unprepared they were to deal with charges of ‘American imperialism’ once the British were no longer on the political front line. It is entirely possible that the State Department’s continuing determination to ‘eliminate Nasser by peaceful means’ would have led to a nationalist reaction against the US with or without the bungled launch of the Eisenhower Doctrine. Nevertheless, Boerner concluded in July that the main reason for Egyptian antiAmericanism ‘appears to be reaction and anger over what the Nasser regime believes to be the US role in isolating Egypt from the Arab bloc’206 and it is clear that the Eisenhower Doctrine formed a key part of that policy of isolation. In drawing the fire of the Arab nationalist movement upon ‘American imperialism’, the Eisenhower Doctrine represented a major propaganda failure. It did not help that the new policy was based on a set of ultimately indefensible positions, most notably of course, that it was primarily an anti-Soviet and anti-communist rather than an anti-nationalist measure. The essence of the problem confronting American propagandists was identified by Earl Newsom in a report delivered to the OCB on 22 January. Newsom argued that There is a grave danger in the ‘military aid and economic aid to our friends’ concept that the peoples of the Middle and Far East will lose that great burst of new confidence in American leadership growing out of the Suez Crisis. … Under present circumstances, these hundreds of millions of people may get the impression that we are sliding back to a cozy comradeship with Britain, intent upon carrying on the same old thing of cold war backed up by saber rattling.207


In using the Cold War theme to mobilise the conservative Arab states against Egypt and Syria, Eisenhower replicated the bankrupt policy with which the British had sought, during 1955–56, to isolate the Egyptians from the ‘Arabs further north’. This approach set the stage for a series of confrontations in the summer, most notably when Syrian intelligence uncovered and publicly condemned American covert activities in August 1957.208 The State Department’s advice to USIA in response to these allegations, particularly in its emphasis on the importance of establishing the ‘obvious fabrication and complete lack of credibility’ of the Syrian complaint was particularly disingenuous.209 Not long before the exposure of the CIA’s efforts to foment a coup in Syria, Egyptian newspapers had announced that ‘Only America plans conspiracies in the Arab world and pays its conspirators in dollars. The US is now a synonym for imperialism.’210 Events in Damascus appeared to vindicate such claims and stories of American ‘plots’, real or imagined and found a receptive audience in the Arab world, making a mockery of the standard line deployed in support of the Eisenhower Doctrine that ‘the U.S. has no intention of interfering in the internal affairs of Middle East countries’.211 In September 1957, USIA Director, Arthur Larson, informed Eisenhower that USIA had ‘initiated a broad psychological campaign to counteract unfavorable repercussions resulting from Syrian developments’. The campaign had two major aims, the second of which was to ‘show that U.S. policies support and protect legitimate Arab nationalist aims’.212 The legalistic use of the word ‘legitimate’ did little to disguise the fact that USIA output had become dangerously separated from the clandestine realities of the CIA’s activities in the region. The promotion of King Saud as a leader capable of appealing to a wider Arab constituency than Nasser, largely on the grounds of his role as protector of Islam’s holiest sites, was also misplaced. Nevertheless, Saud’s January 1957 visit to the United States was seized upon as an opportunity for a major campaign to enhance Saud’s regional prestige. The State Department set out its position in guidance to USIA on 28 January, pointing out that The Department wishes to obtain the maximum publicity for the visit throughout Arab countries to demonstrate the close and friendly relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. … We wish to further, wherever it can be achieved subtly, the growth of closer relations between Saudi Arabia and Iraq. … We wish to encourage continued adherence by the Saudi Government to moderate and constructive


policies, freed from the destructive aspects of emotional nationalism as exemplified by Nasser.213 As Salim Yaqub has demonstrated, presenting Saud as an alternative regional leader to Nasser was neither a sensible nor a realistic policy. ‘Islam’, Yaqub points out, was scarcely an issue in the Eisenhower administration’s confrontation with the Nasserist movement, whose outlook was largely secular. Eisenhower tried to make it an issue by promoting the regional leadership of King Saud, whose formal duties included the protection of Islam’s holy places, but the effort went nowhere. Saud’s Islamic credentials did not translate into significant political influence in the Arab world.214 If this was the case, then as Yaqub argues, ‘Separating Saud from Nasser was a feasible objective; building him up as a pan-Arab rival of Nasser was not. … Clearly Saud was no match for Nasser, and Eisenhower was naïve to suppose that the king’s religious credentials could make up for this fact.’215 Little that USIA could do in the way of informational output, even if it was backed up by Aramco’s financial muscle, could change this basic fact of Middle Eastern politics. ‘In the court of Arab public opinion’, Yaqub concludes, ‘the Nasserites decisively won the argument.’216

Conclusion The Failure of Western Propaganda in the Middle East

Propaganda gives force and direction to the successive movements of popular feeling and desire; but it does not do much to create these movements. The propagandist is a man who canalizes an already existing stream. In a land where there is no water, he digs in vain. Aldous Huxley, ‘Notes on Propaganda’, Harper’s Magazine, No. 174 (December, 1936) Between 1945 and 1957, Western prestige and popularity in the Middle East declined precipitously. It might be argued that in 1945 large swathes of Middle Eastern opinion had already been alienated by decades of British imperial machinations in the region. The United States, on the other hand, emerged from the Second World War with unprecedented global prestige and significant reserves of goodwill founded upon a widespread understanding that, in contrast to the United Kingdom, Americans had generally played ‘a non-imperialistic role in world affairs’.1 If British propagandists had few illusions about the challenge that faced them in the post-war Middle East, life for their American counterparts must have seemed relatively simple. Few could have predicted the speed with which events would transform the psychological climate of the region. In April 1947, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, William Benton, informed the US ambassador in Cairo that The United States is the only country which combines the qualities of moral leadership with the resources necessary to carry out a program of international information and cultural affairs based on principles international in their validity, free from narrow bias and from special 238

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pleading. Our leadership can be vital at a time when the world is in the midst of what Secretary Marshall calls a ‘riot of propaganda’.2 Just over a year later, his successor, George V. Allen, had been forced to concede that It is probably not an exaggeration to say that the US information program in the Arab states is faced with problems of unprecedented delicacy. In the space of a few short years the United States has gone from a position of unequalled esteem, respect and honor in the attitudes of the peoples of the Arab world to one of embittered distrust and animosity.3 This, by any standards, was a startling fall from grace. In this book, I have attempted to chart the use of propaganda by American and British governments as part of their broader strategies of engagement with the Middle East. The startling decline in Western prestige that occurred between 1945 and 1957 would seem to suggest that these psychological operations had been rather less than successful. In the spring of 1957, with Britain languishing in well-earned disgrace and the United States reeling from a series of increasingly vicious Egyptian and Syrian attacks on the Eisenhower Doctrine, it would appear that the propagandists not only failed in their task, but failed spectacularly. Certainly, Egyptian commentators such as Mohamed Heikal and Abdel-Kader Hatem have suggested, in the context of the Suez Crisis, that Egyptian counter-propaganda ‘succeeded in neutralizing [British attempts] to mislead and to undermine Arab opinion’.4 Said K. Aburish, similarly, argues that any Anglo-Egyptian competition for the ‘Arab street’ was ‘an unequal contest, with Nasser way ahead’.5 Even so, one should be wary of slipping towards the simplistic conclusion that Western propagandists were primarily responsible for ‘losing the propaganda war’. The general question of the decline in Western prestige across the region deserves a far more sophisticated response. The story of American and British failure in the Middle East after 1945 is essentially one of policy miscalculation, and it is unduly harsh to point the finger of blame only at those responsible for publicising and popularising flawed policies. Any appraisal of the performance of Western propagandists must take into account the fact that their work could not function in isolation from the policy context in which it was formulated. An appreciation of the relationship between propaganda and policy making must, therefore, be at the heart of any investigation into Western psychological strategy


in the post-war Middle East. This was certainly clear to British and American propagandists at the time. Time and time again, they warned that in the absence of an effective policy approach to the Middle East, their most ingenious techniques would be of little use. As the BBC’s Donald Stephenson pointed out in 1946, ‘propaganda divorced from policy is an utterly bankrupt proposition’.6 Eighteen months later, the Foreign Office Middle East Information Department (MEID) defended its own performance by noting that the ‘success or failure of any propaganda line is closely tied up with actual events and so far these events (Palestine, Anglo-Egyptian Treaty Relations, Portsmouth Treaty etc.) could not have been more unfavourable’.7 American propagandists would have agreed wholeheartedly. From Baghdad, Public Affairs Officer (PAO), Armin Meyer, pointed out that ‘any information program, Soviet, American or otherwise, is only an auxiliary instrument for the prosecution of foreign policy. On the foreign policy itself rests the major responsibility for its own success’. In this sense, it was clear to Meyer, if not his superiors in Washington, that If a nation’s foreign policy is wrong or weak, the information program cannot overcome the basic wrongness nor weakness, even though it may be able to have some effect in cushioning the inevitable consequences. … Thus, with special reference to the Middle East, it is evident that the value of the information program … is dependent upon basic American policy. We are judged by our actions in the political field, notably the Palestine issue; by our conduct in economic matters, notably oil; and by our efforts in the social sphere in assisting the alleviation of misery attendant upon such abject poverty as abounds in this area.8 This lesson does not appear to have been quickly learned and in 1952 William Grant Parr, from his United States Information Services (USIS) office in Damascus, conceptualised the problem in the following terms: If we consider the dog’s body to be our policy and USIE to be its tail, I think we should explain to the Department that if the dog is blind he may not reach his objective no matter how much the USIE tail wags.9 As late as May 1954 the American ambassador in Damascus, James Moose, still found it necessary to point out that The present unfavorable situation is primarily the result of United States policy decisions and actions in consequence thereof, and its origin is not to be sought in inadequate presentation of US background,

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news or opinions nor even in skilful Communist propaganda. … The remedy, if any, therefore appears to lie in the field of policy moves (not policy declarations) rather than in the field of informational activities.10 In the Middle East, the effectiveness of Western propaganda continued to be diminished by the tendency of officials to ascribe mysterious powers to the propaganda agencies at their disposal. When things went wrong, they were quick to lay the blame for policy failures at the door of the propagandists who they believed had not utilised the resources at their disposal with sufficient skill. ‘Many Americans think of propaganda as a bag of tricks, a matter of techniques and devices, with semimagical powers to compel people to conform to the propagandists will’, one United States Information and Educational Exchange Program (USIE) official complained in 1950. ‘They ignore or gloss over the fact that political warfare must be based on national policies and that its effectiveness is largely determined by the policies it is in position to exploit’.11 Ironically, the analysis of propaganda in relation to wider diplomatic and strategic policy reveals the extent to which both Britain and the US failed to sufficiently integrate the various elements of their policymaking systems. Undoubtedly, the reformed US national security bureaucracy had succeeded by the end of 1953 in offering a consultative role to the propaganda agencies and such developments marked progress in the right direction. Nevertheless, the United States Information Agency (USIA) still found itself the target of attacks from Congressional funding committees and felt itself to be thwarted by the apathy and condescension of Foreign Service professionals and career diplomats manning the political desks of the State Department. The British system, without the same channels of communication and consultation between the information departments and policy-making elite, was even more vulnerable to mishap and malfunction and faced complete collapse under the pressures imposed by the 1956 Suez Crisis. In this light, it is instructive to note the conclusion of the man who did more than most to rectify the problems experienced by propagandists alienated from the policy-making elite. C.D. Jackson, the leading champion of the American propaganda programme, in conversation with Eisenhower in August 1954, expressed his irritation at the lack of progress towards an integrated psychological warfare machine, observing that In this business of climate, of psychological warfare, there is no such thing as a guy going off in a corner and doing psychological warfare


separate from, independent of, ahead of ACTS of Government. … If there is action and follow through, then the psychological warfare boys can do things. But if they are expected to do things in a vacuum … you might as well not have them around.12 Jackson’s thoughts on the thematic concerns of Western propaganda in the Middle East are also worthy of attention. In April 1957, noting a fresh British emphasis upon the Soviet threat to the Middle East, Jackson compiled a checklist of Arab states, questioning whether each faced a genuine threat from communism or the Soviet Union. The result, he suggested, ‘does not constitute very impressive evidence: Syria:

YES – but what is new about that? Syria has been the underground Communist headquarters for the area since the end of the war. The only thing that is new is that the headquarters is now above ground; Lebanon: NO; Iraq: NO; Iran: NO; Saudi Arabia: NO; Israel: NO; Jordan: A Question Mark; Egypt: YES – but a doubtful Communist asset both political and militarily. ‘So, as we say in America,’ he concluded, ‘what’s all the shooting about?’13 The question is one that has begun to concern historians. In his April 2000 Stuart L Bernath Memorial Lecture, Odd Arne Westad identified the struggles in the Third World as a key area for the reconceptualisation of the Cold War as part of contemporary international history. He argued that Third World countries became the main victims of the Cold War as ‘the ideological rivalry of the two superpowers came to dominate Third World politics’ and leaders seeking to ‘catapult’ their countries into modernity used superpower allies to enable them to ‘wage war on their own people’. Since ‘human societies cannot be formed into projectiles aimed at ideological images’, Westad concluded, ‘none of them had much success’.14 These observations open up a number of analytical opportunities. In particular, they are reminiscent of an earlier assault upon ‘Eisenhower Revisionism’ in which Robert J. McMahon suggested that ‘the single most dynamic new element in international affairs in

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the 1950s was the emergence of a vigorous, broad-based, and assertive nationalism throughout the developing world’. McMahon argued that the Eisenhower administration not only ‘grievously misunderstood and underestimated the most significant historical development of the midtwentieth century’, but had also ‘insisted on viewing the Third World through the invariably distorting lens of a Cold War geopolitical strategy that saw the Kremlin as the principal instigator of global unrest’.15 In the Middle East this led to a policy ‘characterized by missed opportunities, strategic miscalculations, and counter-productive actions’ as Eisenhower failed to seize the historic opportunity for an American accommodation with Arab nationalism.16 McMahon’s central point was that Western policy was fundamentally misguided in seeking to impose an inappropriate Cold War perspective upon Middle Eastern politics. This view has been challenged by Matthew Connelly, who argues that the ‘ “Cold War lens” did not circumscribe the views of Eisenhower and his contemporaries as much as those of the historians who have studied them’ and that although Eisenhower and Dulles saw the prosecution of the Cold War as ‘their most pressing task’, a genuine fear of international conflict along racial or religious lines existed independently of the Cold War worldview. Eisenhower hoped, Connelly suggests, to ‘appease antiwestern sentiment by accelerating decolonization, accepting the neutralism of some new states, and offering them economic aid’.17 This argument contains intriguing echoes of an article published some 39 years earlier by the retiring head of USIA, George V. Allen. Responding to the question, ‘Are the Soviets Winning the Propaganda War?’ Allen questioned the relevance of the suggestion, arguing instead that Actually, the ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union is a short-term problem. More basic and more abiding in the sense of history are the issues of nationalism and the revolution of rising expectations. … The issue of communism is important, but no war or peace will be won until the issue of nationalism and the revolution of rising expectations are successfully met.18 Not only was the Cold War not the only game in town, therefore, Allen’s analysis suggested that in many parts of the world it was not even the most important game in town. For Allen, the reality of the ‘East–West’ Cold War was less significant than the potential for conflict between ‘North’ and ‘South’ and it is precisely this concern that has animated Connelly’s superb study of the Algerian independence struggle and the


changing international order – in which Connelly sees ‘the origins of the post-Cold War era’ – in which it took place.19 It is questionable whether Connelly’s characterisation of Eisenhower’s approach to the Third World as a form of appeasement20 can be successfully applied to the Arab world. McMahon may be nearer the mark in suggesting that ‘militant nationalism … whether influenced by the Kremlin or not [was] perceived as a significant threat to American interests that demanded a vigorous response’.21 The key point is that in the Middle East, Eisenhower and Dulles continued to conflate Arab nationalism with Soviet penetration and communist influence, even if they did so only to disguise their own attempts to attack and undermine nationalist leaders. From within the policy-making bureaucracy, therefore, there was no easy response to C.D. Jackson’s 1957 bemusement regarding what all the Cold War ‘shooting’ was about. Nor, for that matter, was the Western distinction between communist tyranny and Western freedom immediately apparent in the Arab world. Officials had failed to reconcile the Arab commitment to anti-colonialism and antiZionism with their own objectives of incorporating the Arab states within a secure, Western sphere of influence. As a result, ‘the distorting Cold War lens’ was never fully removed. As Shepherd Jones observed from the State Department desk for Near Eastern affairs, The focus of public attention in the Near and Middle East and South Asia is so totally different from the focus of public attention in this country. … We are all absorbed in a cold war and there is a terrific difference in perspective. They are all absorbed in their problems of the Near East and Middle East and South Asia. They are absorbed in the Arab–Palestine thing. … We have no idea how egotistical we look to peoples in that part of the world.22 Jones’s reference to ‘the Arab–Palestine thing’ is telling, both in its dismissive tone and the recognition that it was an aspect of Middle Eastern political life with which Western propagandists had failed to deal. It is probable that any attempts that might have been made, given the limited room for manoeuvre available, would have achieved little. As a State Department think-tank specifically charged with improving Arab–American relations concluded in 1952, ‘If the Arabs, who rightly or wrongly see in Israel their number one enemy, find that in point of fact the United States do not, they will not be moved into our camp by propaganda.’23 It may have been an exaggeration for George Allen to claim that ‘US foreign policy vis-à-vis the Palestine problem’ was

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‘entirely responsible’ for the post-war collapse of American prestige.24 Nevertheless, the fact remains that the preoccupations of British and American policy makers were very different from those of the Arab governments and peoples and that this discrepancy led Western propagandists consistently to strike at the wrong targets in the Middle East. The technical competence with which they did so was thus, to a large extent, irrelevant. The irony was that by the mid-1950s, both the British and American governments had developed a highly effective machine for the dissemination of propaganda in the Middle East. The technical competence of Western propagandists in the region was indeed remarkable and in identifying the self-defeating nature of ‘official propaganda’ and placing so much emphasis on private agencies and local mediators to carry their message, they attained an impressive level of operational sophistication. In this respect, Shepherd Jones, in response to an enquiry about the performance of USIS personnel made by the chairman of the State Department’s Information Policy Committee, had no difficulty in arguing that ‘they are doing an awfully good job in most of the places I visited. They really do win friends for the American people’.25 By 1957, Ted Streibert’s successor at USIA, Arthur Larson, could inform Eisenhower’s Cabinet that USIA can communicate any particular message to half the population of the globe in 24 hours. … We employ over 12,000 employees, most of them local people. Our radio system broadcasts more words per day than CBS and NBC combined – in 43 languages. … We have made over 12,000 films which are shown commercially or in private shows, or by our 336 mobile units which carry them into the most remote regions. We publish 59 newspapers and magazines and daily pour out a fast wireless press file of 8000 words. We maintain 157 libraries, arrange translation and publication of millions of books and keep up a constant flow of special exhibits. … In addition to these governmental activities, 41 People-to-People Committees are now beginning to channel the activities of hundreds of private organisations toward the helping of our objectives.26 One is reminded of Robert Marett’s account of his time in the Foreign Office’s Information Policy Department (IPD) and his observation that the business of propaganda was primarily about mundane technical and logistical factors rather than the creative arts of persuasion and argument. ‘I have always had a very practical approach to propaganda’, he wrote, ‘anybody of average intelligence can think up a propaganda line


to suit a particular situation. But the line will be of no value unless there exist the men and machinery to put it across’.27 One peculiarity of the failure of Western propaganda in the Middle East after 1945 is that there can be little doubt that the relevant information agencies performed effectively as technical instruments of information dissemination. The ‘men and machinery’ to get the message across were in place and they succeeded in conveying that message to government officials, political and labour organisations, educational and religious institutions, even mass audiences when the need arose. The problem was with the message itself. Philip M. Taylor has argued that the failure of the British information services in the post-war decade was ‘not so much due to an actual divorce of policy from propaganda, but to the fact that policy was being determined without adequate consideration of the problems of presentation’.28 The point is well made, although one might comment in response that the Suez Crisis clearly did represent an ‘actual divorce of policy from propaganda’ as Eden left his official information services completely unaware of the true direction of policy. Taylor has also drawn attention to the fact that in 1956 official expenditure on the overseas information services was at its lowest level since the end of the war. The implication is that a correlation exists between the decline in financial support for British overseas propaganda and the ‘disastrous loss’ of British prestige caused by the Suez Crisis. Taylor is slightly ambiguous on this question, subsequently retreating from this position with the suggestion that ‘even if the British Information Services had been provided with adequate support and funding to fully explain British foreign policy, it is likely that they would still have been fighting a losing battle’.29 With regard to British propaganda in the Middle East, this book has shown that this latter interpretation is more convincing. In November 1956, the British government could have trebled the size of its propaganda budget and still failed to win support for its policies in the Arab world. In this sense, Tony Shaw’s emphasis on the positive aspects of Britain’s propaganda achievements during the Suez Crisis, stressing Eden’s manipulation of the domestic media and the surprisingly effective recovery operation mounted in the months following the crisis, is also in need of some qualification. Shaw is quite right to dismiss the erroneous image of Eden as a Prime Minister ‘fatally ignorant of the power and importance of public relations’,30 but it is equally important to contrast the limited success of British propaganda for a domestic (and, perhaps, an American) audience, with the comprehensive failure of psychological operations in

Conclusion 247

the Middle East itself. Here, moving beyond the narrow framework of the Suez Crisis, Taylor’s suggested correlation between under-investment in information services and the decline of British prestige and influence takes on a more interesting appearance. It can certainly be argued, particularly in relation to the conduct of cultural diplomacy and the task of ‘projecting Britain’, that failure to provide sufficient resources for the BBC and British Council was a serious error. Despite the failures caused by an inappropriate Cold War emphasis and an inability to deal with the psychological forces unleashed by the Arab–Israel dispute, Western propagandists did have a potentially attractive product to sell, particularly in the cultural and social fields. It is this that explains the optimism of the News Department official who argued that It may seem paradoxical that, at a time when Western influence in the Middle East appears to be in decline, we should set any hopes on its increase. The explanation is that what we are advocating is a shift of influence from the political field, where it has become self-defeating, to the economic and social fields, where it has anyway long been at work without our conscious help. … Nationalism, which looks at first sight like a formidable obstacle to that influence, is in fact a measure of how great it already is and an earnest of the opportunities that are still open to us.31 It is also true that British representatives in the Arab world often talked about long-term cultural diplomacy in extremely positive terms. One assessment of British Council activities in Syria, for example, observed that The work of the British Council has been to show the distinctive nature and the advantages of British cultural life and British education. Its impact has been considerable and beneficial both to Syrians and to the interests of the United Kingdom … and this must have helped in the gradual improvement in the climate of opinion that we think has taken place since the height of anti-British feeling during the Palestine War.32 Such positive appraisals were all very well, but they tended to be forgotten when rising political temperatures produced an atmosphere in the Middle East in which a reliance on cultural activities appeared naïve. As the British ambassador to Iraq pointed out in 1952, It cannot be said that the work of the British Council has much effect in the political field where it cannot compete with the more violent


and immediate impact of political and economic pressures. It needs a lengthy period of friendly relationship to secure significant results.33 The problem was that in the absence of lengthy periods of friendly relations, the institutions of cultural propaganda were those least highly regarded by leaders whose attention was monopolised by short-term political factors. Only when confronted with the collapse of their political house of cards at Suez did the British Government commit itself fully to the ‘cultural’ approach, as Charles Hill’s enquiry into the overseas information services identified the British Council and the BBC as the institutions most likely to re-establish some measure of goodwill for Britain in the Middle East.34 After a decade of under-funding, however, and with Britain now seen as a junior partner of the US and, rightly or wrongly, no longer an important power in the Middle East, this commitment to building up the tools of cultural diplomacy had come rather too late. Even had it come earlier, it may be doubted whether cultural activities alone could have resolved the problems created by the impressions made by Western political actions. As Huntington Damon pointed out, the cultural approach, in order to be effective, ‘must be coordinated to appeal to the political aspect of the Arab’s orientation. Unless the two are integrated they cannot be effective for our purposes since the major conflicts between the Arabs and ourselves are political and the cultural approach cannot be expected to operate by itself in a vacuum’.35 Seven years after the Jackson Committee, a second enquiry into American propaganda under Eisenhower, reflecting on ‘Soviet penetration into the Middle East … the overthrow of the pro-Western government in Iraq [and] the replacement of a pro-Western by at best a neutral government in Lebanon, despite the temporary placement of US forces in that country’, pointed out that It might be argued that the cumulative effect of these events has been a decrease of United States prestige and status. … But the critics who deduce from the mere fact of such a decrease that our propaganda has been ineffective, simply attribute to the propagandist a magic power which he does not possess and which the most authoritative practitioners of the art have always been especially eager to disclaim. The prestige and standing of this country depend – apart from short-term tactical coups – not on words but on deeds, i.e. our actual foreign policy and the military, economic and will-power behind it.36 British and American propaganda in the Middle East failed because despite the technical competence with which it was conducted, it was

