Letter from Lhasa, number 197. (Copeland 1969) & (Kolb 2004): The Game of Nations & Overworld
by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
Copeland, M., The Game of Nations. The Amorality of Power Politics, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, U.K., 1969.
(Copeland 1969).
Miles Copeland
Kolb, L. J., Overworld. The Life and Times of a Reluctant Spy, Riverhead Books, New York, N.Y., USA, 2004.
(Kolb 2004)
Larry J. Kolb
(Copeland 1969) is multifaceted, so of great interest from different points of view. A kind of general theory the book intends to present is The Game of Nations. However the book in anchored to Egyptian events, what anyway is an advantage, since that permits to show The Game in its concreteness. There are also other aspects, continuously pushing the reader to think from the particular to the general, or also from the general to how matters develop in concrete contexts.
(Kolb 2004) is a useful complement of (Copeland 1969). For example one may find a realistic evaluation about The Game of Nations and about Miles Copeland:
“By the time he wrote that book, Miles had officially left the CIA and become, according to Newsweek, one of the ten highest-paid consultants in the world – providing Mideast intelligence to oil companies, banks, airlines, and other corporate clients. But he’d also remained in close contact with his old friends the Shah and Nasser, and with Jessie Angleton and Kermit and Archie Roosevelt. Kim Philby wasn’t the first person to suggest Miles’s consultancy was a cover and he still worked for the CIA.
(Kolb 2004, p 185)
Naturally, about (Kolb 2004), you may believe that his father had a casual car accident [no one can left the CIA or the FBI, without going on working for them; different lives are perceived as dangerous and must be liquidated], that Muhammad Ali be a philanthropist not working for the CIA/US government under the unbelievable mask of a faithful Muslin and that only I might thing such an heresy [everybody, in the Islamic world, evidently know that and receives him as an informal representative of the US “government”; ...as some ex-Presidents of the USA when a Muslim is not indispensable], that Kim Philby was really a Russian spy and not part of a more complex game finally in the British Crown interest. The U.K. survived. The USSR didn’t. The British Empire is going on in its fight against the U.S. Empire, now simulating convergence now trying to subordinate it to its interests by deceptions and trickeries. From (Kolb 2004) one may also learn that there are Catholic priests revealing people’s confession to Secret Police Bureaux, if the confession concerns some matters of State [supposed] security [if you have secrets, never trust any religious minister; they are frequently just adventurers which have interiorised, have somatised and have been psychologically sodomised from the Moloch-State/government/Power; if you need a confession, silently confess directly to G-d or, if you really need a priest, choose one cannot see and identify you and do not give him any detail could be used for identifying you; you go for a confession and you may be a bit later arrested or assassinated from a Secret Police Bureau].
(Kolb 2004, p. 318-321) shows that it is possible to forge “reliable” evidence against everybody, alias to irreparably slander everybody, and that Secret Police Bureaux do such things since decades, or it may be more.
By economic and military subversion, it is possible to change whatever government. The USA, not only them, currently do that. (Kolb 2004) illustrates the Low Intensity Conflict technique about Nicaragua. One may read the parts of (Kolb 2004) about India as elements on British-US destabilization of great countries potentially their competitors. Anyway, India is instable because the Empires want it unstable. There is no necessary link between being big and diversifies, and being unstable with systematic killing of rulers. Perhaps, India was feared more than China.
About the Game of Nations, this is the point of view of Zakaria Mohieddin, then Vice-President of the U.A.R., in May 1962:
““(...), in the Game of Nations there are no winners, only losers. The objective of each player is not so much to win as to avoid loss.
““The common objective of players in the Game of Nations is merely to keep the Game going. The alternative to the Game is war.””
(Copeland 1969, p. 7)
Actually, war is part of The Game. Evidently, (Copeland 1969) wanted to mystify. The Game is something else: Imperial powers (which are essentially two, in reciprocal contrast and compromise, the UK and the USA) letting to their dominated the illusion that they have any conditioning power. The only real power of dominated areas is some substantive development (which is not the same of some parasitic wealth), what rarely happens.
