Miles Copeland Jr.

Miles Axe Copeland, Jr. (July 16, 1916 – January 14, 1991) was an American musician, businessman, and CIA officer who was closely involved in major foreign-policy operations from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Background and family life
Copeland was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the son of a doctor. He did not graduate from college. He became a trumpet player with bandleaders such as Ray Noble and Glenn Miller, and was an arranger and trumpet player for the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

Copeland was married to archaeologist Lorraine Copeland (née Adie) and was the father of music manager Miles Copeland III, booking agent Ian Copeland, writer/film producer Lorraine (Lennie) Copeland and composer Stewart Copeland, best known as the drummer for The Police.

CIA founding
At the outbreak of World War II, Copeland joined the National Guard, and contacted Rep. John Sparkman of Alabama, who arranged a meeting with William "Wild Bill" Donovan. The two hit it off immediately, but Copeland nonetheless was not recruited to Donovan's Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and instead joined the Corps of Intelligence Police, which became the Counterintelligence Corps in January 1942. Copeland was stationed in London and reportedly gained the top-secret "Bigot" clearance and took part in discussions about Operation Overlord.

After the conversion of the OSS into the Strategic Services Unit on 1 October 1945, Copeland joined what would become part of the Central Intelligence Agency. Serving in London, he became a lifelong Anglophile and married Lorraine Adie, a Scot he had met during the war when she was serving in the Special Operations Executive.

CIA career
Among Copeland's first postings was Damascus, Syria (September 1947) beginning a long career in the Middle East. Together with Stephen Meade he played a role in supporting the March 1949 Syrian coup d'état. 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 Mossadegh.

In the American Central Intelligence Agency, the project to overthrow King Farouk - known internally as "Project FF (Fat Fucker)" - was initiated by CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. and CIA Station Chief in Cairo Miles Copeland, Jr. (who in his book the Game of Nations boasted that he later had an office next to Gamal Abdel Nasser in the Presidential Palace in Cairo).

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, advising Nasser on the development of the Mukhabarat and becoming Nasser's closest Western advisor. 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. The “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. Copeland, allied with John and Allen Dulles, worked to reverse this trend at the time, which included "Copeland's involvement in schemes to assassinate Nasser..."

In 1958, Syria merged with Egypt in the United Arab Republic and King Faisal II was deposed by Iraqi nationalists. Copeland oversaw contacts with the Iraqi regime and with internal opponents, including Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party.

Copeland opposed major paramilitary CIA operations such as the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in 1961, on the grounds that they were impossible to keep secret due to size.

From 1957 to 1968 Copeland was stationed with his family in Beirut, where his children grew up attending the American Community School.

Retirement
After retirement from the CIA, Copeland wrote foreign policy books and an autobiography, and articles for publications including the National Review. He was active in 1970s political efforts to defend the CIA against critics including the Church Committee. In 1988, Copeland wrote an article titled "Spooks for Bush" which asserted that the intelligence community overwhelmingly supported George H. W. Bush for US President; Bush had run the CIA during the 1970s under Gerald Ford. In the introduction to his book 'Enemy Within', Guardian journalist Seumas Milne wrote that in the Spring of 1990, Copeland warned British miners union leaders Arthur Scargill and Peter Heathfield that the CIA and MI5 had been involved in kickstarting a media campaign against them and helped to frame corrupt allegations against them.

Copeland also wrote later of his suspicions that a drug from the CIA's MK-ULTRA program similar to LSD may have been slipped to Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie, causing his well-publicized emotional response to verbal attacks on his wife, through either E. Howard Hunt or G. Gordon Liddy. Copeland would continue to make bold assertions about CIA operations, both in interviews and his own books.

Also in retirement he created the board game "Game of Nations."

Books

 * The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970
 * Without Cloak or Dagger: The Truth About the New Espionage, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974
 * Beyond cloak and dagger: inside the CIA, New York: Pinnacle Books, 1975
 * Real Spy World, London: SPHERE, 1978
 * The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA's Original Political Operative, London: Aurum Press, 1989