Conclusion 249

not capable of effecting any significant change in the political climate in which it was forced to operate without substantial shifts in Western policy towards Arab nationalism and the Arab–Israel dispute. Western policy makers, in short, failed to set the Middle Eastern political agenda. As the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) explained in 1953 The first step in a strategic psychological plan for the area must be to create a psychological atmosphere which will force the leaders of the area to face squarely up to their problems and permit them to cooperate with Western efforts to prevent the loss of the area to the USSR. In order to do this, the US must act to remove the symbols used as whipping boys by the area politicians – remove them, distract attention from them, or at the very least disassociate US actions from them.37 Since the two most important ‘whipping boys’ were the Arab–Israel question and the concept of ‘Western imperialism’, it matters not whether one looks back from the 1950s or the present day, these issues were firmly lodged at the top of the list of Arab political grievances. The final world should perhaps go to the Egyptian gentleman who entered into a correspondence with the US Embassy’s Information and Educational Exchange Program (USIE) office in Cairo in 1950. I thank you very much for your generosity in sending me your printed materials and bulletins several months ago. I regret, as a friend to America, to inform you that my conscience compels me to refuse any bulletin from your office, or even to listen to your broadcast VOA for the deep wound that pierces my heart, as an Arab who loves his country, and for your policy at Arab Palestine, the Martyr. The beautiful talks about liberty and democracy can, by no means, convince a heart cut into pieces for the lands of fathers and grandfathers, a heart which pities the hundreds of thousands of Arab children and wives and old people sent astray all round. Even if America spends billions of dollars on such propaganda the Arab would not be convinced. Nevertheless, we have every hope in the Third War and it is surely coming. Thanks anyway.38

Notes Introduction 1. The term was used to describe American Cold War psychological strategy by C.D. Jackson, Eisenhower’s special adviser for psychological warfare (Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas (DDE), Jackson Papers, Box 68, Log – 1954 (3), 11 August 1954). 2. The National Archive, formerly the Public Record Office, Kew, UK (NAPRO), FO 953/1191/P10422/15/G, Malcolm to Watson, 16 July 1951, enclosing memorandum, ‘British Propaganda in the Middle East’. 3. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp.1–2; Coombs, The Fourth Dimension of Foreign Policy (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Inc., 1964). 4. DDE, Ann Whitman File, Administration Series, Box 22, W.H. Jackson memorandum, ‘The fourth area of the national effort in foreign affairs’, undated. 5. DDE, Jackson Committee Records, Box 14, The President’s Committee on International Informational Activities Report to the President, 30 June 1953. 6. DDE, Jackson Committee Papers, Box 1, Discussion between Washburn and Hoopes, undated. 7. United States National Archive, College Park, Maryland (USNA), RG 59 Lot 66D148, Box 128, Panel Report, ‘Psychological aspects of United States strategy’, November 1955. 8. Jowett and O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992), p. 4. 9. Thompson, O. Easily Led. A History of Propaganda (Stroud: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1999), p. 3. 10. Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–53. The Information Research Department (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 18. 11. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47 Box 39, Study prepared by Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, ‘Communications and public opinion in Jordan’, August 1951. 12. Rawnsley, ‘Introduction’, in Rawnsley (ed.), Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1999), p. 1. 13. Medhurst (ed.), Eisenhower’s War of Words. Rhetoric and Leadership (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University, 1994), p. 1. 14. Lucas, ‘Beyond Diplomacy: Propaganda and the History of the Cold War’, in Rawnsley (ed.), Cold War Propaganda, p. 21. 15. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, War Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Nuclear Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 266; Taylor, P.M., British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 228–9, p. 248; Thompson, Easily Led, pp. 287–300. 16. Rawnsley (ed.), ‘The BBC External Services and the Hungarian Uprising, 1956’, in Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s, pp. 165–81. See also Shaw, ‘Eden 250

Notes 251

17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

and the BBC during the Suez crisis: A myth re-examined’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1995). Rawnsley, Radio Diplomacy and Propaganda: The BBC and VOA in International Politics (London: Macmillan, 1996); Rawnsley, ‘Overt and Covert: The Voice of Britain and Black Radio Broadcasting in the Suez Crisis, 1956’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 11, No. 3, July 1996. Nelson, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (London: Brassey’s, 1997). Partner, Arab Voices. The BBC Arabic Service 1938–1988 (London: BBC External Services, 1988). Morris, ‘The Labour government’s policy and publicity over Palestine 1945–7’, in Gorst, Johnman and Lucas (eds), Contemporary British History 1931–61 (London: Pinter Publishers Limited, 1991), pp. 179–92; Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds. British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency 1944–1960 (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), pp. 24–61. Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–53. Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War 1948–1977 (Stroud: Phoenix Mill, 1998). Gorst, ‘ “A Modern Major General”: General Sir Gerald Templer, Chief of the Imperial General Staff’, in Kelly and Gorst (eds), Whitehall and the Suez Crisis (London: Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 29–45. Kyle, Suez (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992); Lucas, Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991). Shaw, Eden, Suez and the Mass Media: Propaganda and Persuasion during the Suez Crisis (London: I.B. Tauris and Co. Ltd., 1996). Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001); Dorril, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations (London: Fourth Estate, 2000). Lucas, Freedom’s War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Parry-Giles, The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945–1955 (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2002); Osgood, ‘Form Before Substance: Eisenhower’s Commitment to Psychological Warfare and Negotiations with the Enemy’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 24, No. 3, Summer 2000, pp. 405–33. Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? (London: Granta, 1999); Lucas, Freedom’s War; Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (London: Frank Cass, 2003). Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas, pp. 113–80; Wagnleiter, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, WC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Hixson, Parting the Curtain. Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1997); Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty. Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World. Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

252 Notes 30. See, in particular, the collections of essays in Gienow-Hecht and Schumacher (eds), Culture and International History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003) and Scott-Smith and Krabbendam (eds) The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945–1960 (London: Frank Cass, 2003). 31. Dizard, The Strategy of Truth: The Story of the U.S. Information Service (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1961); Whitton (ed.) Propaganda and the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1963); Sorensen, The Word War. The Story of American Propaganda (New York: Harper & Row, 1968); Henderson, The United States Information Agency (New York: Praeger, 1969); Pirsein, The Voice of America. An History of the International Broadcasting Activities of the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1979); Dizard, Inventing Public Diplomacy. The Story of the U.S. Information Agency (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004). 32. Gregg, ‘The Rhetoric of Distancing: Eisenhower’s Suez Crisis Speech, 31 October 1956’, in Medhurst (ed.), Eisenhower’s War of Words: Rhetoric and Leadership (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1994), pp. 157–87. 33. Lesch Syria and the United States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); Alteras, Eisenhower and Israel (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1993); Gendzier, Notes From the Minefield (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999); Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 126–9. 34. Connelly, ‘Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North–South Conflict during the Algerian War for Independence’, American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 3 ( June 2000), p. 739. For examples of the approach Connelly comments upon, see McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001) and Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–61 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). An important exception to this trend is Von Eschen’s Satchmo Blows Up the World (2004), which successfully weds the ‘cultural turn’ to a detailed discussion of high-level policy. 35. National Security Archive, George Washington University (NSAGWU), www2.gwu/edu/~nsarchiv/index.html#mesa, ‘U.S. Propaganda in the Middle East’ (accessed December 2004). 36. Marett, Through the Back Door. An Inside View of Britain’s Overseas Information Services (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1968); Mayhew, A War of Words. A Cold War Witness (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998); Clark, The Central Office of Information (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1970); Dodds-Parker, Political Eunuch (Ascot: Springwood Books, 1986), pp. 102–3; Fergusson, The Trumpet in the Hall, 1930–1958 (London: Collins, 1970). 37. Ferrell (ed.), The Diary of James C. Hagerty. Eisenhower in Mid-Course, 1954–55 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983); Hughes, The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1962); Eveland, Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1980). 38. Abdel-Kader Hatem, Information and the Arab Cause (London: Longman Group Ltd, 1974). 39. See, for example: Watt, Succeeding John Bull: America in Britain’s Place, 1900–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Beloff, ‘The End

Notes 253 of the British Empire and the Assumption of World-Wide Commitments by the United States’, in Louis and Bull (eds), The ‘Special Relationship’. AngloAmerican Relations since 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 249–60; Freiberger, Dawn Over Suez: The Rise of American Power in the Middle East (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1992); Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance: The Anglo-American Special Relationship 1940–57 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995). 40. Louis, ‘American Anti-Colonialism and the Dissolution of the British Empire’, in Louis and Bull (eds), The ‘Special Relationship’, pp. 261–83. 41. See for example, Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Ashton, Eisenhower, Macmillan and the Problem of Nasser (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1996); Ovendale, Britain, the United States and the Transfer of Power in the Middle East, 1945–62 (London: Leicester University Press, 1996); Petersen, The Middle East Between the Great Powers. Anglo-American Conflict and Cooperation, 1952–7 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000); Tayekh, The Origins of the Eisenhower Doctrine. The US, Britain and Nasser’s Egypt, 1953–57 (Houndmills, Bansingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000); Citino, From Arab Nationalism to OPEC. Eisenhower, King Saud, and the Making of U.S.-Saudi Relations (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002); Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism. The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 42. Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda, p. 11.

1 ‘The Men and Machinery’ 1. United States National Archives, College Park, Maryland (USNA), RG 59, Lot 188, Box 121, Benton to Byrnes, 26 December 1945. 2. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 12, Address by George Allen to the first meeting of the US Advisory Commission on Information, 7 October 1948. 3. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 152, Benton to Tuck, 8 February 1946. 4. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 12, Pat Allen to Stone, 29 September 1948. 5. Lucas, Freedom’s War, p. 12. 6. Dizard, Inventing Public Diplomacy, p. 45. 7. The National Archive, formerly Public Record Office, Kew, UK (NAPRO), FO 371/61570/E11708, British Embassy (Washington) to Eastern Department, 5 December 1947. 8. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 12, Allen to the US Advisory Commission, 7 October 1948. 9. NAPRO, FO 1110/128/PR865. Warner memorandum, 6 October 1948. 10. Parry-Giles, The Rhetorical Presidency, pp. 47–103. 11. USNA, RG 59, Box 2237, 501/1-2953, Office memo enclosing circular airgram No. 341, 4 February 1953. 12. Rosenberg, ‘U.S. cultural history’ in May, E. (ed.), American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (New York: Bedford Books, 1993), p. 163. 13. Brecker, ‘Truth as a weapon of the free world’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 278 (November 1951), p. 4.

254 Notes 14. See Lucas, ‘Campaigns of truth: The psychological strategy board and American ideology, 1951–53’, The International History Review, Vol. XVIII, No. 2 (May 1996), pp. 279–302. 15. USNA, RG 59, Lot 62D333, Box 7, Marshall to Nitze, 3 April 1952. 16. Parry-Giles, The Rhetorical Presidency, p. 136. 17. Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas (DDE), Jackson Committee Records, Box 14, Report to the President, 30 June 1953. 18. Ibid., pp. 129–40; see also Guth, ‘From OWI to USIA: The Jackson Committee’s search for the real “Voice” of America’, American Journalism, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter 2002). 19. Sorensen, The Word War, pp. 81–2; Dyer, ‘The potentialities of American psychological statecraft’, in Whitton (ed.), Propaganda and the Cold War, p. 35. 20. Dizard, Inventing Public Diplomacy, pp. 68–9. 21. USNA, RG 306, Special ‘S’ Reports of the Office of Research 1953–63, Box 7, S-27-54, ‘A Study of USIA Operating Assumptions’, December 1954. 22. Dizard, Inventing Public Diplomacy, p. 66. 23. Ibid., pp. 63–4. 24. USNA, RG 306, Office of Research and Intelligence 1955–59: General Records, Box 1, Folder: Administration Policy Direction 1954–55, Berding to Johnson, 3 August 1954. 25. DDE, Sprague Committee Records, 1959–61, Box 19, USIA(2), ‘The US Information Program Since July 1953’, undated. 26. Parry-Giles, The Rhetorical Presidency, p. 130. 27. DDE, White House Office, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Status of Projects Subseries, Box 5, NSC 5509(7), 17 February 1955. 28. DDE, White House Office, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Status of Projects Subseries, Box 7, #35 NSC 5611, 30 June 1956. 29. DDE, Oral History Transcripts, OH-153, Streibert interview, 10 December 1970. 30. NAPRO, PREM 8/322, C.P.(45)168, Memorandum by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 13 September 1945. 31. NAPRO, PREM 8/322, Report for the Prime Minister by the Lord President of the Council, 23 November 1945, Annex III, ‘Note by the Minister of Information’, 13 November 1945. 32. NAPRO, PREM 8/322, Extract: C.M.(45) 60th Conclusions, 6 December 1945. 33. USNA, RG 59, Lot 188, Box 120, Biddle to Stone, 20 October 1947. 34. The new information agencies were: American, Eastern Europe, Far Eastern, Middle Eastern, Latin American, Western Europe and the Information Policy Department (IPD; see, Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–53, pp. 29, 55, fn. 22). Middle East Information Department (MEID), dismissed by BBC officials as ‘an uninspiring collection of dugouts’ (Partner, Arab Voices. The BBC Arabic Service, 1938–1988, p. 79), was absorbed into IPD in 1949. 35. The Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD) believed that the Central Office of Information (COI) had been penetrated by Soviet intelligence. Given that IRD had once counted Guy Burgess among its employees, it would perhaps have been better advised to concentrate on its own security.

Notes 255 36. Although Britain’s economic difficulties eventually led to Treasury demands for savings and, despite the pressure of rising costs, the available finances for the official information services remained stagnant at around £9000,000–10,000,000 per annum in the mid-1950s. 37. USNA, ’RG 59, Lot 188, Box 122, Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs (OIC), ‘Appendix B’ attached to letter from Kirkpatrick to Benton, 6 November 1946. 38. There is a growing literature on the IRD. See, for example: Smith, ‘Covert British Propaganda: The Information Research Department 1947–1977’, Millennium, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1980), pp. 67–83; Fletcher, ‘British Propaganda since World War II: A Case Study’, Media, Culture and Society, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1982), Lucas and Morris, ‘A Very British Crusade: The Information Research Department and the Beginning of the Cold War’, in Aldrich (ed.), British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945–51 (London: Routledge, 1991); Wilford, ‘The Information Research Department: Britain’s Secret Cold War Weapon Revealed’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1998), pp. 353–69; Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War; Vaughan, ‘Cloak Without Dagger’: How the Information Research Department Fought Britain’s Cold War in the Middle East, 1948–56’, Cold War History, Vol. 4, No. 3 (April 2004), pp. 56–84; Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–53. 39. NAPRO, FO 1110/11/PR497/G, Warner to Balfour, 24 June 1948. 40. Mayhew, A War of Words, pp. 121–22. Mayhew has himself been quoted as saying that the ‘social democracy’ angle was little more than a device to make the idea of IRD more palatable to the Labour left (Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, p. 27). The less conspiratorially minded might argue that IRD simply decided that ‘projection of Britain’ material was more properly the work of IPD and the British Council. 41. NAPRO, FO 1110/460/PR126/5G, Peck memorandum, ‘Anti-Communist Propaganda Operations’, 24 July 1951. 42. NAPRO, FO 1110/716/PR10111/31/G, IRD memorandum, ‘The Use of IRD material’, 6 June 1955. 43. NAPRO, FO 1110/460/PR126/5G, ‘Anti-Communist Propaganda Operations’, 24 July 1951. 44. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 3, US Advisory Commission on Information Semi-Annual Report to Congress, April 1951. 45. Black, Organising the Propaganda Instrument: The British Experience (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), p. 92. 46. Marett, Through the Back Door, pp. 172–3. 47. FO 953/61/PME1499/G, Kirkpatrick minute, 30 September 1946. 48. NAPRO, FO 953/389/PME114, Marsack to Pollock, 28 January 1948, enclosing memorandum, ‘The Present Set-Up and Functions of B.I.S.M.E.’, 18 December 1947. 49. NAPRO, FO 953/392/PME142, MEID Monthly Report, 30 September 1948. 50. NAPRO, FO 1110/815/PR1080/8, Fouracres to Glass, 9 November 1955. 51. NAPRO, FO 1110/700/PR1093/6, Information Department, Baghdad to IRD, 2 March 1954. 52. NAPRO, FO 1110/565/PRG16/11, J.Murray to IRD, 19 June 1953. 53. NAPRO, FO 1110/697/PR1089/17, Press Attaché, Damascus to Foreign Office (received) 16 December 1954.

256 Notes 54. NAPRO, FO 1110/700/PR1093/1/G, Information Department, Baghdad to IRD, 12 January 1954. 55. NAPRO, FO 1110/700/PR1093/6, Information Department, Baghdad to IRD, 2 March 1954. 56. NAPRO, FO 1110/700/PR1093/1/G, Information Department, Baghdad to IRD, 12 January 1954. 57. NAPRO, FO 1110/616/PRG104/49/G, Peck to Glass, 16 July 1953. 58. USNA, RG 59, Lot File 62D333, Box 2, PSB D-22, PSB Program for the Middle East, 6 February 1953. 59. NAPRO, FO 953/367/PME145, Pubsec Cairo to MEID (received) 4 February 1948. 60. NAPRO, FO 953/367/PME428, Pubsec Cairo to MEID, 7 May 1948. 61. NAPRO, FO 953/952/PME145, Haigh to MEID, 8 February 1949. 62. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 171, Patterson to Marshall, A-462, 8 August 1947. 63. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 171, Enclosure to Cairo to State Department Despatch No. 2533, 19 May 1947, ‘Report on Trip through Palestine, Lebanon and Syria’. 64. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D365, Box 53, Bowman to Hulten, 13 November 1950. 65. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 195, Evans to State Department, 24 August 1948. 66. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 196, USIS–OIE Cairo Report of Activities, September 1948. 67. Frances Stonor Saunders, Scott Lucas and Hugh Wilford have been at the forefront of recent historical research into the Cold War’s state-private networks. See Saunders, F. Who Paid the Piper (1999); Lucas, Freedom’s War (1999); Lucas, ‘ “Total Culture” and the State-Private Network’, in GienowHecht and Schumacher (eds), Culture and International History (2003); Lucas, ‘Revealing the Parameters of Opinion: An Interview with Frances Stonor Saunders’; Lucas, ‘Beyond Freedom, Beyond Control: Approaches to Culture and the State-Private Network in the Cold War’, in Scott-Smith and Krabbendam (eds), The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe (2003); Wilford, ‘Calling the Tune? The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War’ (2003). See also essays by Wilford, Aldrich, Kotek and Gienow-Hecht in the Scott-Smith and Krabbendam volume. 68. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 12, Address by George Allen to the first meeting of the US Advisory Commission on Information, 7 October 1948. 69. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D266, Box 187, Paper circulated at the Beirut Conference of Public Affairs Officers, 17 February 1952, No. 17, Proposed Statement on Private Enterprise Cooperation Before Appropriations Committee, undated. 70. DDE, Jackson Committee Records, Box 14, Report to the President, 30 June 1953. 71. USNA, RG 59, 511.74/3-2853, United States Information Service (USIS) Country Plan – Egypt, 20 May 1953. 72. NAPRO, FO 953/4D/P147, Kirkpatrick memorandum, 5 November 1946. 73. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D449, Box 1, Begg to Harris, 20 March 1952. 74. DDE, Whitman File: Name Series, Box 19, Howard to Eisenhower, 2 June 1956.

Notes 257 75. DDE, Whitman File: Name Series, Box 19, Jackson to Whitman, 27 June 1956. 76. USNA, RG 306, USIA Inspection Reports, Box 6, Jordan, 10 February 1956. 77. DDE, Sprague Committee Records, 1959–61, Box 19, USIA(2), ‘The US Information Program Since July 1953’, undated. 78. Fletcher, ‘British Propaganda Since World War Two’, p. 103. 79. NAPRO, FO 953/386/PME67, Pollock minute, 9 February 1948. Further accounts of Secret Intelligence Service’s (SIS’s) links to the Arab News Agency (ANA) can be found in Lucas, Divided We Stand; Dorril, MI6; Aldrich, The Hidden Hand; Emek, British Intelligence Services: A Short Report (London: Mandala 2 Projects, 1984); West, The Friends (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1988). 80. Read, The Power of News. A History of Reuters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 337. 81. Fletcher, ‘British Propaganda Since World War Two: A Case Study’, p. 104. 82. Read, The Power of News, p. 338. 83. NAPRO, CAB 134/2325/O.I.(O)57(4), FO memorandum, ‘Reuters’, 8 September 1957. 84. NAPRO, FO 953/49/ PME283, Publicity Section, Cairo to MEID, undated (received 28 January 1947). 85. NAPRO, FO 953/370/PME523, Haigh to Pollock, 10 June 1948. 86. NAPRO, FO 953/592/PME145, Haigh to MEID, 8 February 1949. 87. NAPRO, FO 953/61/PME1499/G, Kirkpatrick minute, 30 September 1946. 88. NAPRO, FO 953/385/PME40, Gathorne-Hardy memorandum, 28 June 1948. 89. NAPRO, FO 371/63033/J4813, Bowker to FO, 4 October 1947. 90. NAPRO, FO 953/382/PME507/30, Barclay memorandum, 2 June 1948, ‘Note on the Ikhwan al Hurriya’. 91. Ibid. 92. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 195, Carter memorandum, 10 March 1948. 93. USNA, RG 59, Lot File 62D333, Box 2, PSB D-22, Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) Program for the Middle East, 6 February 1953. 94. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 170, News Review, No. 51, 28 June 1951. 95. NAPRO, FO 371/98247/E10345/2, Makins minute, 20 March 1952. 96. NAPRO, FO 371/98247/E10345/16, Montagu Pollock to Eden, No. 85, 15 May 1952. 97. NAPRO, FO 371/98248/E19345/31, Troutbeck to Eden, No. 74, 28 May 1952. 98. NAPRO, FO 953/1476/P1041/23, Child minute, 8 November 1954. 99. USNA, 511.80/2-454, Sanger to Byroade, 4 February 1954. 100. See Eveland, Ropes of Sand (London: W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 1980), p. 125; Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, p. 128; Laville and Lucas, ‘The American Way: Edith Sampson, the NAACP, and African American Identity in the Cold War’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Fall 1996), p. 577. 101. NAPRO, FO 953/1241/P10485/58, COI memorandum, ‘The Monthly Arabic Magazine’, 7 November 1952. 102. NAPRO, FO 953/P10485/1239, Barclay minute, 13 May 1952. 103. NAPRO FO 953/1239/P10485/29, Barclay to Watson, 8 May 1952.