“A diplomat to whom I showed the original draft of this book chided me for ‘revealing a lot of information which had best to be forgotten’ and for ‘needlessly’ puncturing a view of our government ‘which is best for the pubic to have’. I disagree with this outlook.”
(Copeland 1969, p. 11)
Since, generally people having organically worked for the CIA, either continue to go unofficially on (drastically increasing their salaries) or they are generally killed (there are too many casual dies, not only perhaps in the CIA, of pensioners unnaturally dying if they want to be real pensioners: car accidents, drowning, etc), (Copeland 1969) tells what sectors of the CIA wants to tell. It may be information. It may be deception. Both are inevitably mixed.
(Copeland 1969) is centred overall on Egypt.
In (Copeland 1969, p. 15), we find, as subtitle of the I Chapter: “The first prerequisite for winning a game is to know that you’re in one”. Lapalissian! If one wants to win, one needs to play. If one wants to play, generally one needs to know there is a game, although, theoretically, it would be possible to win a game even without knowing there be a game. Who defines there is a game? Who defines there be precisely that game and/or only one game? There is any meaning in playing games? May a game be won without playing it and/or, eventually, changing the terms of the “game”.
What declared at page 21 is not really of any real interest, overall from a CIA/US agent:
“For various reasons the innings we have had which involved President Nasser of Egypt provide the best case history to illustrate how our strategy of double morality works.”
(Copeland 1969, p. 21)
Is it really a case of double morality or overall of double morality? Nasser moves Egypt from the British influence to the U.S. one. At the same time, he plays between the U.S. and the Soviet area for getting charity from both. Both pay him for letting Egypt in a condition of substantial underdevelopment, while it can boast great international successes, ...while remaining substantially underdeveloped.
According to my evaluation, Soviet Union is substantially a US and UK client and, more precisely, it acted in function of British strategic interests. The “cold war” is largely a simulation of fucking common people of whatever geopolitical field. So, Egypt is paid with U.S. money, supposedly for U.S. interests, and with Soviet money in function, substantially, of British interests. Has that any meaning, be not The Game of Nations theatrical representation, alias some universal interest in keeping popular masses in miserable conditions, both in the developed and in the underdeveloped areas, while brainwashing them?
(Copeland 1969) is one of those books suggesting questions, what is anyway a positive aspect. Perhaps it is typical of whatever historical book, if read from or with a questioning mind.
In (Copeland 1969, p. 28-30) there is a masterpiece if British politics. In February 1947, the British informed the Americans that they could not support any more the anti-Soviet resistance of Greece and Turkey. What might the USA do? Naturally, they replaced the British founding of the Greek and Turk governments. Would pro-Soviet Greece and Turkey really have been a danger for anybody or perhaps only a weakening of the Soviet Empire? Was really “the world” in danger since the Soviet fashion? Why there was a Soviet fashion to be fought by the “cold” war and connected barbarianisms? First one makes the USSR military and politically strong, later one declares war to the USSR. There any rational or equilibrated logic in that? It was what happened with WWII and immediately after WWII.
U.S. (and not only U.S.) interest about other countries was just to have their “friend” in office. Myopic or farseeing? In (Copeland 1969) there is the Syrian example, later followed from the Egyptian one.
The 1949 Syrian “revolution” does not seem a great masterpiece:
“The operation was the Husni Za’im coup of 30 March 1949. A ‘political action team’ under Major Meade systematically developed a friendship with Za’im, then chief of staff of the Syrian Army, suggested to him the idea of a coup d’état, advised him how to go about it, and guided him through the intricate preparations in laying the groundwork for it – a degree of participation which was only suspected by Syria’s leading politicians, and which was later written off as ‘typical Syrian suspicion’ by Western journalists and students who interviewed the principal participants and examined the relevant documents. So far as outside world knew, the coup was strictly a Syrian affair, although it was afterwards assumed, fairly generally, that Za’im was ‘the Americans’ boy’.
