Beyond Cloak and Dagger: Inside the CIA

by Miles Copeland Jr.

"This is the book the CIA didn't get to read in advance... it tells you all you always wanted to know about spying but didn't know who to ask". - New York Times.

Genres: Nonfiction

379 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Miles Axe Copeland, Jr. was an American intelligence officer, businessman and musician who was closely involved in major foreign-policy operations from the 1950s to the 1980s.

At the outbreak of World War II, Copeland contacted Rep. John Sparkman of Alabama, who got him a job with Army Intelligence. Showing promise, he was one of the founding members of the OSS and later the CIA under William "Wild Bill" Donovan; serving in London, he became a lifelong Anglophile and married Lorraine Adie, a Scot then serving in the Special Operations Executive. He remained with the office as it was transformed into the Central Intelligence Agency. Among his first postings was Damascus, Syria, beginning a long career in the Middle East. Working closely with Archibald Roosevelt (son of Theodore), and his nephew Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., he was instrumental in arranging Operation Ajax, the 1953 technical coup d'état against the Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadeq.

In 1953, Copeland returned to private life at the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, while remaining a non-official cover operative for the CIA. He traveled to Cairo to meet Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had overthrown King Farouk and taken power in Egypt. In this role he offered U.S. economic development and technical military assistance. At the time, the U.S. considered regional instability adverse to U.S. interests. T he “new postwar era witnessed an intensive involvement of the United States in the political and economic affairs of the Middle East, in contrast to the hands-off attitude characteristic of the prewar period.... The United States had to face and define its policy in all three sectors that provided the root causes of American interests in the region: the Soviet threat, the birth of Israel, and petroleum.”

In 1955 Copeland returned to the CIA. During the Suez Crisis, in which the United States blocked the collusion of France, the United Kingdom and Israel to invade, the US backed Egypt's independence and control of the Suez Canal. The move is said to have been advocated by Copeland with the goal of ending British control of the region's oil resources, and forestalling the influence of the Soviet Union on regional governments by placing the US behind their legitimate national interests. After the crisis Nasser, nevertheless, moved closer to the USSR and accepted massive military technology and engineering assistance on the Aswan Dam, which the US had earlier offered, but with strings Nasser could not accept. Copeland, allied with John and Allen Dulles, worked to reverse this trend at the time.

In 1958, Syria merged with Egypt in the United Arab Republic and King Faisal II was deposed by Iraqi nationalists. Copeland admittedly oversaw CIA contacts with the regime and internal opponents including Saddam Hussein and others in the Ba'ath Party. With Egyptian assistance, Saddam was aided in the failed assassination of Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qassim, who had blocked union with the United Arab Republic, a goal of the Ba'athists. Saddam fled to Cairo and bided his time under Egyptian protection until a coup against Qassim — which blindsided American officials — occurred in 1963. Seizing the moment, Saddam, said to have been provided with U.S. weapons, took part in massacres of suspected Communists as the new regime consolidated power, and rose in the Ba'ath power structure.

Copeland opposed some major CIA operations such as the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in 1961, believing that they were impossible to keep secret due to size. For many years he was based in Beirut, where his children grew up attending the American Community School.

He was later involved in the coup against Kwame Nkrumah, the elected President of Ghana.

Reviews

[Jonah Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's difficult to get a handle on what the early CIA looked like without reading the books and memoirs of its earliest officers (as opposed to reading official histories). While Copeland wasn’t recruited into the OSS, the precursor of the CIA, he did end up joining the Strategic Services Unit, which was a sort of transitional institution that eventually wound up coalescing into the CIA of the post-World War II environment.

And as part of that environment, Copeland was posted to Damascus in 1947, which would set the tone of his agency career as an Arabist.

One amusing note about the book to start. Beyond Cloak And Dagger, at least the used copy I have, was first published in August 1975. But he also published a number of other titles, as well: The Game Player (1989), Without Cloak Or Dagger (1974), and The Real Spy World (1975).

All of these titles—more or less—contain the same content, with slight updates or subtractions. It was probably much easier in the publishing era of the 1970s to hoodwink different publishers into running books with largely the same content. Google Books didn’t exist at the time.

As for Beyond Cloak And Dagger itself, it’s far less a memoir and more a concrete book on tradecraft and stories of his adventures in the Middle East. This genre is very much underpopulated. Most tradecraft work is either proprietary and accessible only behind closed doors (for good reason), though leaks sometimes make their way into outlets like The Daily Beast or The Intercept. The tradecraft work that does exist publicly is usually of a much more theoretical or abstract bent, and while everyone can imagine theoretical or abstract work that is interesting and insightful, the words ‘theoretical’ and ‘abstract’ have the reputation they have for a very good reason; they’re more often than not bloodless, vague, vacuous, other appropriate descriptors, etc.

Copeland at least makes an attempt to concretize. I can appreciate that, though I wouldn’t necessarily take the stories he tells at face value. In some ways, it has a similar vibe to John Perkins’ viral book of the aughts, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which was commercially successful enough that Perkins felt compelled to follow-up with at least two more books on the subject. Those books were comparatively lackluster, but probably performed decently well themselves.

But Copeland’s book is still worth reading because it’s different: it has entertaining stories, interesting tradecraft, hypotheses and alternative takes on several notable political events in the Middle East of the 20th century, and details of the mechanics of intelligence agencies.

[Erick van Til · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book. Interesting perspective, well researched and engaging enough to keep the pages turning. Recommended to anyone with an interest in the inner workings of the agency.

[Dwight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miles Copeland gives his inside view of the CIA when the agency was being scape goated by the Congress to cover up their responsibilty for the Viet Nam war. The book is much kinder to the agency then many other books on the subject. It is of interest to a selective audience.

[Ben B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dated now, I suppose, but I learned a great deal from this book.