258 Notes 104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115.

116. 117.

118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

NAPRO, INF 12/734, COI memorandum, ‘Al Aalam: 1952–1957’, undated. NAPRO, FO 953/1241/P10485/47, Underwood to Barclay, 14 August 1952. NAPRO, INF 12/231, Harrison minute, 7 December 1954. NAPRO, FO 953/1241/P10485/55, Barclay to Edwards, 15 July 1952. See also, INF 12/734, ‘Al Aalam’, Appendix I, ‘Principal contents of the past 12/18 issues of Al Aalam’, 12 August 1957. NAPRO, INF 12/734, COI memorandum, ‘Al Aalam: 1952–1957’, undated. Ibid. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 196, USIS-Cairo Special Report, 24 November 1948. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 195, Amlegation Jidda to PAO, Cairo, 28 August 1948. USNA, RG 306, USIA Inspection Reports, Box 6, Jordan, 10 February 1956. USNA, RG 59, 511.00/4-953, Caffrey to State Department, ‘1954–1955 IIA Prospectus for Egypt’, 9 April 1953. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D449 and 55D251, Box 1, Data for the Jackson Committee on Overt Information and Propaganda by International Information Administration, February 1953; DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff Papers, 1948–61, OCB Central File Series, OCB 091.4. Near East (File #4) (2)(Nov.–Dec. 1956), OCB memo, ‘USIA Informational Programming to the Middle East in Present Crisis’, 10 December 1956. USNA, RG 306, Subject Files of the Office of Administration, Box 1, Folder: Information Centres 1952–53, Harris memorandum 17 January 1952. USNA, RG 306, Subject Files of the Office of Administration, Box 1, Lacy to Compton, 9 June 1952. DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff Papers, 1948–61, OCB Secretariat Papers, Box 1, ‘Report of OCB Working Group on Books, Publications and Libraries’, 10 June 1954. USNA, RG 306, US Advisory Commission on Information, Books Abroad Advisory Committee, 13th meeting, 22 November 1954. Ibid., 18th meeting, 10 February 1956. USNA, RG 84/3253, Box 4, USIA Circular CA-481, 16 September 1955. NAPRO, FO 953/392/PME142, MEID Monthly Report, 31 January 1948. NAPRO, FO 953/592/PME145/21, Haigh to MEID, 8 February 1949. NAPRO, FO 953/1551/P1041/16, Press Office, Cairo to IPD, ‘Reading Rooms’, 20 April 1955. NAPRO, FO 953/1552/P1041/70, Baghdad to IPD, 4 May 1955. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 146, ‘Report on Cultural Relations Activities, November 1945–May 1946’, 21 May 1946. USNA, RG 59, 511.85/3–1653, AmEmbassy Amman to State Department, 16 March 1953. USNA, RG 306, USIA Foreign Service Despatches 1954–65, Box 3, McKee to USIA, CA-311, 23 September 1955. DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff: Papers 1948–61, Executive Secretary’s Subject File Series, Box 7, #35 NSC 5611, 30 June 1956. NAPRO, FO 1110/123/PR846, MacLaren minute, 2 October 1948. NAPRO, FO 953/1715/P1011/26(A), Ministerial Committee on Overseas Information, Stewart minute on ‘Paper by the Central Office of Information’, 28 February 1957.

Notes 259 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138.

139.

140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147.

148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157.

NAPRO, FO 953/52/PME1113, Morrison to MEID, 1 May 1947. NAPRO, FO 953/603/PME469, Houstoun-Boswall to Warner, 15 July 1949. NAPRO, FO 953/602/PME108, Hart to MEID, 27 January 1949. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D449, Box 5, Summaries of Semi-Annual Evaluation Reports, Iran, Period Ending 31 May 1952. NSAGWU, US Propaganda Activities in the Middle East – Documents, No. 45, AmEmbassy Tehran to State Department, A-218, 11 December 1951. DDE, Jackson Committee Records, Box 11, Correspondence XYZ(2), Zanuck to William Jackson, 2 March 1953. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/6–1755, ‘Memorandum for the Chairman, OCB Working Group on NSC 5428, Near East,’ 17 June 1955. DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff Papers, 1948–1961, OCB Central File Series, OCB 091.4.Near East (File #4)(2)(Nov.–Dec. 1956), ‘USIA Informational Programming to the Middle East in Present Crisis’, 10 December 1956. DDE, White House Office, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Status of Projects Subseries, Box 7, NSC 5720(5), 30 June 1957. NAPRO, FO 371/52744/E9717, Stephenson memorandum, ‘The BBC Near East Service’, 5 September 1946. NAPRO, FO 953/1652/PB1041/75, Waterfield to Figg, 25 July 1956. NAPRO, FO 371/52744/E9717, ‘The BBC Near East Service’, 5 September 1946. NAPRO, FO 953/1422/PB1045/42(d), Waterfield to Atkinson Grimshaw, 29 September 1953. BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham (BBCWAC), E1/631, File 1, 1946–54, Waterfield to Director of External Broadcasting, 6 July 1953. NAPRO, PREM 11/1149/103, Dodds-Parker memorandum, 20 November 1956. NAPRO, FO 953/60/PME1607/G, W.Kirkpatrick to MEID, 10 September 1947. NAPRO, FO 371/81983/E1433/1, Waterfield to Furlonge, 3 February 1950, enclosing Paxton’s ‘Report on Middle East Tour, November–December 1949’. NAPRO, PREM 11/1149/103, Dodds-Parker memorandum, ‘The Near East Arab Broadcasting Station’, 20 November 1956. BBCWAC, E1/1815/1 (2), Watrous memo, ‘Report on the Near East Arab Broadcasting Station, Sharq al-Adna’, 23 October 1956. NAPRO, FO 953/373/PME412/193/993, Information Department, Baghdad to MEID, 22 April 1948. BBCWAC, E1/1815/1 (2), Glass to Marett, 25 February 1955. NAPRO, FO 953/1652/PB1041/73G, Moberly minute, 1 August 1956. BBCWAC, E1/1815/1 (2), Watrous memorandum, 23 October 1956. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 195, Marshall to AmEmbassy Cairo, A-39, 10 February 1948. NAPRO, FO 1110/128/PR901/G, Ruthven–Murray minute, 26 October 1948. NAPRO, FO 953/736/P10430/3, US Embassy (Com’d.), ‘United States Information Service Daily Wireless Bulletin, No. 1166’, 28 December 1949. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D266, Box 187, Proceedings of the Beirut Conference of Public Affairs Officers, February 18–24, 1952.

260 Notes 158. USNA, RG 59, 511.84A4/5–2854, Russell to Department of State, 28 May 1954. 159. NAPRO, FO 953/699/P10167/44, Wardle-Smith to IPD, 29 September 1950. 160. NAPRO, FO 953/699/P10167/49, Bromley to IPD, 26 October 1950. 161. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D266, Box 187, Paper circulated at the Beirut Conference of Public Affairs Officers, 17 February 1952, No. 33, ‘The VOA in the Middle East’. 162. USNA, RG 306, USIA Administration Subject Files, Box 2, Thompson to Streibert, 16 June 1954. 163. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D449, Box 5, Summaries of Semi-Annual Evaluation Reports, Egypt, Period Ending 30 November 1951. 164. USNA, RG 306, Country Project Files: Egypt, EG5301: Radio Listening, February/March 1953. 165. USNA, RG 59, 511.834/5–2854, Moose to Department of State, 28 May 1954. 166. USNA, RG 84/3253, Box 4, Nevins to USIA, No. 8, 8 August 1956. 167. USNA, RG 59, Lot 60D605, Box 56, Sanger to Damon, 28 December 1954. 168. DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff Papers, 1948–61, OCB Central File Series, OCB 000.77(8), OCB memorandum by Dale Smith, 3 August 1954. 169. DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff Papers, 1948–61, OCB Central File Series, Box 4, OCB 000.77(File #5)(12)(August–November 1954), Report of the NSC 169 Study: An Estimate of the Effectiveness of US International Broadcasting. 170. NAPRO, FO 953/49/PME283, Quarterly Report on the Activities of the Publicity Section, British Embassy, April–June 1947. 171. NAPRO, FO 953/60/PME1421/6, Kinross to Pollock, 8 August 1947. 172. NAPRO, FO 953/49/PME283, Quarterly Report on the Activities of the Publicity Section, British Embassy, April–June 1947. 173. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 153, Evans to Patterson, ‘Radio Broadcasting Report for October, 1946’; See also RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 153, Allen report, 21 August 1946. 174. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52–367, Box 139, Macy to Begg, 18 January 1947. 175. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 41, United States Information and Educational Exchange Program (USIE) Country Paper for Egypt, August 1950. 176. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D266, Box 187, Beirut Conference of Public Affairs Officers, Paper No. 50, Report of Radio Committee, 21 February 1952. 177. USNA, RG 306, USIA Foreign Service Despatches 1954–65, Box 3, Weathersby to USIA, ‘Semi-Annual USIS Report for Egypt,’ 4 August 1955; USNA, RG 59, 511.744/4-1954, AmEmbasy Cairo to Department of State, No. 2506, 19 April 1954. 178. Eveland, Ropes of Sand, p. 103. 179. NAPRO, FO 953/373/PME592, Information Department, Baghdad to MEID, 23 July 1948. 180. NAPRO, FO 953/594/PME606, Trevelyan to Warner, 30 September 1949. 181. USNA, RG 84, Baghdad Legation and Embassy General Records 1936–49, Box 107, Baghdad USIS Narrative Report for January, February and March 1946. 182. USNA, RG 59, 511.87/4–2053, ‘1954–1955 IIA Prospectus for Iraq,’ April 20, 1953.

Notes 261 183. USNA, RG 84, Baghdad USIS General Records 1956–58, Box 9, Cook to Newsom 28 December 1954, enclosing Inspection Report for USIS Iraq, 1–15 October 1954. 184. DDE, John Foster Dulles Papers, Subject Series, Box 5, Folder: File received from Mr. Herbert Hoover Jr’s office(1), ‘United States policy in the Near East’, 28 March 1956. 185. DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff Papers, 1948–61, OCB 091.4 Middle East (12–17–56), Ad Hoc Committee on Middle Eastern Informational Activities, first meeting, 13 November 1956. 186. NAPRO, FO 953/1463/P1011/88, Butler to IPD, 12 June 1954; NAPRO, FO 953/1422/PB1045/30, Chancery to Middle East Secretariat, 9 June 1953; and FO 953/1421/PB1045/23, Chapman Andrews to Malcolm, 20 May 1953; NAPRO, INF 6/808, COI memorandum, Local Broadcasting as a Publicity Outlet (undated; based on reports from overseas posts received between July 1952 and June 1953). 187. NAPRO, FO 953/61/PME1499/G, Kirkpatrick minute, 30 September 1946. 188. The British Council also appears to have accepted money from private corporations and there is evidence to suggest that its activities in Venezuela, were financially supported by the Shell oil company. 189. NAPRO, PREM 8/1506, C.P.(51)231, ‘Future of the British Council’, 26 July 1951. 190. The Council was consistently on the receiving end of attacks from Beaverbrook newspapers, which repeatedly caricatured Council representatives as long-haired effete, effeminate and ineffectual money-wasters. It is this campaign that led Frances Donaldson, in her ‘official biography’ of the Council, to label Beaverbrook ‘one of the few deliberately wicked men in British history’ (Donaldson, The British Council. The First Fifty Years (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1984), p. 63). 191. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D84, Box 197, Wilson report, ‘Information and Cultural Services in the Arab Near East’, March 1946. 192. USNA, Lot 60D669, Box 18, McCardle to Murphy, 13 October 1954. 193. NAPRO, FO 371/61558/E9559/G, ‘Briefs for Anglo-US Talks on Middle East’, 14 October 1947. 194. Defty, ‘Close and Continuous Liaison: British Anti-Communist Propaganda and Cooperation with the United States, 1950–51’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Winter 2002), pp. 100–30. 195. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D48, Box 110, Barrett memorandum, 6 October 1950. 196. USNA, RG 59, Lot 54D202, Box 6, Schwinn memorandum, 24 June 1949. 197. USNA, RG 59, Lot 54D202, Box 6, Schwinn memorandum, 24 June 1949. 198. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 4, Block to Schwinn, 27 September 1949. 199. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 12, Stone to Joyce, 10 April 1950. 200. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D48, Box 110, Barrett memorandum, 6 October 1950. 201. Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda, p. 149. 202. NAPRO, FO 1110/327/PR58/37/G, Speaight minute, 16 June 1950. 203. Jones, ‘The ‘Preferred Plan’: The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn 2004), p. 405. 204. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy Top Secret Records 1944–54, Box 2, Douglas to State Department, A-1053, 12 May 1948.

262 Notes 205. NAPRO, FO 1110/11/PR497/G, Warner to Balfour, 24 June 1948. 206. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy Top Secret Records 1944–54, Box 2, Devine to Patterson, 5 July 1948. 207. USNA, RG 59, 741.5274/5-550, Martindale to State Department, No. 995, 5 May 1950. 208. USNA, RG 59, 741.5200/6-550, Ford to State Department, No. 343, 5 June 1950. 209. USNA, RG 59, 741.5287/5-2050, Crocker to State Department, No. 624, 22 April 1950. 210. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D365, Box 6, Bowman memorandum, ‘First US–UK Information Committee Meeting held Oct. 17’, 18 October 1950. 211. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D365, Box 62, Southworth to Barrett, 27 April 1951. 212. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D365, Box 62, Memorandum of Conversation between Hamilton and Watson, 10 May 1951. 213. Defty, ‘Close and Continuous Liaison’, p. 122. 214. NAPRO, FO 953/1077/PB1046/1, Warner to Barrett, 17 March 1951. 215. NAPRO, FO 953/1077/PB1046/11, ‘Voice of America Broadcasts from Kuwait (Agreed Anglo-U.S. Record)’, 24 May 1951. 216. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D365, Box 62, Memorandum of Conversation between MacKnight and Watson, 31 March 1951. 217. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D365, Box 62, Kohler to Sargeant, 24 May 1951. 218. NAPRO, FO 953/1190/P10422/12, Watson to Malcolm, 7 June 1951. 219. USNA, RG 59, Lot 58D753, Box 2, Memorandum of Conversation, 9 September 1952. 220. NAPRO, FO 371/104258/E10345/31, Powell-Jones minute, 3 June 1953. 221. NAPRO, FO 371/104258/E10345/49, Falla minute, 21 August 1953. 222. NAPRO, FO 371/104190/E1022/6, Fellowes minute, 6 July 1953. 223. NAPRO, FO 371/104258/E10345/36, Kirkbride minute, 3 July 1953. 224. NAPRO, FO 371/104258/E10345/31, Allen minute, undated. 225. NAPRO, FO 371/104258/E10345/49, Falla minute, 21 August 1953. 226. NAPRO, FO 371/104258/E10345/41, Chapman Andrews to Bowker, 3 July 1953. 227. NAPRO, FO 1110/662/PR1016/171G, Chancery, Cairo to IRD, 23 July 1954. 228. NAPRO, FO 371/104258/E10345/41, Chapman Andrews to Bowker, 3 July 1953. 229. NAPRO, FO 1110/662/PR1016/171G, Chancery, Cairo to IRD, 23 July 1954. 230. USNA, RG 59, 511.00/8-2454, Joint State–USIA circular, CA-1369, 24 August 1954. 231. USNA, RG 59, Lot 62D136, Box 82, Joint State–USIA to NEA posts, CA-5587, 25 February 1955. 232. NAPRO, FO 953/1529/PG14517/37, Watson to Nicholls, 31 August 1954.

2 ‘Western Voices, Arab Minds’ 1. Rotter, ‘Saidism without Said: Orientalism and U.S. diplomatic history’, American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 4. (October 2000), p. 1205. 2. Patai, The Arab Mind (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983), p. ix. 3. Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle. An Interpretation of the Arabs (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), p. 313.

Notes 263 4. Lewis, ‘The Question of Orientalism’, New York Review of Books (June 24, 1982). See also Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam (London: I.B. Tauris,1988), pp. 130–1. 5. Prakash, ‘Orientalism Now’, History and Theory, Vol. 34, No. 3 (October 1995), p. 202. 6. Said, Covering Islam (Revised edition, London: Vintage, 1997), p. 4. 7. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 3. 8. Halliday, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (London: I.B. Tauris, 2nd ed. 1999), p. 200. 9. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 3. 10. Halliday, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation, pp. 205–6. 11. Ibid., p. 203. 12. Raphael Patai devoted an entire chapter to ‘The question of Arab stagnation’, in The Arab Mind (Revised edition, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983), pp. 247–67. 13. Said, Orientalism, pp. 296–307. 14. Halliday, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation, p. 208. 15. Patai, The Arab Mind, pp. 143–4. 16. See, for example, Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs. How Hollywood Vilifies A People (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001); Ghareeb (ed.), Split Vision: The Portrayal of Arabs in the American Media (Washington, DC: The American-Arab Affairs Council, 1983). 17. Mart, ‘Tough guys and American Cold War policy: images of Israel, 1948–1960’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1996), pp. 379–80. 18. Heiss, Empire and Nationhood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 4. 19. Ibid. pp. 229–31. 20. Hahn, Caught in the Middle East (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 28. 21. Little, American Orientalism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), pp. 9–11. 22. Citino, From Arab Nationalism to OPEC. Eisenhower, King Saud and the Making of U.S.–Saudi Relations (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 96. 23. Ibid., p. 88. 24. Ibid., p. 97. 25. Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism. The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 274. 26. Ibid., p. 11. 27. Frankel, British Foreign Policy, 1945–73 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), cited in Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power. British Foreign Policy Since 1945 (London: Zed Books, 1995), pp. 51–2. 28. Connelly, ‘Taking off the Cold War lens’, pp. 740–1. 29. Glubb, Britain and the Arabs, p. 401. 30. See for example, Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971). 31. Glubb, Britain and the Arabs, p. 389. 32. National Archive, formerly Public Record Office, Kew, UK (NAPRO), FO 371/ 52310/E769, Glubb memorandum, ‘The New Relationship’, 1 July 1945. 33. Connelly, ‘Taking off the Cold War lens’, p. 744. 34. Eisenhower, on the other hand, was quick to identify and challenge such views in his encounters with ‘old school’ British imperialists. In November

264 Notes

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

1954, for example, the President wrote to NATO commander, Alfred Gruenther, bemoaning Churchill’s resistance to his own argument that ‘In this day and time, no so-called “dependent people” can, by force, be kept indefinitely in that position.’ Churchill, Eisenhower complained, remained ‘completely Victorian in this regard’ Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas (DDE), Whitman File, DDE Diary Series, Box 8, Nov. 1954(1), Eisenhower to Gruenther, 30 November 1954. Nutting, The Arabs (New York: Mentor Books, 1964), p. 388. NAPRO, FO 371/52459/ E5857, Stonehewer Bird to Bevin, No. 224, 15 June 1946. NAPRO, FO 371/68385/ E24371/G, Pollock minute, 24 March 1948. United States National Archive, College Park, Maryland (USNA), RG 59, Lot 62D333, Box 2, PSB D-22, PSB Program for the Middle East, 6 February 1953. Dorril, MI6, p. 569. NAPRO, FO 953/49/PME283, Publicity Section (Cairo) to FO (received) 28 January 1947. NAPRO, FO 371/98244,/E1026/1, Fellowes memorandum, ‘Nationalism and Policy in the Middle East’, 2 March 1952. Connelly, ‘Taking off the Cold War lens’, p. 754. DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff Papers 1948–61, Executive Secretary’s Subject File Series, Box 7, #35 NSC 5611, ‘The USIA Program as of June 30, 1956’, undated. USNA, RG 59, 611.74/4-1153, Caffery to Department of State, Desp. No. 2113, 11 April 1953. USNA, RG 59, 611.80, 12-755, Allen to Dulles, 7 December 1955, enclosing draft of NSC 5428, ‘United States Objectives and Policies With Respect to the Near East’. NAPRO, FO 953/1563/PB1041/1, Waterfield to Lambert, 21 December 1954, enclosing ‘Broadcasting in Arabic’ (paper read by Waterfield at a FrancoBritish-American Conference on the Middle East and North Africa, December 1953). Cromer, Modern Egypt (New York: Macmillan, 1908), pp. 146–7, cited in Said, Orientalism, p. 38. NAPRO, FO 953/1563/PB1041/1, ‘Broadcasting in Arabic’. Ibid. NAPRO, FO 371/98244,/E1026/1, FO minute, 20 March 1952. NAPRO, FO 371/98251/E1054/2, FO minute, 8 March 1952. USNA, RG 59, 611.80, 12-755, Allen to Dulles, 7 December 1955, enclosing draft of NSC 5428. USNA, RG 59, Lot 62D333, Box 2, PSB D-22, 6 February 1953. DDE, C.D. Jackson Records, 1953–54,Box 1, PSB – Miscellaneous Memos, PSB E-8, Members of PSB Panels and Agency Points of Contact, 28 April 1953. USNA, RG 59, Lot 62D333, Box 2, PSB D-22, 6 February 1953. Ibid. NAPRO, FO 371/68386/5347/103/65/G, Troutbeck to Bevin, 21 April 1948. NAPRO, FO 371/98244,/E1026/1, FO minute, 20 March 1952. NAPRO, FO 371/52459/ E5857, Stonehewer Bird to Bevin, No. 224, 15 June 1946. USNA, RG 59, Lot 62D333, Box 2, PSB D-22, 6 February 1953.

Notes 265 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84.

Ibid. Citino, From Arab Nationalism to OPEC, p. 96. NAPRO, FO 1110/700/PR10104/143/G, Lewen to Glass, 1 November 1954. USNA, RG 306, USIA Intelligence Memoranda of the Office of Research 1954–56, Box 3, IM-122-55, ‘Notes on talk by Bernard Lewis’, 19 December 1955. Ibid. USNA, RG 59, Lot 62D333, Box 2, PSB D-22, 6 February 1953. Glubb, Britain and the Arabs, p. 384. NAPRO, FO 371/68385/ E24371/G, Burrows memorandum, ‘The failure of the Iraq Treaty and Arab Nationalist Movements’, undated [1948]. USNA, RG 59, Lot File 66D148, Box 128, Operations Co-ordinating Board (OCB) Memorandum, 1 April 1954. NAPRO, FO 953/49/PME283, Quarterly Report on the Situation in Egypt and the Activities of the Publicity Section, British Embassy, April–June 1947. NAPRO, FO 1110/316/PR43/8/G, ‘Anti-Communist Propaganda in Egypt’, 18 February 1950. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D266, Box 188, State Department Transcript of Proceedings, Working Group on Special Materials for Arab and Other Moslem Countries, 1 April 1952. NAPRO, FO 1110/PRG104/75/G, Chapman Andrews to Bowker, 23 September 1953. USNA, RG 59, Lot 62D333, Box 2, PSB D-22, 6 February 1953. Ibid. Ibid. Frankel, British Foreign Policy, 1945–73 cited in Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power, pp. 51–52. NAPRO, FO 953/594/PME606, Trevelyan to Warner, 30 September 1949. USNA, RG 59, Lot 62D333, Box 2, PSB D-22, 6 February 1953. NAPRO, FO 371/68385/E5274/103/65/G, Le Rougetel to Bevin, No. 131, 20 April 1948. USNA, RG 59, Lot 62D 333, Box 2, Folder PSB D-22. NAPRO, FO 371/75067/E8752, ‘Sir William Strang’s Tour in the Middle East (21st May–18th June, 1949), Report to the Secretary of State’, 9 July 1949. Strang’s views contrast markedly with the view of Consul General Dow that ‘The Jews are a Western-looking rather than an Eastern-looking people, and their whole economy depends on the flow of capital from the West, and on technical progress and development on Western lines’ (NAPRO, FO 371/75054/E2478, Dow to Bevin, No. 7, 8 February 1949). NAPRO, FO 371/115825/VR1051/8/G, Nicholls to Shuckburgh, 8 March 1955. NAPRO, FO 953/601/PME501, Pollock minute, 5 August 1949.