“Details of the coup itself are not particularly relevant to our subject, but a few general observations are in order:
“First, the State Department was informed of the coming coup as soon as it became a serious possibility. If details were not reported it was because the Department made it clear enough that it preferred not to have the details. References to the pre-coup involvement of Meade’s political action team were ignored. The tenor of the Department’s replies was ‘If Za’im seems bent on changing the Government the Department sees no reason to discourage him so long as we believe he will return to a parliamentary form of government as soon as practicably possible.’ Za’im, it happened, had made it clear that he had no such intention. Rather, he would (1) put the corrupt politicians in jail, (2) reorganise the Government along more efficient lines, (3) institute much needed social and economic reforms, and (4) ‘do something constructive’ about the Arab-Israel problem – this last being what neutralised any inclination the Department might have had to give us explicit instructions to lay off.”
(Copeland 1969, p. 42)
In practice, U.S. milieus orchestrated the coup just for the pleasure of having their men in office. Although things never go as previously planned. However, bureaucracies follow repetitive pattern:
“[...] Outrageous though it may sound, Meade spent the second day of Za’im’s era telling the new dictator who should be Ambassador to the Court of St James, which officers should be promoted into diplomatic positions, and what diet should be given deposed President Quwwatli by his jailer so as not to irritate his ulcer. Immediately following recognition, however, Za’im became a new man – revealing himself suddenly one morning as he brusquely informed Meade and myself that we were henceforth to leap to our feet as he entered the room, and to replace the familiar ‘tu’ (Za’im spoke French, he had no English) with ‘vous – or, better still, with ‘Excellence’. Except for this new note of formality, relations remained friendly enough for the rest of his tenure, but day by day it became clearer and clearer that certain sine qua nons had been left out of our plans, and that we had better be thinking about a replacement for Za’im when he fell, as he surely would – shortly.
“Za’im demonstrated, to all who would study his case, that being a stooge of the most powerful government on earth was not enough to ensure tenure. There was no magic in this widely (and correctly) assumed status, nor was there any magic in the mechanics of command in which he put so much faith. He hadn’t learned the modern theory of command – that is, that the commander’s principal function is to maintain conditions in which subordinates have no alternative but to accept them. A military man who had lived all his life under such conditions, Za’im took them for granted. He treated his immediate subordinates, his fellow colonels who should have been the shoulders of his ‘command structure’, as though they had no choice but to carry out his instructions, and without question. After some months, it was clear that he represented no one but himself, whether dealing with his American patrons or with his own people, and other choices began to occur to his immediate subordinates. On the morning of 14 August 1949, a group of these associates, fronted by one Sami Hennawi, but actually led by Colonel Adib Shishakli, surrounded Za’im’s house, killed him, buried him in the French cemetery (‘We are doing you the favour of treating him as a French agent rather than an American agent’, Shishakli told me) and took over the government. Exactly four months later, Shishakli jailed Hennawi and ran the country himself through a succession of civilian front men until 21 November 1951 when he came into the open as Syria’s ‘strong man’. Shishakli fled the country in February 1954, in the face of yet another coup, and since then coups and counter-coups have occurred so frequently in that country that even those of us who know it well are unable to keep track of which predator is currently in charge.”
(Copeland 1969, p. 44-45)
Charisma in politics does not really exist. What exists is power, the power one has or the power somebody or something gives to someone.
Those who have to know know and, for the general public, there is only deception. Real promoters and their puppets must not be known in their real roles.
Leaders are chosen from power groups or they may propose or impose themselves to power groups. People are easily conditioned by elementary “Pavlovian” techniques: [Not only] “In this part of the world, Bertrand Russell’s observation particularly applied: ‘A common peril is much the easiest way of producing homogeneity’.” (Copeland 1969, p. 50)
A discussible, intellectually provocative, assertion may be used, and in fact is used in (Copeland 1969) as an introduction to Egyptian questions:
“[...] a country’s masses were not likely to rise in revolt because of the dismaying economic circumstances. Roosevelt had long argued this point at the State Department and had once passed out copies of Crane Brinton’s Anatomy of Revolution to support his assertion that no major revolution in history had economic causes at its roots and that our government couldn’t get rid of a leader it didn’t like by withholding grants of wheat from its people.”