3 ‘National Projection’ 1. Lee, ‘British Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War, 1946–61’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Vol. 9, No. 1 (March 1998), pp. 112–34. 2. See Welch, ‘Cultural propaganda’, in Cull, Culbert and Welch (eds), Propaganda and Mass Persuasion. A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO Inc., 2003), pp. 101–2.

266 Notes 3. Gienow-Hecht, ‘On the Diversity of Knowledge and the Community of Thought: Culture and International History’, in Gienow-Hecht and Schumacher (eds), Culture and International History, pp. 3–4. 4. United States National Archive, College Park, Maryland (USNA), RG 59, Lot 53D84, Box 197, United States Information Services (USIS) Baghdad Report, 1 January–1 July 1946. 5. National Archive, Formerly Public Record Office, Kew, UK (NAPRO), FO 371/52459/ E5857, Stonehewer Bird to Bevin, No. 224, 15 June 1946. 6. NAPRO, FO 371/98244/E1026/1, Fellowes minute, 2 March 1952, attaching memorandum, ‘Nationalism and Policy in the Middle East’. 7. NAPRO, FO 371/52459/ E5857, Stonehewer Bird to Bevin, No. 224, 15 June 1946. 8. NAPRO, FO 371/52310/E769, Glubb memorandum, 1 July 1945. 9. NAPRO, FO 953/1317/PG1162/1, Creswell to Eden, No. 152, 24 June 1952. 10. NAPRO, FO 371/61544/E6379, McClelland to British Embassy, Washington, 8 July 1947. 11. NAPRO, FO 953/49/PME283, Publicity Section (Cairo) to FO (received) 28 Jan. 1947. 12. NAPRO, FO 1110/820/PR1088/3/G, Chapman Andrews to Grey, 2 May 1955. 13. NAPRO, BW 1/98, British Council memorandum, ‘Suggestions for British Council Expansion in the Middle East 1956–59,’ 1 November 1956. 14. NAPRO, FO 953/1317/PG1162/1, Creswell to Eden, No. 152, 24 June 1952. 15. NAPRO, BW 1/98, British Council memorandum, ‘Expansion in the Near and Middle East,’ 8 May 1956. 16. NAPRO, FO 953/58/PME1342, Wheeler to FO, 12 June 1947. 17. NAPRO, BW 39/11, British Council minute by the Controller, Overseas ‘B’ Department, 23 February 1953. 18. NAPRO, BW 39/11, ‘Report of a Visit to Iraq by the Overseas Inspector, Education Division’, August 1954. 19. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D84, Box 197, USIS Baghdad Report, 1 January–1 July 1946. 20. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D84, Box 197, Report by J.A. Wilson, ‘American Colleges in the Near East’, March 1946. 21. NAPRO, FO 371/98276/E11345/7, FO minute, 25 January 1952, enclosing memorandum, ‘United States Economic and Social Interests in the Middle East’. 22. USNA, RG 59, Lot 62D430, Box 2, Operations Co-ordinating Board (OCB) meeting, 19 October 1956. 23. NAPRO, FO 371/98276/E11345/7, ‘United States Economic and Social Interests in the Middle East’. 24. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 41, US Information and Educational Exchange Program (USIE) Country Paper for Syria, August 1950. 25. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 41, USIE Country Paper for Iraq, August 1950. 26. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D449 and 55D251, Box 1, Data for the Jackson Committee on Overt Information and Propaganda by International Information Administration, February 1953. 27. NAPRO, FO 953/1346/PG1932/1, Beeley to Eden, No. 85, 26 June 1952. 28. USNA, RG 59, Lot 66D449, Box 222, United States Educational Foundation (USEF) to State Department, No. 186, 8 November 1956.

Notes 267 29. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 153, USIS–OIC Cairo Report for September 1946. 30. Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas (DDE), Whitman File: NSC series, Box 5, 193rd meeting, 12 April 1955. 31. USNA, RG 306, United States Information Agency (USIA) Intelligence Bulletins of the Office of Research 1954–56, IB-53-55, ‘Near East Students at US Colleges and Universities 1950–55,’ 27 September 1955. 32. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 170, News Review, No. 37, 10 September 1953. 33. National Security Archive, George Washington University (NSAGWU), ‘U.S. Propaganda in the Middle East’, Doc. 93, Damon to Hadsel, 30 April 1953. 34. Ibid., Doc. 90, Dodge to Sanger, 2 February 1953. 35. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 170, News Review, No. 16, 16 April 1953; RG 59, 511.00/4–853, State Department Infoguide Bulletin 328, 8 April 1953. 36. NAPRO, FO 953/1316/PG1161/12, Chancery, Cairo to IPD, 7 October 1952. 37. NAPRO, FO 953/1216/P1011/1, Nicholls to Bass, 4 January 1952, enclosing memorandum, ‘The Projection of Britain’ (1946 text). 38. NAPRO, FO 953/1216/P1011/1, Nicholls to Bass, 4 January 1952, enclosing memorandum, ‘The Projection of Britain’ (1952 text). 39. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 153, Tuck to Byrnes, No. 635, 14 April 1946. 40. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 171, Tuck to Benton, 17 April 1947. In early 1948 United States Information Service (USIS) staff in Cairo reported that ‘official French sources’ were issuing press material that ‘damned America by snickers and the light touch … leading the reader to conclude that Americans are feather-minded … love their meals above their fellowmen … are far more interested in political advantage than world affairs’ (USNA RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 196, USIS–OIE Cairo Report of Activities, January 1948). 41. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 4, Report on OII Output for June 1951. 42. USNA, RG 306 USIA Publications, Box 170, News Review, No. 60, 30 July 1951. 43. NAPRO, FO 371/52310/E769, Glubb memorandum, 1 July 1945. 44. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 172, News Review, No.7, 17 February 1955. 45. See Carruthers, ‘ “Not just washed but dry-cleaned”: Korea and the “Brainwashing” scare of the 1950s’, in Rawnsley, Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s, pp. 47–66. 46. USNA, RG 59, Box 2237, 501/5–2853, H. Minor to Department of State, No. 685, 28 May 1953. 47. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 170, News Review, No. 27, 2 July 1953. 48. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D387, Box 120, NEA News Guidance, No. 2, 24 January 1952. 49. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 170, News Review, No. 26, 25 June 1953. 50. Ibid., Box 171, News Review, No. 30, 29 July 1954. 51. Ibid., News Review, No. 2, 14 January 1954.

268 Notes 52. Ibid., News Review, No. 30, 29 July 1954. 53. NAPRO, FO 953/379/PME20, Progress Report of Information Activities in the Middle East for the period December 1946–December 1947. 54. NAPRO, INF 12/734, Central Office of Information (COI) memorandum, ‘Al Aalam’, 12 October 1957. 55. Ibid. 56. NAPRO, FO 953/1216/P1011/1, ‘The Projection of Britain’ (1946 text). 57. NAPRO, FO 953/49/PME1969, Publicity Section, Cairo, to Middle East Information Department (MEID), 8 November 1947. 58. NAPRO, FO 953/395/PME358/254, Morrison to FO, 1 April 1948. 59. NAPRO, FO 953/52/PME510, Information Department, Baghdad to MEID, 3 February 1947. 60. NAPRO, FO 953/63/PME177, Wheeler to FO, 10 July 1947. 61. NAPRO, FO 953/373/PME412, Information Department, Baghdad, to FO, 22 April 1948. 62. NAPRO, FO 953/592/PME514, Parkes to Pollock, 11 August 1949. 63. NAPRO, FO 953/376/PME397, Howes to Pollock, 22 April 1948. 64. NAPRO, FO 953/603/PME469, Houstoun-Boswall to Warner, 15 July 1949. 65. NAPRO, FO 953/1553/P1041/38, Gallagher to Marett, 25 October 1955. 66. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 172, USIS–OIC Cairo Report, June 1947. 67. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 196, USIS–OIE Cairo Report, December 1948. 68. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 153, USIS–OIE Cairo ‘Films and Recordings Report for October 1946’. 69. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 153, USIS–OIC Cairo, ‘Films and Recordings Report for November 1946’. 70. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 172, USIS–OIC Cairo ‘Films and Recordings Report for July 1947’. 71. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D449 and 55D251, Box 5, Summaries of Semi-Annual Evaluation Reports, Iraq, Period Ending 31 May 1952. 72. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 196, USIS–OIE Cairo Report of Activities, February 1948. 73. DDE, White House Office: Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Status of Projects Subseries, Box 5, NSC 5430(5), Part 7, The USIA Program, 12 August 1954. 74. USNA, RG 59, 511.835/9–954, Strong to Dulles, 9 September 1954. 75. USNA, RG 59, Lot 60D262, Box 93, USIA Fortnightly Guidance for the NEA Area, No. 11, 30 September 1954. 76. DDE, White House Office: Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Status of Projects Subseries, Box 5, NSC 5509(7), Part 6, The USIA Program, 17 February 1955. 77. DDE, Whitman File: Dulles-Herter series, Box 4, Edman to USIA–State, No. 44, 9 September 1954. 78. Ibid., Byroade memorandum, 13 September 1954. 79. DDE, Jackson Committee Records, Box 14, Report to the President, 30 June 1953. 80. DDE, C.D. Jackson Records 1953–54, Box 1, Jackson to Adams, 19 January 1954.

Notes 269 81. Dizard, Inventing Public Diplomacy, p. 66. 82. NSAGWU, US Propaganda Activities in the Middle East – Documents, No. 1, Murray to MacLeish, 21 March 1945. 83. See, for example, USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 153, Allen report, 21 August 1946 and Box 153, American Legation, Cairo to State Department, No. 1742, 23 July 1946, Enclosure No. 1. 84. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 153, Allen report, 21 August 1946. 85. USNA, RG 306, Special ‘S’ Reports of the Office of Research 1953–63, Box 3, S-33-53, ‘Film Distribution Channels in Egypt’, 30 September 1953. 86. NAPRO, FO 953/373/PME592, Information Department, Baghdad to MEID, 23 July 1948. 87. USNA, RG 59 Lot 53D266, Box 188, Jones to Barrett, 15 January 1951. 88. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 172, USIS–OIC Cairo report for October 1947. 89. DDE, Dulles Papers, Special Assistant’s Chronological Series, Box 3, ‘Summary of Dr Johnson’s Statement’, 8 July 1953. 90. DDE, Jackson Committee Records, Box 14, Report to the President, 30 June 1953. 91. NAPRO, FO 953/740/P10453/1, Samuel to Beaumont, 17 April 1950. 92. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D449, Box 1, Begg to Harris, 20 March 1952. 93. DDE, White House Ofice, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Briefing Notes Subseries, Box 18, President’s Special International Program, 2nd semi-annual report, 1 January 1957–30 June 1957. 94. Ibid. 95. DDE, White House Office, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Status of Projects Subseries, Box 5, NSC 5509(7), Part 6, ‘ “The USIA Program”, 17 February 1955. See also, Monod, ‘ “He is a Cripple an” Needs my Love’: Porgy and Bess as Cold War Propaganda’, in Scott-Smith and Krabbendam (eds), The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945–1960, pp. 300–12. 96. USNA, RG 59, Lot 60D262, Box 93, USIA Fortnightly Guidance for the NEA Area, No. 17, 23 December 1954. 97. USNA, RG 84, Baghdad USIS General Records 1956–58, Box 4, American Embassy, Baghdad to State Department, 10 June 1955. 98. USNA, RG 84, Baghdad Legation and Embassy General Records 1936–49, Box 107, ‘USIS Program on Baghdad Radio’, 24 February 1946. 99. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 153, Allen report, 21 August 1946. 100. USNA, RG 306, USIA Intelligence Bulletins, Memoranda and Summaries of the Office of Research, 1954–56, Box 8, IS-38-56, 10 April 1956. 101. DDE, White House Office NSC Staff: Papers 1948–61, Planning Coordination Group Series, Box 2, #9 Bandung, Murphy to Rockefeller, 19 August 1955. 102. DDE, White House Office, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Status of Projects Subseries, Box 6, NSC 5525(6), Part 6 – The USIA Program, 11 August 1955. 103. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World. Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). See also Von Eschen, ‘Who’s the real ambassador? exploding Cold War racial ideology’, in Appy (ed.),

270 Notes

104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

128. 129.

Cold War Constructions (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), pp. 110–31. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, pp. 31–3. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 171, News Review, No. 15, 16 April 1954. DDE, C.D. Jackson Papers, 1931–67, Box 62, Washburn memorandum, 28 October 1954. Ibid., Washburn memorandum, 11 January 1955. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 170, News Review, No. 31, 15 May 1952. Ibid., No. 5, 17 January 1952. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D238 and 53D254, Box 86, Begg to Barry, 4 February 1952. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 27, NEA News Guidance, Vol. II, No. 7, 29 March 1951. USNA, RG 59, Lot 60D262, Box 93, USIA Fortnightly Guidance for the NEA Area, No. 17, 23 December 1954 and No. 32, 21 July 1955. USNA, RG 84, Baghdad USIS General Records 1956–58, Box 4, State Department Instruction, CA-7722, 7 May 1955. NAPRO, FO 953/592/PME145, Haigh to MEID, 8 February 1949. NAPRO, FO 953/603/PME469/11/988, Houstoun-Boswall to Warner, 15 July 1949. NAPRO, FO 953/382/PME528, Ikhwan al Hurriya Bulletin, No. 313, 17 August 1948. NAPRO, FO 953/592/PME145, Haigh to MEID, 8 February 1949. NAPRO, FO 953/603/PME146/11/988, W. Kirkpatrick to MEID, 10 February 1949. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D84, Box 197, Wilson report, ‘Information and Cultural Services in the Arab Near East’, March 1946. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 12, George Allen address to first meeting of the US Advisory Commission on Information, 7 October 1948. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D84, Box 197, ‘Information and Cultural Services in the Arab Near East’, March 1946. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D84, Box 197, USIS Baghdad Report, 1 January–1 July 1946. NAPRO, FO 371/68385/ E24371/G, Halford minute, 13 February 1948. USNA, RG 59, Lot 188, Box 120, Tyler to Stone, 4 October 1947. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 12, Hunt to Barrett, 21 August 1950. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 168, Dorsz to Marshall, A-413, 18 December 1947. NAPRO, PREM 8/1506, C.P.(51)231, Memorandum by the Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs, Colonies and Commonwealth Relations, ‘Future of the British Council’, 26 July 1951. NAPRO, FO 953/1461/P1011/45, Nutting minute, 13 November 1953. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, p. 84.

4 ‘Who Can Be Neutral?’ 1. See, for example, Kent, British Imperial Strategy and the Origins of the Cold War 1944–49 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993).

Notes 271 2. Acheson, Present at the Creation. My years at the State Department (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1969), pp. 196–7. 3. United States National Archive, College Park, Maryland (USNA), RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 150, Lyon to Byrnes, No. 1735, 20 July 1946, enclosing memorandum by Philip Ireland, ‘Soviet Penetration in the Middle East’, 16 July 1946. 4. Ibid. 5. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 150, Lyon to Byrnes, No. 1735, 20 July 1946. 6. National Archives, formerly Public Record Office, Kew, UK (NAPRO), FO 371/52327/4369/797/65, Shone to Bevin, No. 72, 1 May 1946. 7. NAPRO, FO 371/52310/E3135/96/65, Note by M.L. Fitzgerald, 1 June 1946. 8. NAPRO, FO 953/61/PME1499/G, Kirkpatrick minute, 30 September 1946. 9. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 166, Douglas to Marshall, A-1285, 2 June 1947. 10. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 187, Wadsworth to Marshall, No. 78, 16 April 1948, enclosing Meyer memorandum, U.S. Information Policy as viewed from Iraq, 8 April 1948. 11. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 151, Lyon to Byrnes, No. 1214, 14 July 1946. 12. NAPRO, FO 1110/660/PR1013/5, Fay to IRD, 5 November 1954. 13. NAPRO, CAB 158/15 (Part I), J.I.C.(53)29(Final), Report by the Joint Intelligence Committee ( JIC), ‘Survey of World Communism in 1952’, 28 April 1953. 14. NAPRO, CAB 158/17 (Part I), J.I.C.(54)10(Final), Report by the JIC, ‘Survey of World Communism in 1953’, 1 March 1954. 15. NAPRO, CAB 158/19, J.I.C.(55)10(Final), Report by the JIC, ‘Survey of World Communism in 1954’, 24 March 1955. 16. NAPRO, CAB 158/23, J.I.C.(56)10(Final), Report by the JIC, ‘Survey of World Communism in 1955’, 20 April 1956. 17. See, for example, Golan, Soviet Policies in the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 44–5. 18. USNA, RG 59, 511.83A/6-1853, United States Information Services (USIS) Country Plan – Lebanon, 1 June 1953. 19. USNA, RG 59, 511.87/3-3053, USIS Country Plan – Iraq, 30 March 1953. 20. DDE, Jackson Committee Records, Box 14, ‘Report to the President’, 30 June 1953. 21. NAPRO, FO 1110/316/PR43/8/G, Information Department, Cairo to Information Research Department (IRD), 20 March 1950. 22. USNA, RG 306, USIA Administration Subject Files, Box 2, Folder: Committee Area Directors, Minutes of Area Directors Meeting, 18 June 1954. 23. USNA, RG 59, 611.80, 12-755, Allen to Dulles, 7 December 1955, enclosing revised draft of NSC 5428, ‘United States Objectives and Policies With Respect to the Near East’. 24. NAPRO, CAB 158/23, J.I.C.(56)20(Final), Report by the JIC, ‘Factors Affecting Egypt’s Policy in the Middle East and North Africa’, Annex: ‘Soviet Activities and Aims in the Middle East’, 18 April 1956. 25. NAPRO, FO 1110/585/PRG44/8/G, Chancery, Ankara to IRD, 29 June 1953. 26. NAPRO, FO 1110/565/PRG16/13, J.Murray to Peck, 6 July 1953. 27. NAPRO, FO 1110/776/PR1016/2/G, Rennie to Glass, 10 February 1955.

272 Notes 28. NAPRO, FO 1100/600/PRG80/5/G, Chancery, Amman to IRD, 13 July 1956. 29. NAPRO, FO 1110/676/PR1034/5/G, Residency, Bahrain, to IRD, 29 November 1954. 30. NAPRO, FO 1110/823/PR1093/6, Kellas to Grey, 22 July 1955. 31. NAPRO, CAB 159/16, J.I.C. (54) 67th Meeting, Minutes of Meeting held on 29 July 1954. 32. NAPRO, FO 1110/820/PR1099/2/G, Gauntlett to Rennie, 19 April 1955; FO 1110/PR1089/6/G, Gardener to Grey, 3 May 1956. 33. Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas (DDE), Jackson Committee Records, 1950–53, Box 12, ‘Statement of message of US propaganda effort in various countries’, 17 March 1953. 34. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy Top Secret Records 1944–54, Box 1, Patterson to Marshall, No. 2661, 23 June 1947. 35. USNA, RG 306, Office of Research Country Project Correspondence, 1952–63, Box 4, Folder: Egypt 1956, Loomis to Weathersby, 27 February 1956. 36. Ibid. 37. USNA, RG 84, Damascus Embassy General USIS 1955–57, Box 4, Weathersby to Near East Regional Service Centre (NERSC) Beirut, 10 March 1956. 38. USNA, RG 59 Lot 54D202, Box 3, Laswell to Benton, 3 October 1946. 39. NAPRO, FO 371/75054/E2478, Dow to Bevin, 8 February 1949. 40. NAPRO, FO 371/52327/E2692, Greenhill minute, 8 April 1946. 41. NAPRO, FO 371/98244/E1026/1, FO minute, 20 March 1952. 42. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 151, Mattison report, 9 May 1946. 43. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 151, Mattison to Byrnes, No. 449, 19 June 1946. 44. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 151, Strategic Services Unit, War Department Intelligence Dissemination No. A-69167, ‘Notes on Hizb al-Qawmi al-Suri (SPP) in Damascus, 23 May 1946. 45. USNA, RG 59 Lot 61D53, Box 80, AmEmbassy Beirut to State Department, 29 May 1953. 46. NAPRO, FO 371/52327/E2692, Greenhill minute, 8 April 1946. 47. NAPRO, FO 953/61/PME1499/G, Kirkpatrick memorandum, 17 October 1946. 48. NAPRO, FO 953/592/PME145, Haigh to Middle East Information Department (MEID); 8 February 1949. 49. NAPRO, FO 953/932/PG1883/1, Warner to Houstoun-Boswall, 21 January 1950. 50. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D365, Box 48, Fisk to Phillips, 19 February 1951. 51. NAPRO, FO 953/367/PME428, Pubsec Cairo to MEID, 7 May 1948. 52. NAPRO, FO 953/367/PME145, Pubsec Cairo to MEID (received) 4 February 1948. 53. NAPRO, FO 953/367/PME428, Pubsec Cairo to MEID, 7 May 1948. 54. NAPRO, FO 371/63033/J2166, Fay memorandum, 29 April 1947. 55. NAPRO, FO 953/380/PME30, Ikhwan al Hurriya Bulletin No. 290, 24 February 1948. 56. NAPRO, FO 371/53327/J53/53/16, Killearn to Bevin, 27 December 1945. 57. NAPRO, FO 1110/316/PR43/8/G, Information Department, Cairo to Information Research Department (IRD), 20 March 1950, ‘Anti-Communist Propaganda in Egypt’, 18 February 1950.

Notes 273 58. An Arabic language article entitled ‘WFTU: a Subversive Organisation’ was produced by IRD and RIO Beirut and appeared in the Jordanian press in March 1956 (NAPRO, FO 1110/926, RIO Beirut to IRD, 9 April 1956). 59. NAPRO, FO 953/1481/P10416/2/G, Information Office, Beirut to IRD, 26 April 1954. 60. NAPRO, FO 1110/688/PR1053/5, Chancery, Tel Aviv, to IRD, 16 August 1954. 61. NAPRO, FO 953/1481/P10416/2/G, Information Office, Beirut to IRD, 26 April 1954; FO 1110/821/PR1089/6/G, Kemp minute, 6 June 1955. 62. NAPRO, FO 1110/776/PR1016/10/G, R. Murray to Grey, 18 July 1955. 63. NAPRO, FO 1110/821/PR1089/6/G, Gardener to Grey, 3 May 1955. 64. Ibid., Goodison minute, 9 June 1955. 65. Ibid., Gardener to Grey, 3 May 1955. 66. NAPRO, FO 1110/776/PR1016/10/G, Murray to Grey, 18 July 1955. IRD was less enthusiastic, doubting that a left-wing British journalist could be found to take the job on (‘they are unlikely to do it to please us’) and, even if a candidate could be found, expressing concern about the likely contents of any material such a journalist might publish upon his return to Britain (FO 1110/776/PR1016/10/G, Grey to Murray, 19 September 1955). 67. NAPRO, FO 1110/821/PR1089/6/G, Gardener to Grey, 3 May 1955. 68. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 170, News Review, No. 60, 30 July 1951. 69. NAPRO, FO 371/98276/E11345/7, FO minute, 25 January 1952, enclosing ‘United States Economic and Social Interests in the Middle East’, undated. 70. NAPRO, FO 371/98276/E11345/7, ‘United States Economic and Social Interests in the Middle East’. 71. USNA, RG 59, 511.80/4-1653, Clark to Sanger, 16 April 1953, enclosing ‘Information Policy for the Point IV Program’, 3 March 1953. 72. USNA, RG 306, United States Information Agency (USIA) Publications, Box 170, News Review, No. 18, 3 March 1952. 73. NAPRO, FO 957/132/3, Rapp to Heads of all Middle East Missions, 1 February 1951. 74. NAPRO, FO 371/104258/E10345/49, Falla minute, 21 August 1953. 75. USNA, RG 59, 541.80/10-2654, Weathersby to Joint State-USIA, No. 792, 26 October 1954. 76. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 170, News Review, No. 36, 3 September 1953. 77. NAPRO, FO 1110/823/PR1093/5, Wright to Grey, 8 July 1955. 78. NAPRO, FO 953/58/PME1342, Wheeler to Middle East Information Department (MEID), 12 June 1947. 79. NAPRO, FO 953/49/PME283, Publicity Section, Cairo, to MEID, 28 January 1947. 80. NAPRO, FO 371/52459/E5857, Stonehewer Bird to Bevin, No. 224, 15 June 1946. 81. NAPRO, FO 371/52459/E5857, Buss minute, 2 October 1946. 82. NAPRO, FO 953/1351/PG1881/1, Verney to Barclay, 21 May 1952. 83. USNA, RG 59, Lot 61D53, Box 77, Newsom to MacKnight, 21 April 1954. 84. DDE, White House Office Staff Papers 1948–61, Planning Coordination Group Series, Box 2, Murphy to Rockefeller, 19 August 1955. 85. USNA, RG 59, 674.00/1-954, Caffery to Department of State, No. 1613, 9 January 1954.

274 Notes 86. NAPRO, FO 371/108349/JE1022/3, Stevenson to Eden, 12 January 1954. 87. DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff: Papers 1948–61, Planning Coordination Group Series, Box 2, Murphy to Rockefeller, 19 August 1955. 88. USNA, RG 59, Lot File 66D148, Box 128, ‘Psychological Aspects of US Strategy Panel Report’, November 1955. 89. NAPRO, PREM 11/1079, Makins to Foreign Office, No. 2489, 14 October 1955. 90. Ibid., Millard minute, 18 October 1955. 91. NAPRO, FO 953/1476/P1041/20, Gathorne-Hardy to Marett, 6 August 1954. 92. Russell wrote a short piece, ‘Who Can Be Neutral’, which was translated into Arabic and distributed in the Middle East in early 1953. 93. NAPRO, FO 953/1476/P1041/20, Gathorne-Hardy to Marett, 6 August 1954, and attached minutes. 94. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 172, News Review, No. 13, 1 April 1954. 95. Ibid., No. 37, 16 September 1954. 96. USNA, RG 306, Office of Research and Intelligence General Files 1955–59, Box 7, Global Theme II, 6 July 1954. 97. USNA, Lot 60D262, Box 93, USIA Fortnightly Guidance for the NEA Area, No. 12, 14 October 1954. 98. USNA, RG 306, USIA Feature Packets, Non-Recurring Subjects 1953–58, Box 1, No. 14, ‘Words and Deeds’, undated. 99. Representing an advance of 100,000 on the figure presented in the original research paper, presumably a clerical error. 100. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 172, News Review, No. 19, 12 May 1955. 101. Ibid., Box 170, News Review, No. 8, 19 February 1953. 102. Ibid., Box 172, News Review, No. 18, 5 May 1955. 103. NAPRO, FO 953/62/PME14, Wheeler to MEID, 24 December 1946. 104. NAPRO, FO 953/380/PME30, Ikhwan al Hurriya Bulletin, No. 288, 10 February 1948. 105. NAPRO, INF 12/734, COI memo, ‘Al Aalam’, 12 October 1957. 106. NAPRO, FO 953/1629/P1041/2, Regional Information Office (RIO) Beirut to IPD, 5 January 1956. 107. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 172, News Review, No. 16, 22 April 1954. 108. USNA, RG 59, Lot 5D57, Box 8, ‘Information Program Guidance Special Series: Moral and Religious Factors in the USIE Program’, 22 June 1951. 109. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D266, Box 188, Abiouness to Semmerling, 18 July 1952. 110. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D266, Box 188, Damon to Wadsworth, 9 June 1952. 111. DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff Papers 1948–61, Operations Co-ordinating Board (OCB) Secretariat Series, Box 5, OCB memorandum, ‘Planning and Programming in the Area of Moral and Spiritual Values’, 4 September 1953. 112. USNA, RG 59, 511.74/2-1453, Caffery to State Department, No. 1626, 14 February 1953 (Caffery was rather less keen to draw attention to the Minister’s additional observation that Judaism, like Nazism, was ‘no more than racism’).

Notes 275 113. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 170, News Review, No. 18, 30 April 1953. 114. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D449 and 55D251, Box 1, Damon to International Information Administration (IIA) directors, 8 April 1952. 115. USNA, Lot 53D266, Box 188, Damon to Connors, 25 June 1952. 116. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 230, State Department Infoguide Bulletin No. 51, 26 August 1952. 117. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D449 and 55D251, Box 1, Data for the Jackson Committee on Overt Information and Propaganda by International Information Administration, February 1953. 118. USNA, RG 59 Lot Files, 62D430, Box 40, Ad Hoc Working Group on Islam memorandum for OCB, 3 May 1957. 119. NAPRO, FO 953/863/PG1163/15E, Ikhwan al Hurriya Bulletin, No. 410, 15 August 1950. 120. NAPRO, FO 371/53327/J1266/53/16, Bowker to Bevin, 14 March 1946. 121. NAPRO, FO 371/52327/E4369, Shone to Bevin, No. 72, 1 May 1946. 122. NAPRO, FO 371/52459/E5857, Stonehewer Bird to Bevin, No. 224, 15 June 1946. 123. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 150, ‘Soviet Penetration in the Middle East’. 124. NAPRO, CAB 158/18 (Part I), JIC (54) 72 (Final), ‘Political Developments in the Middle East and Their Impact upon Western Interests’, Report by the JIC, 11 November 1954. 125. NAPRO, FO 1110/227/PR2674, Murray to Parkes, 15 November 1949. 126. NAPRO, FO 953/381/PME294, Ikhwan al Hurriya Bulletin, No. 296, 6 April 1948. 127. NAPRO, FO 953/863/PG1163/17C, Ikhwan al Hurriya bulletin, No. 417, 10 October 1950. 128. NAPRO, FO 1110/662/PR1016/17/G, Chancery, Cairo to IRD, 23 July 1954. 129. NAPRO, FO 975/25, IRD Research Report, ‘Communism and Islam’, 31 May 1949. 130. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 170, News Review, No. 23, 22 March 1951. 131. Ibid., No. 34, 26 May 1952. 132. Ibid., No. 6, 5 February 1953. 133. Ibid., No. 15, 9 April 1953. 134. USNA, RG 59, 511.7421/4-2253, Payne to State Department, 22 April 1953. 135. USNA, RG 59, 511.74/3-953, Payne to State Department, No. 1806, 9 March 1953. 136. USNA, RG 59, 511.74/12-3155, Weathersby to State-USIA, No. 720, 31 December 1955. 137. NAPRO, FO 1110/316/PR43/81G, Cairo Information Department to IRD, 20 March 1950, enclosing memorandum, ‘Anti-Communist Propaganda in Egypt’, 18 February 1950. 138. Ibid. 139. NAPRO, FO 1110/609/PRG93/8/G, Mackenzie to IRD, 22 June 1953. 140. Ibid., Horn to Mackenzie, 31 July 1953. 141. NAPRO, FO 953/61/PME1499/G, Kirkpatrick memorandum, 17 October 1946.

276 Notes 142. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy Top Secret Records, 1944–54, Box 1, Patterson to Marshall, No. 2661, 23 June 1947. 143. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 218, Caffery to State Department, No. 1005, 5 May 1950. 144. NAPRO, FO 1110/823/PR1093/6, Kellas to Grey, 27 July 1955. 145. NAPRO, FO 1110/823/PR1093/6, Glass to IRD, 30 July 1955. 146. NAPRO, FO 1110/225/PR472, Carter minute, 11 March 1949. 147. USNA, USIA Publications, Box 170, News Review, No. 34, 26 May 1952. 148. NAPRO, FO 1110/821/PR1089/4, Myers to IRD, 5 March 1955; NAPRO, FO 1110/933/PR1089/10, Press Attaché, Damascus, to IRD (received) 18 June 1956. 149. Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail. Suez through Egyptian Eyes (London: André Deutsch, 1986), p. 53.

5 ‘The Less Said the Better’ 1. Readers unfamiliar with the topic should consult excellent accounts such as: Cohen, Palestine and the Great Powers (1982); Pappe, Britain and the Arab–Israeli Conflict 1948–51 (1988); Ovendale, Britain, the United States and the End of the Palestine Mandate (1989); Levey, Israel and the Western Powers, 1952–1960 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Hahn, caught in the Middle East. U.S. Policy towards the Arab–Israeli conflict, 1945–1961 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 2. United States National Archive, College Park, Maryland (USNA), RG 59, Lot 53D84, Box 197, United States Information Services (USIS) Baghdad Report, 1 January–1 July 1946. 3. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 150, Tuck to Byrnes, A-52, 2 February 1946. 4. Ibid., Byrnes to Amlegation, Cairo, 4 March 1946. 5. Ibid., White House Press Release, 30 April 1946. 6. National Archive, formerly Public Record Office, Kew, UK (NAPRO), FO 930/433, Ikhwan al Hurriya Bulletin, No. 200, 7 May 1946. 7. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 150, Lyon to Byrnes, 1 July 1946, enclosing report by Philip W. Ireland, 10 June 1946. 8. NAPRO, FO 371/61559/E10018/G, Inverchapel to FO, No. 5928, 25 October 1947. 9. NAPRO, FO 371/61559/E10018/G, Rundall minute, 31 October 1947. 10. Ibid., Box 171, Tuck to Marshall, No. 2533, 19 May 1947. 11. USNA, RG 59, Lot 188, Box 124, Carter to Stone, 5 June 1946. 12. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 187, Memorandum by A.H. Meyer, ‘U.S. Information Policy as Viewed from Iraq’, 8 April 1948. 13. Ibid., Box 196, USIS–OIE Cairo ‘Report of Activities, January 1948’. 14. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D365, Box 48, Fisk to Phillips, 19 February 1951. 15. NAPRO, CO 537/4206, Report by the Public Informations Office, Jerusalem, January–December 1946. 16. Ibid. 17. Morris, ‘The Labour government’s policy and publicity over Palestine 1945–7’, p. 170.

Notes 277 18. NAPRO, CO 537/4206, Report by the Public Informations Office, Jerusalem, January–December 1946. 19. Ibid. 20. Morris, ‘The Labour government’s policy and publicity over Palestine 1945–7’, p. 170. 21. NAPRO, FO 953/5J/P1849, FO to His Majesty’s Representative at Cairo, No. 1925, 16 October 1947. 22. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D84, Box 197, USIS, Baghdad Report, 1 January–1 July 1946. 23. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 151, Wadsworth to Byrnes, No. 1266, 10 July 1946. 24. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 151, Mattison report, 9 May 1946. 25. USNA, RG 263, Box 217, No. 277, Sharq al-Adna, 26 March 1948. 26. Ibid., Box 211, No. 243, Sharq al-Adna, 8 February 1948. 27. NAPRO, FO 953/381/PME294, Ikhwan al Hurriya Bulletin, No. 294, 23 March 1948. 28. USNA, RG 263, Box 224, No. 319, Sharq al-Adna, 25 May 1948. 29. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 151, Mattison to Byrnes, No. 449, 19 June 1946. 30. USNA, RG 59, Lot 188, Box 125, Office of International Information (OII) Weekly Guidance Notes, #14, 12 February 1948. 31. NAPRO, FO 953/381/PME294, Ikhwan al Hurriya Bulletin, No. 302, 25 May 1948. 32. NAPRO, FO 371/68386/E6364/103/65, Houstoun-Boswall to FO, No. 357, 16 May 1948. 33. NAPRO, FO 953/375/PME103, Information Department, Beirut, Monthly Review of the Lebanese Press, No. 5, May 1948. 34. NAPRO, FO 953/392/PME142, Middle East Information Department (MEID) Monthly Report, 30 May 1948. 35. NAPRO, FO 371/68386/E8738, Troutbeck to Wright, 18 May 1948. 36. NAPRO, FO 371/68386/E8737/103/65, Houstoun-Boswall to Wright, 9 May 1948. 37. NAPRO, FO 953/380/PME30, Ikhwan al Hurriya Bulletin, No. 282, 30 December 1947. 38. NAPRO, FO 953/5J/P1849, FO to Singapore, No. 41, 22 October 1947. 39. USNA, RG 263, Box 210, No. 239, Sharq al-Adna, 2 February 1948. 40. NAPRO, FO 953/370/PME867, Haigh to Pollock, 24 November 1948. 41. NAPRO, FO 953/381/PME294, Ikhwan al Hurriya Bulletin, No. 292, 9 March 1948. 42. Ibid., No. 296 (indexed 26 April 1948). 43. Ibid., No. 291, Sharq al-Adna, 15 April 1948. 44. NAPRO, FO 953/592/PME145/21/916, Haigh to MEID, 8 February 1949. 45. BBC Written Archives Center, Cauersham (BBCWAC), E1/631, File 1, Tweedy to Waterfield, 1 November 1949. 46. NAPRO, CO 537/3931, Fox-Strangeways to Gutch, 4 February 1948. 47. NAPRO, CO 537/3931, O’Sullivan report, 10 February 1948. 48. USNA, RG 263, Box 216, No. 272, Haganah Radio, 19 March 1948. 49. NAPRO, FO 953/373/PME592/193/993, Information Department, Baghdad to MEID, 23 July 1948.

278 Notes 50. NAPRO, FO 953/361/PME511/2/H, Chapman Andrews to FO, No. 136, 16 August 1948. 51. NAPRO, FO 953/362/PME593, Information Department, Cairo to MEID, 16 July 1948. 52. NAPRO, FO 953/367/PME594, Information Department, Cairo to MEID, 30 July 1948. 53. NAPRO, FO 953/367/PME662, Haigh to Warner, 4 August 1948. 54. NAPRO, FO 953/367/PME594, Information Department, Cairo to MEID, 30 July 1948. 55. USNA, RG 263, Box 249, No. 1, Sharq al-Adna, 1 January 1949. 56. NAPRO, FO 953/383/PME717, Ikhwan al Hurriya Bulletin, No. 317, 14 September 1948. 57. NAPRO, FO 953/383/PME889, Ikhwan al Hurriya Bulletin, No. 329, 14 December 1948. As a result of propaganda of this kind, Britain’s ‘de facto’ recognition of Israel in 1949 came as a shock to many in the Arab world, and prompted a number of resignations from the Ikhwan al Hurriya (NAPRO, FO 371/73469/J2037, Campbell to FO, 8 March 1949). 58. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D335, Box 89, Overnight Guidance No. 11, 16 November 1948. 59. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D84, Box 198, NEA/P to United States Information and Educational Exchange Program (USIE) 22 December 1949. 60. NAPRO, FO 953/370/PME867, Haigh to Pollock, 24 November 1948. 61. NAPRO, FO 953/383/PME717, Ikhwan al Hurriya Bulletin, No. 323, 2 November 1948. 62. USNA, RG 59, Lot 54D202, Box 6, State Department Transcript of Proceedings, Meeting: Information Policy Committee, 15 May 1950. 63. NAPRO, FO 953/373/PME863, Morrison to MEID, 8 November 1948. 64. USNA, RG 84, Egypt Cairo Embassy Top Secret Records 1954–55, Box 4, ‘Detailed Discussion of Need For Early Diplomatic Initiative by U.S. Government Re Arab Refugees and Related Palestine Issues’, 17 August 1953. 65. NAPRO, FO 953/379/PME20/20/965, ‘Progress Report of Information Activities in the Middle East for the Period December 1946 to December 1947’. 66. NAPRO, FO 371/111076/VR1072/282, Sterndale Bennett to Shuckburgh, 13 December 1954. 67. NAPRO, FO 371/75064/E3158, Troutbeck to Wright, 3 March 1949. 68. NAPRO, FO 1110/327/PR58/47/G, Houstoun-Boswall to Murray, 19 August 1950. The ‘moral’ aspect of British pro-Arab sentiment is intelligently dissected in Wm. Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 114–18. 69. NAPRO, FO 371/75054/E2478, Bevin to Troutbeck, 20 May 1949. 70. NAPRO, FO 371/75054/E2479, Houstoun-Boswall to Bevin, 16 February 1949. 71. NAPRO, FO 371/75054/E2478, Bevin to Troutbeck, 20 May 1949. 72. NAPRO, FO 953/698/P10167/16, British Legation, Tel Aviv, to IPD, 16 September 1950. 73. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 41, USIE Country Paper for Egypt, August 1950. 74. Ibid., United States Information and Educational Exchange Program (USIE) Country Paper for Iraq, August 1950.

Notes 279 75. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D266, Box 187, Proceedings of the Beirut Conference of Public Affairs Officers, 18–24 February 1952. 76. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/1-2053, Willard to State Department, 20 January 1953. 77. USNA, Lot 53D266, Box 187, Proceedings of the Beirut Conference of Public Affairs Officers, 18–24 February 1952, Excerpts and Summaries. 78. Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 79. NAPRO, FO 371/104789/ER1091/397, Falla minute, 16 October 1953. 80. NAPRO, FO 371/104790/ER1091/428, Fowler to Baker, enclosing correspondence with J.Murray, 21 October 1953. 81. NAPRO, FO 371/104789/ER1091/394, FO to Tel Aviv, No. 429, 16 October 1953. 82. USNA, RG 59, 511.00/2-653, State Department Circular, No. 845, 6 February 1953. 83. USNA, RG 59, Lot 60D262, Box 97, State Department Policy Information Statement for USIA (NEA-30), 24 September 1953. 84. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 170, News Review, No. 43, 22 October 1953. 85. USNA, RG 59, Lot 60D262, Box 97, State Department Policy Information Statement for USIA (NEA-44), 23 October 1953. 86. NAPRO, FO 371/111073/VR1072/175, Duke to Shuckburgh, 10 August 1954; FO 371/111074/VR1072/184, Wilson to FO, 6 September 1954. 87. Hansard, Vol. 517, c. 1705, 13 July 1953. 88. NAPRO, FO 371/104784/ER1091/239, Moore to FO, No. 194, 19 June 1953; FO 371/104784/ER1091/244, Makins to FO, No. 1299, 20 June 1953. In fact, despite the initial annoyance with Glubb for causing Britain some discomfiture with the Israelis, it was felt by several officials that if Glubb’s comments had secured his position in Jordan, then the temporary souring of relations with Israel was outweighed by the benefits to British interests in the Arab world. 89. NAPRO, FO 371/111073/VR1072/177, Sterndale Bennett to Shuckburgh, 16 August 1954. 90. NAPRO, FO 371/111087/VR1074/91‘A’, Sterndale Bennett to FO, No. 267, 17 April 1954. 91. NAPRO, FO 371/111089/VR1074/168, Sterndale Bennett to FO, No. 308, 13 May 1954. 92. NAPRO, FO 371/111073/VR1072/177, Falla minute, 25 August 1954. 93. Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas (DDE), White House Office, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, Records, 1952–61, NSC Series, Policy Papers Subseries, Box 5, Progress Report on NSC 155/1, 29 July 1954. 94. USNA, RG 306, USI Publications, Box 171, News Review, No. 19, 13 May 1954 and No. 20, 20 May 1954. 95. NAPRO, FO 371/111092/VR1076/17, Bailey to Brewis, 5 May 1954. 96. USNA, RG 306, United States Information Agency (USIA) Publications, Box 171, News Review, No. 19, 13 May 1954. 97. Ibid., No. 19, 13 May 1954 and No. 20, 20 May 1954. 98. Benny Morris has cited a letter to the State Department from the US consul in Jerusalem which predicted that the Israelis would find the prosecution of their campaign against Hutchison ‘difficult’ on account of his ‘personal popularity’ and his having ‘gained the respect of all who know him by his

280 Notes

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

intelligence, fairness and impartiality’ (Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 313n.). In turn, the British consul in Jerusalem declared that he did not believe there to be ‘any truth in the suggestion that Bennike has pro-Arab bias’ (NAPRO, FO 371/111078/VR1073/81, Wikeley to Falla, 11 May 1954). Indeed, if anything, British officials tended to condemn Bennike for being too weak and not standing up to the Israelis, and there was a tendency later in the year to regard French members of the UNTSO team as being unacceptably pro-Israeli. NAPRO, FO 371/111078/VR1073/81, Wikeley to Falla, 11 May 1954. NAPRO, FO 371/111078/VR1073/90, Wikeley to Falla, 18 May 1954. NAPRO, FO 371/111080/VR1073/154, Wikeley to Falla, 21 July 1954. NAPRO, FO 371/111078/VR1073/81, Wikeley to Falla, 11 May 1954. NAPRO, FO 371/111079/VR1073/123, Wikeley to Falla, 30 June 1954. DDE, White House Office, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs: Records 1952–61, NSC Series: Status of Projects Subseries, Box 6, NSC 5525(6), The USIA Program, 11 August 1955. NAPRO, FO 371/111104/VR1091/169, Goodison minute, 10 August 1954. NAPRO, FO 371/110086/VR1074/45, Makins to FO, No. 521, 27 March 1954. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/9-154, State Department Circular, No. 125, 1 September 1955. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/9-454, Hare to Dulles, No. 211, 4 September 1954. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/9-354, Ireland to Dulles, No. 135, 3 September 1954. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/9-454, Strong to Dulles, No. 104, 4 September 1954. NAPRO, FO 371/113676/256/JE1194/256, Scott to FO, No. 742, 6 October 1955. USNA, RG 59, 511.00/10-1255, CA-2907, NEA-123, 11 October 1955. NAPRO, FO 371/113681/JE1194/372, Shuckburgh minute, 19 October 1955. NAPRO, FO 953/1420/P10437/4, Malcolm minute, 24 June 1953. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D266, Box 187, Proceedings of the Beirut Conference of Public Affairs Officers, 18–24 February 1952. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/12-755, NSC 5428 ‘United States Objectives and Policies With Respect to the Near East’, 7 December 1955. NAPRO, FO 371/111095/VR1079/9/G‘A’, Makins to FO, No. 2749, 18 December 1954. NAPRO, FO 371/111069/VR1072/1, Troutbeck to Eden, No. 213, 28 December 1953. NAPRO, FO 371/111095/VR1079/9/G, Jebb to FO, No. 814, 17 December 1954. NAPRO, FO 371/111095/VR1079/10/G, Shuckburgh minute, 15 December 1954. USNA, RG 59, 511.87/11-1653, AmEmbassy Baghdad to State-USIA, No. 33, 16 November 1953. NAPRO, FO 371/115879/VR1076/314/G‘E’, Arthur minute, 17 September 1955. NAPRO, FO 371/115870/VR1076/114/G‘B’, Shuckburgh minute, 15 June 1955. NAPRO, FO 371/115874/VR1076/184/G, FO minute, 24 August 1955.