(Copeland 1969, p. 54)
The question is complex. Even the assertion that economic factors be, in last analysis, determinant, does not avoid to question how they be determinant. Actually, economic demolition from British and/or U.S. “international finance” etc, together with various forms of military subversion, works. When it does not work, there is the final solution: war, direct attack. Although, frequently [not always!], covert war in its various forms be sufficient.
“The point came up in the meeting between Roosevelt and Nasser representatives when one of these representatives remarked that ‘whoever rules this country will have a hard time meeting the tremendous wants of the Egyptian people’. The senior member of the group in his first complete sentence of the evening, replied, ‘On the contrary; our problem is that people don’t want enough.’ Most Egyptians, he went on to say, have lived at marginal subsistence for thousands of years and could go on for another thousand. ‘They aren’t motivated to revolt,’ he said, ‘and they aren’t motivated to make the most out of their lives after the revolution. After the revolution we will do our best to motivate them, but we don’t have time for it beforehand.’ Thus, there was no question of a ‘democratic’ or ‘popular’ revolution. It was understood from the start that Egyptian army would take control of the country, choosing a time and circumstances which could ensure the support of a political conscious and active urban populace, and that the rest of the country would be won over gradually thereafter.”
(Copeland 1969, p. 54)
Again, Nasser was the leader because the U.S.A. accepted him as the leader. He had “charisma” because he get the position from the U.S.A.. The U.S.A. gave him charisma and, certainly, he could maintain his ruling position neutralising eventual manoeuvres from the U.S.A. for replacing him with somebody else as, on the contrary, happened in the Syrian case with other protagonists.
Key element of the “Egyptian revolution” was the deception of the popular masses:
“The new government’s job would be to bring about these conditions, which were: (1) a literate populace; (2) a large and stable middle class; (3) a feeling by the people that ‘this is our government’, and not an imposition of the French, the Turks, the British, or the Egyptian upper classes; (4) sufficient identification of local ideals and values so that truly indigenous democratic institutions could grow up, not mere imitations imported from the United States or Great Britain. Both Roosevelt and Nasser’s representatives realised that the American public, Congressmen, some journalists, and some State Department people, often including the Secretary of State himself, would soon be howling the old slogans. At the same time, they fully realised that any premature attempt at democracy would put the country back in the same old mess: elections between candidates who were supported by the US and British Governments running against candidates supported by the Soviets, a rural populace (at 24,000,000 out of 28,000,000 by far the majority) voting as instructed by the large landowners, and the frustrated city populace reduced to riots and general troublemaking as their only means of exerting political influence, joining the Moslem Brotherhood and the Communist Party as being the only outlets befitting their energies.”
(Copeland 1969, p. 55)
It would have been a tricky game anyway, because the same Moslem Brotherhood and the Communist Party were not independent organizations but were finally controlled, through Secret Police Bureaux, by the same “government” they told to oppose.
The U.S. government worked for the Nasser’s coup d’État while it could not know determine precisely when and how the takeover would have been realised:
“Our Government learned of the actual coup by reading about it in the newspapers the day it happened (22 July 1952) following the usual flurry of CIA reports indicating that something was up but failing to pinpoint the exact time and movements. The press was entirely favourable: the coup had been bloodless, it was obviously acceptable to the Egyptian people, and no one seemed to regret the departure of the profligate king. The ostensible leader of the coup, General Mohammed Naguib, appeared as a genial, pipe-smoking type from whom mature judgements might be expected. His supporters appeared as clean-cut young officers, all of them slim and athletic looking, who seemed to be ideal material from which to build a New Egypt. There were no wild statements such as invariably followed Syrian coups. The preoccupations seemed the same as that of intelligent, mature politicos anywhere: cleaning up corruption, building a more efficient government, reforming the political parties and so on. Nothing was said about Israel.”