Notes 281 125. DDE, McCardle Papers, Series II, Box 7, Department of State Press Release No. 517, Text of Address by John Foster Dulles before the Council on Foreign Relations, 26 August 1955. 126. NAPRO, FO 371/115872/VR1076/150/G, Sterndale Bennett to FO, No. 300, 3 August 1955. 127. Ibid., Rose to Sterndale Bennett, 15 August 1955. 128. NAPRO, FO 371/115874/VR1076/189/G, FO to Washington, No. 3808, 23 August 1956. 129. NAPRO, FO 371/115875/VR1076/272/G, Graham minute, 29 August 1956. 130. NAPRO, FO 371/115874/VR1076/189/G, Makins to FO, No. 1998, 24 August 1956. 131. NAPRO, FO 371/115879/VR1076/315/G, Policy Information Guidance for USIA, 27 September 1955. 132. USNA, RG 306,USIA Publications, Box 172, News Review, No. 36, 8 September 1955. 133. NAPRO, FO 371/115879/VR1076/315/G, Policy Information Guidance for USIA, 27 September 1955. 134. NAPRO, FO 371/115880/VR1076/331/G, Arthur minute, 4 November 1955. 135. Ibid. 136. NAPRO, FO 371/115880/VR1076/335 ‘B’, FO to Cairo, No. 2587, 9 November 1955. 137. NAPRO, FO 371/115880, VR1076/334/G, Shuckburgh minute, 7 November 1955. 138. NAPRO, FO 371/115880/VR1076/334/G, Shuckburgh minute, 7 November 1955. 139. NAPRO, FO 371/115881/VR1076/381, Arthur minute, 17 November 1955. 140. NAPRO, FO 371/115880/VR1076/343, Nicholls to FO, No. 457, 11 November 1955. 141. Shamir, ‘The Collapse of Project Alpha’, in Owen and Louis (eds), Suez 1956. The Crisis and its Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 85. 142. NAPRO, FO 371/115880/VR1076/335, FO to Amman, No. 742, 9 November 1955. 143. NAPRO, FO 371/115882/VR1076/396, Arthur minute, 17 November 1955. 144. NAPRO, FO 371/115883/VR1076/414, Arthur minute, 19 November 1955. 145. USNA, RG 263, Box 704, No. 21, Sharq al-Adna, 30 January 1956. 146. Shamir, ‘The Collapse of Project Alpha’, p. 99. 147. Hansard, Vol. 529, c. 18–19, 21 June 1954. 148. USNA, RG 59, Lot 60D605, Box 56, Sanger to Jernegan, 28 December 1954. 149. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/5-1754, Hare to Department of State, No. 725, 17 May 1954. 150. USNA, RG 59, Lot 52D365, Box 48, Fisk to Phillips, 19 February 1951. 151. USNA, RG 59, Lot 54D202, Box 6, Department of State Transcript of Proceedings, Meeting: Information Policy Committee, 15 May 1950. 152. Ibid.

6 ‘Equal Partners’? 1. Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) p. 8.

282 Notes 2. National Archive, formerly Public Record Office, Kew, UK (NAPRO), FO 371/52310/E3135, Shaw to Hall, 18 August 1945, enclosing memorandum by Brigadier J.B. Glubb, 1 July 1945. 3. NAPRO, FO 371/52310/E3135, Shaw to Hall, 18 August 1945. 4. NAPRO, FO 371/91182/E1022/10, Franks to Bowker, 19 July 1951. 5. NAPRO, FO 371/98251/E1054/2, FO minute, 8 March 1952. 6. NAPRO, FO 371/68384/E1442/103/65, FO minute, ‘Notes for Secretary of State’s speech in House of Commons debate, January 22nd’, 2 February 1948. 7. NAPRO, FO 371/68385/E24371/103/65/G, Burrows memorandum, ‘The failure of the Iraq Treaty and Arab Nationalist Movements’, 7 April 1948. 8. United States National Archive, College Park, Maryland (USNA), RG 263, FBIS, Box 209, No. 233, Sharq al-Adna, 25 January 1948. 9. Priestland (ed.), The Buraimi Dispute. Contemporary Documents 1950–1961, Vol. 3, 1953 (Archive Editions, 1992), p. 225, FO to Cairo, No. 827, 17 April 1953. 10. Ibid., p. 635, Burrows to FO, No. 1009, 5 December 1953. 11. Priestland (ed.), The Buraimi Dispute, Vol. 5, 1954–55 (Archive Editions, 1992), p. 121, Shuckburgh Minute, 11 June 1954. 12. Ibid., p. 120, Fry minute, 10 June 1954. 13. NAPRO, FO 371/104290/EA1081/434, Blackham minute, 17 April 1953. 14. Priestland, The Buraimi Dispute, Vol. 6, 1955 (Archive Editions, 1992), p. 288, FO to Certain of Her Majesty’s Representatives, 12 July 1955. 15. Ibid., p. 138, Duke to FO, No. 320, 17 June 1954. 16. Ibid., p. 611, Gault to FO, No. 533, 14 July 1955. 17. Ibid., p. 304, FO to Amman, No. 501, 30 July 1955. 18. Ibid., pp. 434–6, Shuckburgh minute, 16 September 1955. 19. Priestland, The Buraimi Dispute, Vol. 6, pp. 466–7, The Times, 5 October 1955. 20. USNA, RG 263, Box 684, No. 193, Sharq al-Adna, 2 October 1955. 21. NAPRO, FO 371/114/623/EA 1081/348(A), Hansard cutting, 26 October 1955. 22. NAPRO, FO 371/114622/EA1081/334, FO to Baghdad, 29 October 1955. 23. Ibid., FO to Baghdad, 25 October 1955. 24. Priestland, The Buraimi Dispute, Vol. 7, 1956 (Archive Editions, 1992), pp. 351–2, FO to Certain of Her Majesty’s Representatives, No. 3, 12 January 1956. 25. NAPRO, FO 953/4G/P900, Draft Note, ‘The Background of Anglo-Egyptian Relations’, 22 May 1947. 26. NAPRO, FO 953/367/PME428, Publicity Section, Cairo to Middle East Information Department (MEID), 7 May 1948. 27. NAPRO, FO 953/48/PME125, FO to Middle East Posts, 7 February 1947. 28. NAPRO, FO 953/49/PME283, Publicity Section, Cairo to MEID, 19 July 1947. 29. NAPRO, FO 953/1108/PG1161/8, Barclay to Waterfield, 20 July 1951. 30. NAPRO, FO 953/1108/PG1161/8, Barclay minute, 27 July 1951. 31. NAPRO, FO 953/1191/P10422/26, Malcolm to Watson, 26 November 1951. 32. NAPRO, FO 371/102773/JE1055/1, Barclay minute, 7 May 1953. 33. Ibid. 34. NAPRO, FO 371/102775/JE/1055/86, Eden minute, 10 November 1953. 35. NAPRO, FO 953/1522/PG1168/8G, Sterndale Bennett to Nicholls, 30 June 1954. 36. USNA, RG 263, Box 654, No. 73, Sharq al-Adna, 13 April 1955.

Notes 283 37. USNA, RG 263, Box 659, No. 92, Sharq al-Adna, 11 May 1955. 38. NAPRO, FO 953/868/PG11616/3, Stevenson to Warner, 4 August 1950. 39. NAPRO, FO 953/868/PG11616/4, Stevenson to Troutbeck, 15 November 1950. 40. NAPRO, FO 953/1114/PG11637/76, Parkes to Malcolm, 21 November 1951. 41. NAPRO, FO 953/1319/PG11637/15/G, Stevenson to Nicholls, 7 February 1952. 42. NAPRO, FO 953/1114/PG11637/17, Information Department, Cairo to Information Policy Department (IPD), 27 October 1951. 43. NAPRO, FO 953/1319/PG11637/15/G, Stevenson to Nicholls, 7 February 1952. 44. NAPRO, FO 953/1114/PG11637/17, Information Department, Cairo to IPD, 27 October 1951. 45. NAPRO, FO 953/1115/PG11637/100, J. Murray to Morris, 6 December 1951. 46. NAPRO, FO 953/1319/PG11637/15/G, Stevenson to Nicholls, 7 February 1952. 47. NAPRO, FO 953/1354/PG18837/2, Chapman Andrews to FO, No. 71, 5 February 1952. 48. NAPRO, FO 953/1230/P1041/16, Nutting minute, 16 April 1952. 49. NAPRO, FO 953/1319/PG11637/15/G, Stevenson to Nicholls, 7 February 1952. 50. NAPRO, FO 953/1319/PG11637/24, Parkes to Malcolm, 17 May 1952. 51. NAPRO, FO 371/102847/JE119141/19, Rapp to FO, 10 May 1953. 52. NAPRO, FO 371/102848/JE11914/36, Stevenson to FO, 19 May 1953. 53. USNA, RG 263, Box 533, No. 98, Sharq al-Adna, 21 May 1953. 54. NAPRO, FO 953/1477/P1048/1, Ministry of Defence (MOD) to GHQ Middle East Land Forces, 22 December 1953. 55. NAPRO, FO 953/1477/P1048/2, Sterndale Bennett memorandum, 23 December 1953. 56. Ibid. 57. NAPRO, FO 953/1477/P1048/6, Duke to Marett, 4 February 1954. 58. NAPRO, INF 12/610, Central Office of Information (COI) reference paper, ‘Defence of the Middle East’, 17 September 1954. 59. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/12-755, NSC 5428 ‘United States Objectives and Policies With Respect to the Near East’, 7 December 1955. 60. Eden, Full Circle (London: Cassell, 1960), p. 220. 61. Hansard, vol. 539, col. 379, 30 March 1955. 62. NAPRO, FO 371/115529/V1073/1280, FO to Baghdad, 18 November 1955. 63. NAPRO, FO 371/115496/V1073/424, Hooper to Rose, 8 March 1955. 64. USNA, RG 59, 511.00/1-2556, CA-5571, Policy Information Statement for United States Information Agency (USIA), 25 January 1956. 65. NAPRO, FO 953/1629/P1041/1, Gauntlett to Stewart, 2 January 1956. 66. NAPRO, FO 371/121255/V1073/211, Stevens to Lloyd, 24 April 1956. 67. NAPRO, FO 371/121252/V1073/135G, Baghdad Pact Council Briefs, 11 April 1956. 68. NAPRO, FO 371/121294/V10714/3, Report of the Chairman of the Working Party on Information, 20 June 1956. 69. NAPRO, FO 371/121262/V1073/321, Record of 24th meeting of the Deputies, 23 August 1956.

284 Notes 70. Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (London: André Deutsch, 1973), p. 322. 71. NAPRO, FO 371/68386/E7453/G, Trott to Bevin, No. 103, 29 May 1948. 72. Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995); Thorpe, Eden (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003). 73. Priestland, The Buraimi Dispute, Vol. II, p. 289, Trott to Morrison, 2 June 1951. 74. Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas (DDE), Whitman File, International Series, Box 46, Saudi Arabia (2), State Department Memorandum of Conversation, 30 January 1957. 75. NAPRO, FO 371/98247/E10345/17, Shepherd to Bowker, 10 May 1952. 76. NAPRO, FO 371/98247/E10345/17, Bowker to Shepherd, 19 July 1952. 77. USNA, Lot 188, Box 123, Allen to Lovett, 25 June 1948, enclosing memorandum, ‘Information Policy for Arab States’. 78. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/1-2053, Willard to State Department, 20 January 1953. 79. DDE, White House Office: Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Policy Papers Subseries, Box 5, NSC 155/1 – Near East (2), NSC Planning Board Report to NSC on US Objectives and Policies with Respect to the Near East, 17 June 1953. 80. USNA, Lot 60D262, Box 93, USIA Fortnightly Guidance for the NEA Area, No. 27, 12 May 1955. 81. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy Top Secret Records 1944–54, Tuck to Henderson, No. 2275, 28 February 1947, enclosing Morde to Tuck, 23 February 1947. 82. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 218, Caffery to State Department, No. 1005, 5 May 1950. 83. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D266, Box 188, State Department Transcript of Proceedings, Working Group on Special Materials for Arab and Other Moslem Countries, 1 April 1952. 84. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/6-1953, Hopkins to Dulles, 19 June 1953 85. NAPRO, FO 953/1476/P1041/23, Information Department, Baghdad to IPD, 11 September 1954, attaching American Friends of the Middle East (AFME) pamphlet, ‘Britain Sees The Light At Last’, 30 July 1954. 86. See McNay, Acheson and Empire. The British Accent in American Foreign Policy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), pp. 178–81. 87. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 228, Acheson to Cairo, Circular 329, 10 October 1951. 88. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 228, Acheson to Cairo, Circular 359, 17 October 1951. 89. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 228, Acheson to Cairo, Circular 408, 31 October 1951. 90. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 228, Acheson to Cairo, Circular 359, 17 October 1951. 91. USNA, Lot 60D262, Box 97, State Department Policy Information Statement (NEA-3), 7 August 1953. 92. PRO, INF 12/610, COI reference paper, ‘Defence of the Middle East’, 17 September 1954. 93. USNA, Lot 60D262, Box 93, USIA Fortnightly Guidance for the NEA Area, No. 9, 5 August 1954. 94. USNA, RG 59, Lot 60D262, Box 97, P.I.S. for USIA, NEA-2, 7 August 1953. 95. Priestland, The Buraimi Dispute, Vol. II, p. 359, Pelham to Eden, 17 December 1952.

Notes 285 96. Ibid., Vol. VII, pp. 376–7, Morris to Riches, 21 January 1956. 97. USNA, RG 59, 511.80/11-755, CA-3616, P.I.S. for USIA, NEA-128, 3 November 1955. 98. USNA, RG 59, 511.80/2-156, CA-5778, P.I.S. for USIA, NEA-143, 30 January 1956. 99. DDE, Whitman File, NSC Series, Box 7, 263rd meeting of NSC, 27 October 1955. 100. USNA, RG 59, 611.80, 12-755, Allen to Dulles, 7 December 1955, enclosing draft of NSC 5428. 101. DDE, Whitman File, NSC Series, Box 7, 272nd meeting of NSC, 12 January 1956. 102. DDE, C.D. Jackson Papers, 1931–67, Box 71, Luce to Jackson, 20 April 1956. 103. USNA, Lot 60D262, Box 93, USIA Fortnightly Guidance for the NEA Area No. 38, 1 December 1955. 104. Priestland, The Buraimi Dispute, Vol. VII, p. 537, Riches to Nutting, 2 July 1956. 105. Ibid., Vol. IV, p. 689, FO to Washington, 16 December 1955. 106. Ibid., Vol. V, p. 171, FO Brief for Washington Talks, 13 July 1954. 107. NAPRO, FO 371/104258/E10345/52G, Makins to Eden, 6 November 1953. 108. DDE, Whitman File, NSC Series, Box 8, 289th meeting of NSC, 28 June 1956. 109. USNA, RG 84, Iraq, Baghdad, General Records 1956–58, Box 7, AmEmbassy Baghdad to State Department, No. 43, 17 July 1956. 110. Eveland, Ropes of Sand, pp. 169–70. It is also conceivable that covert measures to undermine Saud were being undertaken by the Egyptians, although this idea may well have been deliberately fostered by Anglo-American propagandists as part of a campaign to sow discord between the Saudis and the Egyptians. 111. NAPRO, FO 371/114624/EA1081/388, Washington to FO, No. 631, 29 October 1955. 112. NAPRO, FO 371/114627/EA1081/466, Makins to FO, 9 November 1955. 113. NAPRO, FO 953/1477/P1048/4, Atkinson-Grimshaw to Glass, 28 January 1954. 114. NAPRO, FO 371/119149/JE14211/1996, Makins to FO, 2 October 1956. 115. Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance, p. 312. 116. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 170, News Review, No. 45, 5 November 1953. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid., No. 46, 12 November 1953. 119. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/1-1156, AmEmbassy, Cairo to State Department, No. 747, 11 January 1956. 120. Ibid. 121. DDE, Dulles Papers, General Correspondence and Memoranda, Box 2, Lodge to Eisenhower, 26 June 1956. 122. Ibid., Dulles to Lodge, 29 June 1956. 123. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/4-756, Byroade to Dulles, No. 2002, 7 April 1956. 124. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/1-1156, AmEmbassy, Cairo to State Department, No. 747, 11 January 1956.

286 Notes 125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

USNA, RG 59, Lot 62D333, Box 2, PSB D-22, 6 February 1953. NAPRO, FO 371/104258/E10345/36, Kirkbride minute, 3 July 1953. DDE, Whitman File, NSC Series, Box 4, 164th meeting, 1 October 1953. NAPRO, FO 371/102731/JE10345/14, Hankey to Bowker, 23 June 1953. NAPRO, FO 953/1419/P1041/25/G, Fitzgerald to British Middle East Office (BMEO), Beirut, 27 July 1953. 130. Ibid., Glass to Fitzgerald, 3 August 1953. 131. British Interests in the Mediterranean and Middle East, A Report by a Study Group of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 42.

7 ‘The Last Trump’ 1. National Archive, formerly Public Record Office, Kew, UK (NAPRO) FO 371/113675/JE1194/192G, FO to UK Delegation to UN, 30 September 1955. 2. NAPRO, FO 371/113676/JE1194/225, FO to Cairo, No. 2155, 6 October 1955. 3. NAPRO, FO 371/113680/JE1194/356, Bromley minute, 22 October 1955. 4. NAPRO, FO 371/113676/JE1194/225, FO to Cairo, No. 2155, 6 October 1955. 5. NAPRO, FO 371/113677/JE11941/270, Hooper to FO, 5 October 1955. 6. United States National Archive, College Park, Maryland (USNA), RG 59, 511.00/9-3055, CA-2609, P.I.S. for USIA, NEA-122, 30 September 1955. 7. USNA, Lot 60D262, Box 93 United States Information Agency (USIA) Fortnightly Guidance for the NEA Area, No. 36, 18 October 1955. 8. NAPRO, FO 371/113678/JE1194/317(A), Bromley minute, 17 October 1955. 9. USNA, RG 263, Box 683, Vol. 1266, No. 191, Sharq al-Adna, 30 September 1955. 10. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 172, News Review, No. 44, 3 November 1955. 11. NAPRO, FO 371/113676/JE1194/231, Wilton minute, 4 October 1955. 12. NAPRO, FO 371/115489/V1073/179, Sterndale Bennett to Shuckburgh, 2 February 1955. 13. NAPRO, FO 371/115469/V1023/28G, Cairncross to Hancock, 7 December 1955. 14. NAPRO, INF 12/734, ‘Al Aalam: 1952–1957, Principal Contents, May 1956–October 1957’, undated. 15. NAPRO, FO 371/68385/E24371/103/65/G, Fitzgerald minute, 19 March 1948. 16. NAPRO, FO 371/111046/VQ1682/1G, Allen minute, 31 March 1954. 17. NAPRO, FO 371/111046/VQ1682/2G, Mackenzie to Brewis, 2 June 1954. 18. NAPRO, FO 371/121648/VQ1022/3, Rose minute, 17 January 1956. 19. USNA, RG 263, Box 657, Vol. 1213, No. 85, Voice of Free Iraq, April 28–30 1955. 20. USNA, RG 84, Iraq: Baghdad Embassy General Records 1953–54, Box 1, Gallman to Dulles, No. 895, 6 May 1955. 21. USNA, RG 59, 974.40/4-3055, Byroade to Dulles, No. 2049, 30 April 1955. 22. NAPRO, FO 371/98249/E1051/1, Chapman Andrews to Bowker, 19 December 1951.

Notes 287 23. NAPRO, FO 371/98249/E1051/1, Bowker to Chapman Andrews, 18 January 1952. Heikal has also claimed that in late 1955, Said Ramadan, a prominent Moslem Brotherhood leader, was acting as an adviser to a clandestine British station based in Cyprus (Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail, p. 100). 24. USNA, RG 59, 974.40/4-1255, State Department Instruction, CA-6963, 12 April 1955. 25. NAPRO, FO 953/1495/PG1932/3, Hooper to Grey, 27 April 1955. 26. USNA, RG 59, 974.40/4-3055, Byroade to Dulles, No. 2049, 30 April 1955. 27. USNA, RG 59, 574.85/1-1756, AmEmbassy Amman to State Department, No. 236, 17 January 1956. 28. USNA, RG 263, Box 704, Vol. 1307, No. 19, Voice of the Arabs, 27 January 1956. 29. USNA, RG 59, 574.85/2-2156, Parker to State Department, No. 278, 21 February 1956. 30. USNA, RG 59, 574.85/1-1756, AmEmbassy Amman to State Department, No. 236, 17 January 1956. 31. Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene Kansas (DDE) Whitman File, DDE Diary Series, Box 14, Mar. ’56, Miscellaneous, Eden to Eisenhower, 4 March 1956. 32. DDE, Whitman File, DDE Diary Series, Box 13, Mar. ’56 Diary, Memorandum for the President, ‘Near Eastern Policies’, 28 March 1956. 33. USNA, RG 59, 511.74/4-1056, Damon to MacArthur, 10 April 1956. 34. USNA, RG 59, Lot 60D262, Box 93, USIA Fortnightly Guidance for the NEA Area, No. 44, 13 April 1956. 35. DDE, John Foster Dulles Papers, Subject Series, Box 5, File received from Mr. Herbert Hoover Jr’s office(1), ‘United States Policy in the Near East’, 28 March 1956. 36. Ibid. 37. USNA, RG 59, 611.89/5-2456, Bowie to Rountree, 24 May 1956. 38. Eveland, Ropes of Sand, pp. 169–70. 39. USNA, RG 84, London Embassy, Top Secret Subject Files 1956–58, Box 1, Aldrich to Dulles, No. 4138, 22 March 1956. 40. USNA, RG 59 Lot 62D430, Box 2, minutes of Operation Co-ordinating Board (OCB) meeting, 11 April 1956. 41. Ibid., minutes of OCB meeting, 25 April 1956. 42. NAPRO, PREM 11/1450, de Zulueta minute, 25 May 1956. 43. NAPRO, PREM 11/1450, de Zulueta minute, 25 May 1956. 44. NAPRO, PREM 11/1450, Lennox Boyd minute, 30 May 1956. 45. NAPRO, PREM 11/1450, Eden to Lennox Boyd, 4 June 1956. 46. NAPRO, PREM 11/1450, de Zulueta minute, 25 May 1956. 47. NAPRO, PREM 11/1450, Eden to Selwyn Lloyd, 4 May 1956. 48. NAPRO, PREM 11/1450, Selwyn Lloyd to Eden, 12 May 1956. 49. NAPRO, FO 953/1652/PB1041/77G, Stephenson to Rennie, 27 July 1956, enclosing ‘1. Summary of recommendations given to Iraqi Prime Minister’. 50. Ibid., enclosing ‘5. A copy of my contribution to the working party of the Baghdad Pact Counter-Subversion Committee’. 51. Ibid. 52. USNA, Lot 61D53, Box 77, MacKnight to Kretzman, 7 May 1956. 53. Ibid., Payne to USIA, Tousi 396, 8 May 1956.

288 Notes 54. Ibid., MacKnight to Kretzman, 18 May 1956. 55. NAPRO, PREM 11/1450, de Zulueta minute, 25 May 1956. 56. Ibid., Millard memorandum, ‘Propaganda and Broadcasting in the Middle East’, 29 June 1956. 57. Ibid., ‘Note on British Propaganda and Egypt’. 58. Ibid., ‘Propaganda and Broadcasting in the Middle East’, 29 June 1956. 59. Ibid. 60. NAPRO, FO 1110/942/PR10104/54/G, Adams to Grey, 18 April 1956. 61. Lucas, ‘The Missing Link? Patrick Dean, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee’, Kelly & Gorst (eds.), Whitehall and the Suez Crisis (London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 123. 62. See, in particular, Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis. Reluctant Gamble (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 63. Shaw, Eden, Suez and the Mass Media, p. 2. 64. NAPRO, FO 1110/880/PR10131/1/G, Kirkpatrick memorandum, 23 August 1956. 65. NAPRO, CAB 134/1297, Official Committee on the Middle East, ME(O)(56) 3rd meeting, 13 April 1956. 66. NAPRO, FO 1110/942/PR10704/54/G, Grey to Adams, 3 May 1956. 67. Thornhill, ‘Alternatives to Nasser: Humphrey Trevelyan, Ambassador to Egypt’, in Kelly and Gorst, Whitehall and the Suez Crisis, pp. 17–18. 68. Shaw, Eden, Suez and the Mass Media, p. 88. 69. Lashmar & Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, p. 70; Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, pp. 482–3. 70. BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham (BBCWAC), R34/1580/1, BBC minute, Director General’s desk diary, 2 August 1956; NAPRO, FO 1110/948/PR10104/245/G, Grey and Dean minutes, 12 November 1956. 71. NAPRO, AIR 8/1940, C.O.S.(57)220 Chiefs of Staff Committee, 11 October 1957, Part II of General Sir Charles Keightley’s Despatch on Operations in the Eastern Mediterranean, November–December 1956; Fergusson, The Trumpet in the Hall, 1930–1958, p. 259; Gorst, ‘A Modern Major General: General Sir Gerald Templer, Chief of the Imperial General Staff’ in Kelly & Gorst, Whitehall and the Suez Crisis, pp. 37–8. 72. NAPRO, PREM 11/1450, Extract from Record of Conversation, 21 September 1956. 73. BBCWAC, R34/1580/1, Advisory Committee ‘ICE Progress Report’, undated (probably late-September 1956). 74. Rawnsley has unearthed intriguing evidence that the man who later confessed to responsibility for the broadcasts from France, Mahmoud Abu Al-Fath, also claimed the initial impetus for the station had come from Nuri Said. This raises the possibility of a link between the French ‘Free Egypt’ in 1956 and the ‘Free Egypt’ broadcasts believed to have been organised by Iraq in 1955 (Rawnsley, ‘Overt and Covert: The Voice of Britain and Black Radio Broadcasting in the Suez Crisis, 1956’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 11, No. 3 ( July 1996), p. 514. 75. Dorril, MI6, p. 625. 76. USNA, RG 306, USIA Office of Research, Classified Research Reports, Box 2, ‘Clandestine Anti-Nasir Radio Station Probably French’, 27 August 1956. 77. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, pp. 484–5.

Notes 289 78. Rawnsley, ‘Overt and Covert’, p. 515. 79. Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail, pp. 99–100. 80. DDE Library, OCB series, Subject subseries, Box 4, Near East – Radio Broadcasting (1), Draft memo, 22 July 1958. 81. USNA, RG 306, USIA Office of Research, Classified Research Reports, Box 2, ‘Second Anti-Nasir Station may be on Cyprus’, 15 October 1956. 82. BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham (BBCWAC), E1/1811/1, Whitehead to C.O.S., 24 October 1955. 83. Partner, Arab Voices, p. 101. 84. BBCWAC, E1/1815/1, Watrous memorandum, 23 October 1956. 85. NAPRO, FO 1110/971/PR139/148/G, Grey to Johnston, 10 January 1957. 86. BBCWAC, R34/1580/3, Note of meeting between Sir Ian Jacob and Sir Charles Hill, 8 January 1957. 87. NAPRO, FO 1110/967/PR136/19/G, FO minute, 18 February 1956. 88. NAPRO, CAB 134/1217, E.C.(56)62, Lloyd memorandum, ‘Propaganda and Political Warfare in the Middle East’, 24 October 1956. 89. Ibid. 90. Dodds-Parker, Political Eunuch, pp. 102–3. 91. Hansard, vol. 557, c. 1603. 92. NAPRO, INF 12/717, Central Office of Information (COI) monthly reports: July–August 1956, 14 September 1956. 93. NAPRO, FO 371/119081/JE14211/119, FO to Washington and other posts, No. 3419, 30 July 1956. 94. BBCWAC, R34/1580/1, Ministerial Broadcast by the Prime Minister, 8 August 1956. 95. Eden, Full Circle, pp. 430–2. 96. NAPRO, PREM 11/1098, FO to Washington, No. 3568, 5 August 1956. 97. NAPRO, FO 953/1689/PG11639/10, Information Policy Department (IPD) minute, 11 August 1956. The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) produced its own historical analogy, noting that ‘Perhaps the best recent parallel to Nasser is not Hitler but Peron’ (CAB 158/27, J.I.C.(57)12/1, JIC report, ‘The Situation in Egypt as at 8th January, 1957’, 10 January 1957). 98. NAPRO, FO 371/119111/JE14211/888A, Speech by the Selwyn Lloyd, 14 August 1956. 99. NAPRO, FO 1110/880, PR10131/10/G, Drew to Oakeshott, 18 October 1956. 100. DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff Papers 1948–61, Disaster File Series, Box 65, Memorandum for Mr. Gleason, 17 October 1956. 101. BBCWAC, R34/1580/3, Advisory Committee minutes, 11 January 1957. 102. NAPRO, FO 371/119083/JE14211/214, Duke to FO, 2 August 1956. 103. NAPRO, FO 953/1689/PG11639/7, Montgomery-Cuninghame minute, 3 August 1956. 104. USNA, RG 59, 774.00(W)/9-656, AmEmbassy Cairo to State Department, No. 189, 6 September 1956. 105. BBCWAC, R34/1580/1, ‘ICE Progress Report’, undated (probably lateSeptember 1956). 106. Ibid. 107. NAPRO, PREM 11/1149, SCANT No. 44, 25 September 1956. 108. USNA, RG 263, Box 747, Vol. 1395, No. 196, Voice of Justice, 8 October 1956.

290 Notes 109. NAPRO, PREM 11/1149, P.204, ME(O)(56) Conclusions, minute 2, 22 September 1956. 110. NAPRO, PREM 11/1149, Langardge to Bishop, 3 October 1956. 111. USNA, RG 263, Box 751, Vol. 1402, No. 210, Voice of Justice, 25 October 1956. 112. NAPRO, PREM 11/1149, SCANT No. 44, 25 September 1956. 113. USNA, RG 263, Box 750, Vol. 1401, No. 207, Voice of Justice, 19 October 1956. 114. USNA, RG 263, Box 747, Vol. 1395, No. 196, Voice of Justice, 8 October 1956. 115. NAPRO, FO 371/119141/JE14211/1784G, Ministry of Transport minute, 10 September 1956. 116. NAPRO, FO 371/119147/JE14211/1939, Banister to FO, 28 September 1956. 117. DDE, Whitman File, International Series, Box 47, Suez Summary No. 18, 27 September 1956. 118. Hansard, vol. 558, c.1569. 119. NAPRO, FO 953/1607/P10118/41, FO to Tehran, 1 November 1956. 120. NAPRO, PREM 11/1149, Grey minute, 3 November 1956. 121. BBCWAC, E1/1815/1, BBC monitoring, 3 November 1956. 122. USNA, RG 306, Office of Research Classified Research Reports, Box 2, ‘Cyprus Government Seizes Sharq al-Adna Broadcasting Station’, 5 November 1956. 123. BBC, R34/1580/1, File Note, 2 November 1956; and R34/1580/2, Note on visit of Acting Director-General to Monckton, 2 November 1956. 124. BBCWAC, E1/1815/1, Watrous to Assistant Head of the Eastern Service, 6 December 1956. 125. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, p. 490. 126. Fergusson, The Trumpet in the Hall, pp. 263–8. 127. NAPRO, FO 953/1604/P1011/23G, Grey minute, 22 November 1956. 128. NAPRO, INF 12/732, EPC 55, Editorial and Planning Committee meeting, 5 September 1956. 129. NAPRO, INF 12/717, COI monthly reports: December 1956, 11 January 1957. 130. NAPRO, FO 371/118910/JE1094/178, Dixon to FO, 21 November 1956. 131. NAPRO, INF 6/83, ‘The Facts About Port Said’, text of commentary and cutter’s shot list, undated. 132. NAPRO, PREM 11/1149, Hansard cutting, 10 December 1956. 133. NAPRO, FO 953/1615/P10118/199, Heath minute, 12 December 1956. 134. NAPRO FO 371/119160/JE14211/2279, FO to Certain of Her Majesty’s Representatives, No. 132, 11 November 1956. 135. NAPRO, FO 953/1612/P10118/150, Press Section, Tehran to IPD, 1 December 1956. 136. USNA, RG 263, Box 755, Vol. 1411, No. 227, Voice of Justice, 20 November 1956. 137. USNA, RG 263, Box 763, Vol. 1427, No. 8, Voice of Justice, 10 January 1957. 138. USNA, RG 263, Box 763, Vol. 1428, No. 10, Voice of Justice, 13 January 1957. 139. USNA, RG 263, Box 763, Vol. 1428, No. 10, Voice of Free Egypt, 11 January 1957.

Notes 291 140. USNA, RG 263, Box 763, Vol. 1428, No. 10, Voice of Free Egypt, 11 January 1957. 141. NAPRO, FO 953/1612/P10118/150, Speares minute, 1 December 1956. 142. Marret, Through the Back Door, p. 155. 143. NAPRO, FO 953/1714/P1011/3, Dodds-Parker minute, 31 December 1956. 144. USNA, RG 59, 974.7301/7-2756, Byroade to Dulles, No. 157, 27 July 1956. 145. See, for example Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance, p. 331. 146. DDE, Whitman File, Speech Series, Box 16, Suez Canal Report (Dulles) 8/3/56, Snyder Press Release, 3 August 1956. 147. News Review subsequently published an article stressing that it had never been Eisenhower’s intention to claim that ownership of the Canal was international in character, merely its usage (USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 173, News Review, No. 37, 13 September 1956). 148. DDE, Whitman File, Press Conference Series, Box 5, Press Conference, 8 August 1956. 149. Cited in Bowie, ‘Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Suez Crisis’, in Louis and Owen (eds), Suez 1956, p. 200. 150. USNA, RG 59, 511.00/8–1156, CA-1341, P.I.S. for USIA, NEA-168, 16 August 1956. 151. Later USIA output consistently sought to dissociate the question of Aswan Dam funding from the Suez Crisis. 152. USNA, RG 59, 511.00/8–1156, CA-1341, P.I.S. for USIA, NEA-168, 16 August 1956. 153. DDE, McCardle Papers, Series II, Box 7, 1956 Statements by the Secretary, Department of State for the Press, No. 507, 26 September 1956. 154. DDE, Whitman File, Cabinet Series, Cabinet meeting, 27 July 1956. 155. DDE, Dulles Papers, White House Memoranda Series, Box 5, Meetings with the President Aug. thru Dec. 1956 (8), Memorandum of Conversation, 8 August 1956. 156. DDE, Whitman File, Press Conference Series, Box 5, Press Conference, 8 August 1956. 157. USNA, RG 59, 974.7301/8–656, Rubottom to Dulles, 6 August 1956. 158. USNA, RG 59, 511.00/8–1156, CA-1341, P.I.S. for USIA, NEA-168, 16 August 1956. 159. USNA, RG 306, US Advisory Commission on Information, Broadcast Advisory Committee, Meeting 25 January 1957. 160. USNA, RG 306, Office of Research, Field Research Reports 1953–62, Box 33, SY-2–56, United States Information Services (USIS) Baghdad to USIA, No. 38, 27 November 1956. 161. DDE, White House Office, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Status of Projects Subseries, Box 7, NSC 5720(5), The USIA Program, 30 June 1957. 162. Ibid. 163. Gregg, ‘The Rhetoric of Distancing’, in Medhurst (ed.), Eisenhower’s War of Words, p. 184. 164. DDE, Whitman File, Speech Series, Box 19, TV Report to the Nation 10/31/56, Hagerty Press Release, 31 October 1956. In addition to Gregg’s analysis, Emmet Hughes’s recollection of the process of drafting Eisenhower’s speech contains many useful insights (Hughes, The Ordeal of Power, pp. 187–95).

292 Notes 165. DDE, Jackson Papers, 1931–67, Box 60, Jackson to Hughes, 26 October 1956. 166. DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff Papers: 1948–61, OCB 091.4 Near East (12–10–56), Memo for the Ad Hoc Committee on Middle Eastern Informational Activities, 10 December 1956. 167. Ibid. 168. USNA, RG 306, Office of Research and Intelligence 1955–59 General Records, Box 3, USIA Daily Summary, No. 213, 13 November 1956. 169. USNA, RG 59, 511.00/11-2056, P.I.S. for USIA, NEA-173, 20 November 1956. 170. Ibid. 171. DDE, Jackson Papers 1931–67, Box 40, Jackson to Compton, 26 March 1957. 172. DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff Papers: 1948–61, OCB 091.4 Middle East (11-15-56), Ad Hoc Committee on Middle Eastern Informational Activities, Second meeting, 14 November 1956. 173. Ibid., OCB 091.4 Near East (12-10-56), Memo for the Ad Hoc Committee on Middle Eastern Informational Activities, 10 December 1956. 174. Ibid., Attachment #3, Early Morning Commentary #892, 2 November 1956. 175. NAPRO, FO 953/1632/P1041/65, Malcolm to IPD, 23 July 1956. 176. DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff Papers: 1948–61, OCB 091.4 Middle East (12-17-56), Ad Hoc Committee on Middle Eastern Informational Activities, Eighth meeting, 5 December 1956. 177. The President disliked the name ‘Eisenhower Doctrine’ but, despite his and USIA’s best efforts, the preferred terms (‘American Resolution’ or ‘Middle East Doctrine’) failed to catch the popular imagination. 178. Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism, pp. 58–9. 179. DDE, Whitman File, DDE Diary Series, Box 19, Staff Notes No. 46, 28 November 1956. 180. DDE, John Foster Dulles Papers, General Correspondence and Memoranda Series, Box 1, Memorandum of Conversation with Senator Knowland, 9 December 1956. 181. DDE, Whitman File, DDE Diary Series, Box 14, November ’56, Diary-Staff memos, Memorandum of Conference with the President, 21 November 1956. 182. DDE, Dulles Papers, Draft Presidential Correspondence and Speeches Series, Box 3, Middle East Message to Congress 1/5/57, Bowie memorandum, ‘Comments on Middle East Message’, 27 December 1956. 183. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/12-2956, Hare to Dulles, No. 2074, 29 December 1956. 184. DDE, Whitman File, DDE Diary Series, Box 20, December ’56 Phone Calls, ‘Monday, December 31, 1956’ (See also Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism, pp. 83–5). 185. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/1-257, Moose to Dulles, No. 1614, 2 January 1957. 186. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/1-257, Mallory to Dulles, No. 700, 2 January 1957. 187. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/1-357, Mallory to Dulles, No. 714, 3 January 1957. 188. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/1-257, Hare to Dulles, No. 2116, 2 January 1957. 189. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/1-457, Mallory to Dulles, No. 721, 4 January 1957. 190. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/1-357, State Department circular No. 574, 3 January 1957. 191. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/1-757, Bohlen to Dulles, No. 1654, 7 January 1957. 192. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/1-1057, Bohlen to Dulles, No. 1683, 10 January 1957.

Notes 293 193. USNA, RG 59, Lot 60D370, Box 103, State Department Policy Information Statement, NEA-176, 11 January 1957. 194. USNA, RG 306, USIA Publications, Box 174, News Review, No. 5, 31 January 1957. 195. DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff Papers: 1948–61, OCB 091.4 Middle East, Ad Hoc Committee on Middle Eastern Informational Activities, 11th meeting, 10 January 1957. 196. DDE, White House Office, Staff Research Group, Records 1956–61, Box 21, Boerner to Toner, 16 January 1957. 197. DDE, White House Office, Staff Research Group, Records 1956–61, Box 21, Boerner to Toner, 25 January 1957. 198. DDE, White House Office, Staff Research Group, Records 1956–61, Box 21, Boerner to Toner, 14 March 1957. 199. DDE, White House Office, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Status of Projects Subseries, Box 7, NSC 5720(5), Part 6 – The USIA Program, 30 June 1957. 200. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/1-1657, AmEmbassy Cairo to State Department, No. 2286, 16 January 1957. 201. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/1-1757, Hart to State Department, No. 2296, 17 January 1957. 202. USNA, RG 59, 611.80/3-1457, Weathersby to USIA, No. 688, 14 March 1957. 203. DDE, White House Office, Staff Research Group, Records 1956–61, Box 21, Boerner to Toner, 15 April 1957. 204. DDE, White House Office, NSC Staff Papers: 1948–61, OCB 091.4 Middle East, Ad Hoc Committee on Middle Eastern Informational Activities, ‘Report on Middle East Informational Activities’, 18 January 1957. 205. USNA, RG 59, Lot 60D370, Box 103, State Department Policy Information Statement, NEA-184, 25 March 1957. 206. DDE, White House Office, Staff Research Group, Records 1956–61, Box 21, Boerner to Toner, 3 July 1957. 207. DDE, White House Office NSC Staff Papers: 1948–61, OCB Central File, Box 77, OCB 091.4.Middle East(6), Washburn to Staats, 24 January 1957, enclosing Newsom memorandum, 22 January 1957. 208. See Rathmell, Secret War in the Middle East: The Covert Struggle For Syria (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996); Little, ‘Cold War and Covert Action: the United States and Syria, 1945–58’, Middle East Journal, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Winter 1990), pp. 51–75; Jones, ‘The “Preferred Plan”: The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Acrion in Syria, 1957’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn 2004), pp. 401–15. 209. USNA, RG 59, Lot 60D370, Box 103, State Department Policy Information Statement, NEA-194, 15 August 1957. 210. USNA, RG 59, 611.74/6-557, Weathersby to State Department, 5 June 1957. 211. USNA, RG 59, Lot 60D370, Box 103, State Department Policy Information Statement, NEA-176, 11 January 1957. 212. DDE, White House Office, Office of the Staff Secretary, Box 2, Larson memorandum, 28 September 1957. 213. USNA, RG 59, Lot 60D370, Box 103, State Department Policy Information Statement, NEA-177, 28 January 1957. 214. Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism, p. 16.

294 Notes 215. Ibid., pp. 44–5. 216. Ibid., p. 270.

Conclusion 1. United States National Archive, College Park, Maryland (USNA), RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 41, United States Information and Educational Exchange Program (USIE) Country Paper for Iraq, August 1950. 2. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 171, Benton to Tuck, 3 April 1947. 3. USNA, Lot 188, Box 123, Allen to Lovett, 25 June 1948, enclosing memorandum, ‘Information Policy for Arab States’. 4. Abdel-Kader Hatem, Information and the Arab Cause (London: Longman, 1974), p. 184. 5. Aburish, Nasser: The Last Arab (London: Thomas Dunne, 2004), pp. 112–3. 6. National Archive, formerly Public Record Office, Kew, UK (NAPRO), FO 371/52744/E9717, Stephenson memorandum, ‘The BBC Near East Service’, 5 September 1946. 7. NAPRO FO 371/68385/ E24371/G, Pollock minute, 24 March 1948. 8. USNA, RG 84/2410, Box 187, Meyer memorandum, ‘U.S. Information Policy as Viewed from Iraq’, 8 April 1948. 9. USNA, RG 59, Lot53D266, Box 187, Proceedings of the Beirut Conference of Public Affairs Officers, 18–24 February 1952. 10. USNA, RG 59, 511.834/5-2854, Moose to State Department, 28 May 1954. 11. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Box 12, Hunt to Barrett, 21 August 1950. 12. Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene Kansas (DDE), Jackson Papers, Box 68, Log – 1954 (3), 11 August 1954. 13. DDE, C.D. Jackson Papers 1931–67, Box 65, Jackson to Lazereff, 22 April 1957. 14. Westad, ‘The new international history of the Cold war: three (possible) perspectives’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Fall 2000), pp. 561–3. 15. McMahon, ‘Eisenhower and Third World nationalism: a critique of the revisionists’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 101, No. 3 (1986), pp. 457–8. 16. Ibid., p. 463. 17. Connelly, ‘Taking off the Cold War lens’, pp. 741–2. 18. Allen, ‘Are the Soviets winning the propaganda war?’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 336 ( July 1961), p. 1. 19. Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution. Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 20. Connelly, ‘Taking off the Cold War lens’, pp. 741, 764. 21. McMahon, ‘Eisenhower and Third World nationalism’, p. 473. 22. USNA, RG 59, Lot 54D202, Box 6, State Department Transcript of Proceedings, Meeting: Information Policy Committee, 15 May 1950. 23. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D266, Box 188, State Department Transcript of Proceedings, Working Group on Special Materials for Arab and Other Moslem Countries, 1 April 1952. 24. USNA, Lot 188, Box 123, Allen to Lovett, 25 June 1948, enclosing memorandum, ‘Information Policy for Arab States’.

Notes 295 25. USNA, RG 59, Lot 54D202, Box 6, State Department Transcript of Proceedings, Meeting: Information Policy Committee, 15 May 1950. 26. DDE, Whitman File, Cabinet Series, Cabinet meeting, 18 January 1957. 27. Marett, Through the Back Door, p. 177. 28. Taylor, Selling Democracy, p. 240. 29. Ibid., p. 229. 30. Shaw, Eden, Suez and the Mass Media, p. 1. 31. NAPRO, FO 371/98244/E1026/1, Fellowes minute, 2 March 1952. 32. NAPRO, FO 953/1377/PG1892/1, Samuel to Eden, No. 105, 26 June 1952. 33. NAPRO, FO 953/1346/PG1932/1, Beeley to Eden, No. 85, 26 June 1952. 34. NAPRO, FO 953/1719/P1011/113/G, White Paper on the Overseas Information Services, July 1957. 35. USNA, RG 59, Lot 53D266, Box 188, Damon to Glidden, 25 March 1952. 36. DDE, Sprague Committee Records 1959–61, Box 15, History and Background (1), Nielsen to Boerner, 2 March 1960. 37. USNA, RG 59, Lot 62D333, Box 2, PSB D-22, 6 February 1953. 38. USNA, RG 84, Cairo Embassy 1936–55, Box 218, Martindale to Caffery, No. 1095, 17 May 1950.