(Copeland 1969, p. 61-62)
It was just the usual masquerade for “the masses”:
“Various accounts of the Egyptian revolution have Naguib as its leader, the British and American Governments dealing with him as such, and Nasser taking over from him many months later. The truth, however, is that although Roosevelt had taken Nasser at his word when he insisted he was not the head of the revolutionary movement, members of the Embassy in Cairo, mainly William Lakeland, the Embassy’s political officer, realised almost immediately that Naguib was only Nasser’s front man. Lakeland first became friendly with Nasser’s Free Officers through Mohammed Hassanein Haykel, who later became Nasser’s closest friend and confidant but who was then a mere working reporter on the staff of a paper owned by Nasser’s friend Mustafa Amin. Through Heykel, Lakeland met many of the leading Free Officers, including Nasser, and during the months following the coup he entertained them frequently in his apartment overlooking the Nile. While the Egyptian public and the outside world were cheering Naguib, the Embassy, through Lakeland, had begun to deal with Nasser as the one who really made the decisions.”
(Copeland 1969, p. 63)
The Egyptian “revolution” was successful, at last from the point of view of creating a stable top-level counterpart (it was not really successful from the point of view of breaking with underdevelopmentalism and underdevelopment), because in the Egyptian “revolution” there were not revolutionaries but only grey bureaucrats:
“Apropos of some country somewhere, Roosevelt once told Secretary Dulles, ‘We can’t have a revolution without revolutionaries’ – or, as Brian Crozier put it some years later, ‘Men do not rebel because their conditions of life are intolerable; it takes a rebel to rebel.’ After some weeks of social mixing with Egyptian officers – which, after all, followed years of close association with Syrian, Lebanese and Iraqi officers – Meade believed the opposite. Syrian coups failed – or rather, they were quickly followed by other coups – because they had too many rebels in them. Meade believed that the Egyptian coup was likely to stick because it had been brought off as the result of Nasser’s discipline, and because it was evident that Nasser’s followers were amenable to his continuing the discipline. ‘These boys see themselves as Robin Hood’s merry band’, Meade wrote to Roosevelt, ‘and they are pleased to be billed as “heroes of the Revolution”. But I haven’t found a one who can explain to me what the revolution is all about. They aren’t interested in politics, and fortunately for Nasser and all of us, they want and require someone to tell them what to think and do. There’ll be no difficulty in getting them back into the barracks.’”
(Copeland 1969, p. 65)
...A “revolution” without revolutionaries and without revolution. Just a top-government change for changing nothing. ...Ah, no, there is the game of nations for fucking the same Egyptian people that underdevelopment, but “with pride”, would have gone on. The “Egyptian revolution” was just the passage from ordinary underdevelopment to the pride of being underdeveloped because Nasser was acclaimed in international conferences. ...Deliria... ...Prodigies of mass brainwashing!
(Copeland 1969, p. 66) exalts “discipline”. However it is discipline for doing nothing. ...From undisciplined underdevelopment to disciplined underdevelopment!
...Do you remember or do you ever heard of the Andreotti-Berlinguer’s P2? ...“Secret societies”...
“Nasser had singles out officers who were both serious and in key positions of command; his secret society consisted of these officers. His coup had not been a matter of upsetting discipline, but a matter of establishing it.”
(Copeland 1969, p. 66)
Contrarily to what (Copeland 1969, p. 99) tries to suggest, the “logic” of “this is the only way; there is no other alternative” is not particularly sophisticate either not particularly genial or original. It is a classic backward bureaucratic technique. The difference would be, eventually, between compressing and liberating energies for personal and collective achievements.
“To start with, Nasser believed that you get anyone, a single individual or a populace, to do what you want him to do not by persuasion or by coercion but by creating circumstances which will make him want to do it. People are motivated by their own wants, not by the wants of their leader. Leadership, in other words, is essentially a job of motivation. First, you motivate the people (make them want something); then you direct them (show them how to get it). Or, if you can’t really show them how to get it (and this is usually the case, since nobody really knows a way to prosperity – or to any acceptable substitute – which is open to the people of a so-called ‘underdeveloped’ country), you show them what appears to be a way, and this will enable you to hold on to leadership until they find out differently or until someone else turns up with a more plausible avenue.