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Index Aalam, al, 29–30, 82, 119, 195, 219 Abbot and Costello, 87 Abdullah, King, 135 Acheson, Dean, 98, 111, 182 Adams, Philip, 206 Adams, Sherman, 86 Aden, 101, 203, 205, 209 African-Americans, 89–90 Ahram, al, 157, 181 Akhbar, al, see News Review/al Akhbar Aldrich, Winthrop, 202 Allen, George, 13, 23, 93, 178, 239, 243–44 Allen, Sir Roger, 46 ALPHA, 129, 153–58 American Friends of the Middle East (AFME), 28–29, 75, 181–82 American University of Beirut (AUB), 49, 75 Andrews, Chapman, 46–47, 65, 73, 110, 197 Anglo-American relations, 5, 8, 28, 76; and anti-colonialism, 178–88; and anti-communism, 100; and Arab nationalism, 185–91; and propaganda co-operation, 9, 42–47 Anglo-Arab relations, 160–77 Anglo-Egyptian Agreement (1954), 172–74, 182 Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), 20, 24 Anti-Americanism, 46–47, 80, 95, 130, 133–35, 188–90, 234–35, 267 Anti-Semitism, 68–69, 126, 135–37, 142, 145, 157, 274 Arab American Oil Company (ARAMCO), 78, 183–84, 237 Arab-Americans, 81–82 Arab-Israeli dispute, 10, 69, 126–27, 128–59, 244–45 Arab League, 137 Arab Legion, 199 Arab nationalism, 10, 70, 95, 127, 243

Arab News Agency (ANA), 25–26, 208, 257 Archaeology, 93 Arms supplies, 149–51; see also Czech-Egyptian arms deal Armstrong, Louis, 90, 96; see also Jazz Associated Press (AP), 25 Aswan Dam, 200 Atoms for Peace, 116 Attlee, Clement, 6, 16, 78–79, 109 Authoritarianism, 63–64, 105–07, 212 Azhar, al, 82, 123–24 Badeau, John, 73 Baghdad Pact, 174–77, 195, 196, 203–04, 230; see also CounterSubversion Committee Baghdad Radio, 39–40, 89, 138, 154, 197, 203–04 Ballet, see Music Bandung Conference, 115, 214 Barclay’s Bank, 24 Barrett, Edward, 42 Beaverbrook, Lord, 261 Beeley, Sir Harold, 70, 76 Belgium, 117 Bell, Gertrude, 121 Ben-Gurion, David, 157 Bennett, Sir John Sterndale, 140, 145–46, 154, 168, 195; and British withdrawal from the Suez Canal Zone, 172–73 Benny, Jack, 87 Benton, William, 12–13, 238 Bevin, Ernest, 16; allegations of anti-Semitism against, 137; and Anglo-Arab relations, 162, 173; and the Arab-Israel dispute, 141–42; decision to withdraw from Palestine, 133 Black propaganda, see covert propaganda Boerner, Alfred, 233–34

309

310 Index Bohlen, Charles, 232 Bowie, Robert, 202, 230 Bracken, Brendan, 34 Bribery, 21, 164–65, 167, 184 Britain: and anti-Americanism, 46; and Arab nationalism, 160–63; and the Baghdad Pact, 174–77; British values and national character, 72–74, 114; expenditure on propaganda, 17,255; imperialism and colonial policy, 79, 119, 177; relations with Egypt, 166–74, 193–95; relations with Iraq, 195–96; relations with Israel, 44, 140–42, 157, 279; relations with Saudi Arabia, 163–66 British-American Tobacco, 24 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 5, 35–37, 58, 82, 137, 202–03, 247–48; comparison with Voice of America, 36–38; and the Suez Crisis, 218 British Council, 41, 47, 73–74, 83–84, 247–48, 261; see also Cultural Diplomacy British Information Services Middle East (BISME), 20 British Middle East Office (BMEO), 20, 61, 79, 112, 140, 145, 168 Brotherhood of Freedom, see Ikhwan al Hurriya/Brotherhood of Freedom Buraimi dispute, 163–66, 182–85 Burgess, Guy, 254 Burrows, Bernard, 162, 163 Byroade, Henry, 85–86, 147, 186–87, 196–97, 223

Chaplin, Charlie, 87 Chatham House, 190 China, 118 Christianity, 73, 75, 120, 121 Churchill, Winston, 18, 60, 151, 202, 264 Cinema, 33–35, 83–88 CINERAMA, 85–86 Clandestine radio, see Covert propaganda Cleland, Wendell, 84, 180 Coca-Cola, 24, 85 Cold War, 2, 11, 71, 236; and ArabIsrael dispute, 151, 158–59; and cultural diplomacy, 93–96; historiographical developments, 4–7; and the Suez Crisis, 227–29; and the Third World, 242–44 Collusion, 217–18; see also Sèvres Protocol Communism, 240; threat to the Middle East, 9, 98–103, 242 Conservative Party (British), 55, 78–79 Cooper, Gary, 87 Copeland, Miles, 39 Counter-Subversion Committee, 176–77, 203–04; see also Baghdad Pact Covert propaganda, 5, 125, 204–05, 208–10, 215–17, 221–22, 285, 287, 288 Cromer, Lord, 59 Crosby, Bing, 87 Cultural Diplomacy, 6, 41–42, 69, 70–96, 247–48 Czech-Egyptian arms deal, 149, 193–94

Caffery, Jefferson, 58, 115, 120 Cairo Packaging Center, 39 Cairo Radio, 38–39, 219; see also Voice of the Arabs Campaign of Truth, 13, 22–23, 125 Campbell, Sir Ronald, 99 Capitalism, 80 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 8, 14, 29, 60, 86, 104, 116, 125, 184, 202, 209, 236 Central Office of Information (COI), 7, 16–17, 29–30, 254; and the Suez Crisis, 219–20

Damascus Fair, 84–86, 102 Dam Busters, The, 84 Damon, G. Huntington, 102, 120, 200, 233, 248 Dayan, Moshe, 145 Dean, Patrick, 211 Deir Yassin, 137 Delmer, Sefton, 208 Demille, Cecil B., 86 Democracy, 63, 78–79, 114, 249; see also Authoritarianism; Social democracy Democrat Party (US), 15

Index Development, see Economic development, Point Four Dickens, Charles, 126 Disney, Walt, 86, 87 Dixon, Pierson, 219, 229 Dodds-Parker, Douglas, 7, 35, 207, 211, 221, 222 Drew, John, 213 Drogheda Committee, 1, 65, 222 Duke, Sir Charles, 213–14 Dulles, Allen, 183, 230 Dulles, John Foster: and anticolonialism, 45, 185, 187–88; and Arab-Israel dispute, 153, 155–56; and the Baghdad Pact, 195; and the Buraimi dispute, 184–85; and the Eisenhower Doctrine, 230–31; and Nasser, 127, 199; and the Suez Crisis, 223–25 Eagle-Lion Films, 83, 92 Economic development, 79, 82, 102, 111–13 Economic propaganda, 215–16, 224–25 Eden, Anthony, 34, 115, 173, 202; and Arab-Israel dispute, 153, 155–57; and the BBC, 203; and clandestine radio propaganda, 216; relations with John Foster Dulles, 153, 156; and the Sudan dispute, 168; and the Suez Crisis, 211–12, 217, 246; support for British propaganda activities, 202–05, 246 Education, 41, 65, 71–78, 110 Egypt: American education projects in, 73, 76–77, 124; British education projects in, 73–74, 110; British threat to Nile waters, 216; and communism, 99–105, 125–26; neutralism, 115; propaganda activities of, 35, 196, 219–20, 239; revolution (1952), 104, 124; and the Suez Canal Zone dispute, 169–73 Egypt Committee, 216 Egyptian State Broadcasting, see Cairo Radio; Voice of the Arabs Eisenhower Doctrine, 52, 192, 229–37, 292; Arab hostility to, 231–32, 234–35, 239

311

Eisenhower, Dwight, see also Eisenhower Doctrine: and British imperialism, 263–64; and educational exchange programs, 77; foreign policy speeches, 116; and Nasser, 230; religious rhetoric, 119; reorganisation of American propaganda agencies, 14–15; and the Suez Crisis, 223–26, 228, 229, 291 Evans, Gillespie, 128 Eveland, Wilbur, 8, 39, 185, 202 Falla, Paul, 146 Fay, Ronald, 27 Fellowes, Peregrine, 57, 72 Fergusson, Bernard, 8, 208, 218–19 Fisher, Hamilton, 148 Ford Motor Company, 24 Foreign Office: attitudes towards propaganda agencies, 19–20; control of British overseas publicity, 16–17, 254 France, 8, 95, 150, 208–09, 267, 280, 288 Franklin Publications Inc., 31–32, 78, 200 Franks, Oliver, 161 Free Egyptian Broadcasting Station, 208–09, 288 Free Iraq Radio, 196 Fulbright program, 75–77 Gable, Clark, 87 Garland, Judy, 87 Gaumont, 33 Gaza, 127 General Motors, 24 Gibb, Hamilton, 59, 62 Gillespie, Dizzy, 90; see also Jazz Glass, Leslie, 62, 189–90 Glubb, John Bagot, 1, 54–55, 63, 72, 80, 145, 161, 173, 279 Great Britain, see Britain Greenhill, Denis, 105–06, 107 Grey, Paul, 210, 218, 219 Haganah, 137–38 Hagerty, James, 8 Hambro, Sir Charles, 208 Hare, Raymond, 231

312 Index Harlem Globetrotters, 92; see also Sports Hashemite Broadcasting Station, 40; see also Radio Ramallah Hawkins, Coleman, 89; see also Jazz Heikal, Mohamed, 58, 209, 239, 287 Helm, Sir Knox, 48 Hill, Charles, 248 Histadrut, 110 Hollywood, 86–88 Hoover Jr., Herbert, 230 Hope, Bob, 87 Hopkins, Garland Evans, 28; see also American Friends of the Middle East Hourani, Albert, 62 House Un-American Activities Committee, 87; see also McCarthy, Joseph Houstoun-Boswall, William, 135, 141, 142 Howard, Roy, 25 Hughes, Emmet, 8, 226, 291 Hungary, 228–29 Hussein, King, 198, 199 Huxley, Aldous, 238 Ikhwan al Hurriya/Brotherhood of Freedom, 27–28, 92, 109, 119; on communism and Islam, 121–23; and the Palestine crisis, 134–39 Information Coordination Executive (ICE), 19, 207–08, 210–11, 215 Information Policy Department (IPD), 16–17, 19–20, 245; and anti-neutralism, 116–17 Information Research Department (IRD), 6, 17–19, 30, 100, 208, 273; and Al Azhar university, 124; and Arab nationalism, 207; and bribery, 21; on communism and Islam, 123; contacts with Middle Eastern leadership groups, 103–04; contacts with Middle Eastern left wing groups, 110–11; covert propaganda in Shia communities, 125; and Soviet intelligence, 254; and the Suez Crisis, 207

International Confederaton of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), 110 International Information Administration (IIA), 13, 64, 87, 121; sponsorship of Princeton University Colloquium on Islamic Culture, 77–78 Iran, 10, 20, 34, 51, 67, 99, 115, 118, 182 Iraq: 24, 99, 101, 113, 115, 125; propaganda activities of, 40, 138, 195–97, 201, 203; see also Baghdad Radio Ireland, Philip, 98–100, 122 Irgun, 136 Islam, 50–51, 61–63, 71–72, 77, 237; see also Religious propaganda; in America and Britain, 82, 120; and communism, 119–25 Israel, 119; border raids, 127, 144–49; international recognition of, 134–35, 139, 142; national stereotypes, 51, 67–69, 265; relations with UN, 146–47, 279–80; and security guarantee, 149; War of Independence (1948), 126, 199 Israeli Defence Force (IDF), 143–44 Jackson, Charles (C.D.), 14, 25, 86, 184, 188, 208, 241–42, 244, 250; and the Suez Crisis, 226–27, 228 Jackson Committee, 2–3, 14, 24, 65, 86, 87, 94, 102, 104, 120, 248 Jackson, William, 2, 14 Jacob, Sir Ian, 210 Jazz, 87, 89–90, 96 Jewish Agency, 136–37 Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC): assessments of communist threat to Middle East, 101, 103; on incompatibility of Islam and communism, 122; view of Nasser, 289 JOLT, Operation, 171 Jones, Shepherd, 244 Jordan: anti-communist activity in, 104; British intelligence activities in, 107; radio broadcasting in, 40

Index Keightley, General Sir Charles, 208 Kellas, Arthur, 126 Kennan, George, 98 Khrushchev, Nikita, 119 Kirkbride, Sir Alex, 46, 188 Kirkpatrick, Ivone, 24, 27, 41, 125, 184, 207 Kohler, Foy, 44 Korda, Alexander, 83 Korean War, 81 Kurds, 99 Kuwait, 44–45, 104, 203 Labour organisations, 109–11; see also trades unions Labour Party (British), 17–18, 78–79, 105, 111, 160–61, 222 Lampson, Sir Miles, 109 Landale Organisation, 26–27 Larson, Arthur, 236, 245 Lasswell, Harold, 105 Lawrence, T.E., 121 Lebanon: communist Party in, 99, 101; British intelligence activities in, 106–07; neutralism, 115; radio broadcasting in, 40 Lennox-Boyd, Alan, 203 Lewis, Bernard, 48, 49, 62–63 Libraries, 32–33 Library of Congress, 77 Libya, 219; communist threat to, 100–01 Lloyd, Selwyn, 158, 203, 208–09; and the Suez Crisis, 211–21; and collusion with Israel, 217–18 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 187 Logan, Donald, 211 London Press Service (LPS), 17, 212, 217 Loomis, Henry, 104–05 Lyon, Cecil, 100 Macmillan, Harold, 174, 193 Mailer, Norman, 87 Makins, Roger, 185 Malcolm, Angus, 1, 167, 229 Maltese Falcoln, The, 87 Marconi, 38, 203 Marett, Robert, 7, 11, 19–20, 245–46

313

Marshall Plan, 111 Mason, James, 83 Mattison, Gordon, 106 Mayhew, Christopher, 7 McArdle, Carl, 42 McCarthy, Joseph, 87 Mecca airlift, 120–21 Meyer, Armin, 131, 240 MGM, 33, 87 MI6, see Secret Information Service Middle East: definition of, 10 Middle East Defence Organisation (MEDO), 45, 175 Middle East Information Department (MEID), 16–17, 56, 69, 240 Millard, Guy, 205 Miller, Glenn, 89; see also Jazz Ministry of Defence (MOD), 172, 213 Ministry of Information (MOI), 16, 27 Minor, Harold, 143 Monckton, Walter, 218 Moose, James, 240 Morde, Theodore, 180–81 Moscow Radio, 117 Mossadeq, Mohammed, 6, 51 Murray, Ralph, 18, 110, 111, 122, 208 Music, 40, 88–90, 96, 204 Muslim Brotherhood, 22, 23, 121, 196–97, 287 Naguib, Muhamed, 172, 202 Naked and the Dead, The, 87 Nasser, Gamal Abdul, 52, 95, 104, 127, 190, 192, 239; and Arab-Israel dispute, 149–50, 156, 221–22; and the Baghdad Pact, 195; and communism, 104; comparisons with Hitler Mussolini and Peron, 193, 212–14, 289; co-operation with American propagandists, 32, 104–05; and Czech-Egypt arms deal, 193–94, 222; denounced as imperialist, 201, 214–15; and the Soviet Union, 127 National Security Council, 14–15; analysis of Middle Eastern neutralism, 114–15 NATO, 30, 117, 213

314 Index Near East Arab Broadcastng Station, see Sharq al-Adna Near East Regional Service Center (NERSC), Beirut, 23, 118, 227 Neutralism, 5, 60, 114–19; see also Bandung Conference New York Times, 46, 145, 184 News agencies, 25–26, 133; see also Arab News Agency, Associated Press, Reuters, TASS, United Press News Department (Foreign Office), 16, 57, 144, 163–64, 247 News Review/al Akhbar, 31, 77, 81–82, 113, 118, 123, 147, 155, 200, 233; and the Suez Crisis, 225–27, 291 Newsreels, 33–35 Newsweek, 183 Nicholls, Jack, 68, 157 Non-aligned movement, see Neutralism NSC 68, 13 Nutting, Anthony, 55–56, 95, 170–71 Office of Information and Cultural Affairs (OIC), 77, 94; and the Palestine crisis, 130–31; relations with Congress, 12 Office of War Information (OWI), 12, 80, 84–85, 180 Oklahoma, 89 Olympic Games, 92–93; see also Sports OMEGA, 40, 169, 199–206, 207, 222–24, 230, 235 Open Skies, 116 Opera, see Music Operations Co-ordinating Board (OCB), 14–16, 64, 118, 121, 202 Oral propaganda, 26–28 Orientalism, 9, 49–69; see also Said, Edward Pakistan, 118 Palestine, 5–6, 43, 159, 240, 249; crisis of the British Mandate, 95, 129, 132–36; Jewish immigration, 130, 133, 135–36; Palestinian refugees, 139–40, 154, 155–56 Panama Canal, 225

Pan-American Airways, 24–25, 78 Paramount, 33 Parr, William Grant, 240 Peck, John, 18, 20–21 Pelham, Henry, 160 Pepsi-Cola, 24 PILEUP, Operation, 216–17 Point Four, 111–12, 143 Political Warfare Executive (PWE), 207–08 Pollock, A.J.C., 25, 56 Porgy and Bess, 89; see also Music Portsmouth Treaty (1948), 162, 240 Port Said: alleged British atrocities at, 219–21 Pravda, 134 Princeton University, 77 Private Enterprise Co-operation, see State-Private network Projection of America, 79–80, 85 Projection of Britain, 78–79, 82–83, 95, 247 Propaganda: definition of, 3 Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), 13–14, 56, 188, 249; views on the ‘Arab mind’, 60–66 Qibya raid, 144–46 Radio Ramallah, 198–99 Rank, J. Arthur, 83 Reading Rooms, see Libraries Reddaway, Norman, 207 Regional Information Office (RIO), Beirut, 21, 62, 119, 126, 189–90, 206 Religious propaganda, 18, 73, 119–25; see also Islam Rennie, Jack, 103–04, 203, 207 Republican Party (US), 12, 15 Reuters, 25–26, 133 RKO Pictures, 87 Rockefeller, Nelson, 2, 14, 90, 115 Roosevelt, Franklin, 86–87, 131 Roosevelt, Kermit, 104, 125, 183 Rougetel, John Le, 67 Rountree, William, 230 Royal Air Force (RAF), 170, 219 Russell, Bertrand, 117, 274

Index Sadaka, al, 31, 124 Sadat, Anwar, 234 Said, Edward, 49–52; see also Orientalism Said, Nuri, 104, 177, 194–96 Saud, King, 52, 236–37 Saudi Arabia: and the Buraimi dispute, 163–66; communism in, 101; corruption and bribery, 164–65, 184, 185, 198; difficulty of propaganda work in, 30–31, neutralism, 115 SCANT, 208, 215–16 Schramm, Wilbur, 38 Secret Information Service (SIS/MI6), 25–26, 106–07, 185, 257 Sèvres Protocol, 211 Shakespeare, William, 94 Sharq al-Adna, 25, 35–36, 88, 162–63, 198, 209–10; and the Arab-Israel dispute, 157; and the Czech-Egyptian arms deal, 194; and the Palestine crisis, 134–38; requisitioned by the British Government, 210, 218; and the Sudan dispute, 169; and the Suez Canal Zone dispute, 170–72; and the Voice of Britain, 218 Sharrett, Moshe, 146 Shaw, Artie, 89; see also Jazz Shell Oil Company, 24, 261 Shishakli, Adib, 101 Shuckburgh, Evelyn, 128, 151, 152, 153, 156, 163, 207 Smith-Mundt Act, 12–13 Social democracy, 18, 78–79, 107–11, 114, 255 Soviet Union, 71, 80, 95–96, 194, 242; alleged anti-Semitism, 126; alleged pro-Israeli bias, 126–27; invasion of Hungary, 228; ‘peace’ campaign, 115–16; penetration of the Middle East, 98–103, 231, 248; Soviet imperialism’, 117–19, 186; standard of living, 113; and the Suez Crisis, 227–29; suppresion of Muslims, 123–24; and the Third World, 115, 243–44

315

Special Operations Executive (SOE), 207–08 Special Relationship, see AngloAmerican Relations Sports, 90–93 Stalin, Joseph, 101, 115, 123 Stark, Freya, 27–28 State Department: loss of reponsibility for US propaganda, 14, 19; opposition to Truman’s policy towards Palestine, 130–31; post-war propaganda responsibilities, 12–13; relations with USIA, 15, 19 State-Private Network, 23–29, 42, 77–78, 83, 256 Stephenson, Donald, 35, 203–04, 240 Stern Gang, 136 Stevenson, Ralph, 115, 169 Stonehewer Bird, Hugh, 61, 71–72, 121–22 STRAGGLE, Operation, 221 Strang, Sir William, 68 Streibert, Theodore, 16, 245 Sudan, 166–69 Suez Canal: nationalization of, 193 Suez Canal Zone Base, 127, 169–73, 181–82, 189–90 Suez Crisis, 6, 19, 74, 190, 192–93, 206–29, 241, 246 Syria, 221, 247; American intelligence activities in, 236; Ba’ath Party, 111; British intelligence activities in, 106–07; communism in, 99–101; neutralism, 115 Tales of Hoffman, The, 84 TASS, 232 The Week In America, 30–31 Thompson, Dorothy, 28; see also American Friends of the Middle East Three Came Home, 88 Time-Life Inc., 184 Times, The, 168 Trades unions, 95, 109–11; see also Histadrut, International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, World Federation of Trade Unions Trades Union Congress (TUC), 110

316 Index Transjordan, see Jordan Trevelyan, Humphrey, 66 Tripartite Declaration, 143, 149, 159 Troutbeck, Sir John, 61, 135, 140–41, 145 Truman, Harry, 12–13, 15, 111, 125; and Palestine crisis, 130–32, 134–35 Tuck, S. Pinckney, 79–80, 130 Turner, Lana, 87 TWA, 23–24, 78 Twentieth Century Fox, 33–34, 87–88, 200 United Nations (UN), 27, 75, 125; and Arab-Israel Dispute, 139, 144–48; Palestine Partition Plan (1947), 131, 134, 154; and Suez Crisis, 220, 223, 227 United Press (UP), 25, 133 United States of America: anti-British sentiment and anti-colonialism, 8, 28–29, 44–45, 160, 178–85; and Arab nationalism, 185–91, 243–44; expenditure on propaganda, 12–13, 15, 17, 241; relations with Egypt, 105, 117; and the Suez Canal Zone dispute, 180–82; and the Suez Crisis, 223–29 United States Educational Foundation (USEF), 77 United States Information Agency (USIA), 7, 245; and Al Azhar university, 124; and the Arab-Israel dispute, 144–45, 155; and the Eisenhower Doctrine, 232–34; establishment of, 14; Global Themes, 117; publications programme, 31–32; racial issues, 58; relations with CIA, 15; relations with Congress, 15, 241; role within the foreign policy bureaucracy,

14–16, 19; and the Suez Crisis, 226–29; Wireless File, 23, 40, 234 United States Information and Educational Exchange Program (USIE), 13, 240, 241, 249 US Advisory Commission on Information, 23, 93 USSR, see Soviet Union Voice of America, 7, 36–38, 44, 88, 147, 200; and the Eisenhower Doctrine, 233; and the Suez Crisis, 226–27 Voice of the Arabs, 39, 202; see also Egyptian State Broadcasting Voice of Britain, 210, 218 Voice of Free Egypt (British), 208–09, 221–22 Voice of Free Egypt (Iraqi), 196–97 Voice of Justice, 209, 215–16, 221 Warner Brothers, 86 Warner, Christopher, 17–18, 42, 44, 67, 108, 128 Washburn, Abbot, 90–91 Waterfield, Gordon, 58, 137 Watson, Adam, 42, 44–45, 47 Welfare State, see Economic development; Social democracy West Germany, 67, 79 Whitman, Ann, 25 W.H. Smith and Sons, 32 World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), 110 Wyatt, Woodrow, 145 Young, George Kennedy, 57 Zanuck, Daryll, 34, 86 Zionism, 5, 28, 129, 151, 244 Zulueta, Philip de, 204–05

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