“As Nasser, before the coup, took a good look at this country, he saw people who didn’t really want anything, who weren’t really motivated in any direction. He saw that it was necessary to surround them with an environment which would stimulate the motivation; the ‘leader’ was merely a part of the environment. And it was not necessarily to Nasser that he be the leader himself, so long that he could engineer the environment and retain control of it. As Nasser has since openly become the leader, instead of remaining a manipulator behind the scenes, this argument is bound to be questioned. But those who know Nasser well believe it, and believe that what changed things was not Nasser’s growing thirst for power so much as a thirst for power awakening in Naguib. Nasser wanted a figurehead, and Naguib could have stayed on indefinitely as long as he was content to remain one. And ‘engineering an environment’, rather than Hitler-type personal leadership, is the Nasser style. If he has learned to like being the idol of a personality cult – and I, among others who know him, doubt this – it is coincidental.”
(Copeland 1969, p. 99)
About the 5 March 1953 British-U.S. initiative on the Middle East Defence, (Copeland 1969) remembers:
“The specific question at hands was Egypt: Nasser and his Revolutionary Command Council were more interested in defending themselves from the British than in defending themselves from the Soviets, and they didn’t see the Middle East as being in danger of military attack anyhow.”
(Copeland 1969, p. 113)
Begging U.S. and Soviet help for preserving underdevelopment was not a great defence. Frustration is largely a media creation, indispensable for mass brainwashing and for exploiting this built “frustration” in a way functional to imperialist interests while presenting the organization of frustration as a way for opposing imperialist interests. “National independence” without individual rights and without development is just a masquerade for exploiting frustration and/or resentment for preserving internal parasitic classes simulating the war of the nation war against “imperialism”.
The USA paid Egypt, as well as others, precisely because it played the game of deceiving its population and the whole world on third ways, which were sterile as the second one [the Soviet-style regimes]. In fact, the British paid the Russian giving them large sections of Europe and Asia precisely because the illusion of a Soviet way was high functional to imperialist interests.
“Positive neutrality – or freedom of decision, or whatever you choose to call it – is not only Nasser’s objective, it is his strategy. [...]
“[...] The route which Nasser did take produced roughly ten times that amount.” [What he would have got remaining an apparently servile U.S. and British valet]
(Copeland 1969, p. 144)
Clandestine or Masonic organisations as the Moslem Brotherhood were not different options. Bureaucracies, as the military, have some internal stability that “alternative” organisations have not. Revolutionary group, not differently from current religious congregation, are immediately submitted to Police Secret Bureaux, alias to State/government bureaucracies.
“[...] Information directly from the German sources showed that the Moslem Brotherhood had been virtually a German Intelligence unit; [...]
“[...] Sound beating of Moslem Brotherhood organisers who had been arrested revealed that the organisation had been thoroughly penetrated, at the top, by the British, American, French and Soviet intelligence services, any one of which could either make active use of it or blow it up, whichever best suited its purpose. Important lesson: fanaticism is no insurance against corruption; indeed, the two are highly compatible. When Nasser’s unionising agents moved on to their ‘negative’ phase this was one lesson they kept firmly in mind.”
(Copeland 1969, p. 155-156)
In chapter 8, (Copeland 1969) shows that even the concept of Arab, Arab Union, Arab Space or Arab World are only media constructions, propaganda, variously used for mass brainwashing.
In addition, the bureaucratisation of decision-making at State/government level makes everything complicated and also largely inefficient and unpredictable only for those believing in the rationality of power instead of understanding that there are only grey bureaucratic patterns also at level of decision-making and -implementing: “‘you Americans [...] never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing.’”
The Egyptian use of terrorism against Jordan, in 1956, see (Copeland 1969, p. 184-185), shows only that such games work until the recipients accept them. In September 1970, the Jordan reaction was different. In addition, it shows how Egypt controlled “Palestinian” terrorism and how it used it.
Finally, the representation of the Egyptian Army coming out from (Copeland 1969), is that of an inefficient clientelist force good only for some internal backward consensus and for some repression.
Copeland, M., The Game of Nations. The Amorality of Power Politics, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, U.K., 1969.
Kolb, L. J., Overworld. The Life and Times of a Reluctant Spy, Riverhead Books, New York, N.Y., USA, 2004.
