Spies and Holy Wars: The Middle East in 20th-Century Crime Fiction

5. Secular Jihad: International Terrorism and Economic Destabilization

f i v e By the 1980s, almost 600 thrillers and spy novels using the Middle East as a backdrop for action, characterization, or plot material had appeared in the United States either as British imports or as American originals. Suddenly, it seemed that supermarkets, drugstores, bus stations, and airports were inundated with spy novels whose covers depicted petro-sheikhs and terrorists held at bay by macho “avengers,” “destroyers,” “killmasters,” “executioners ,” “peacemakers,” and assorted James Bond clones. That the books were included on best seller lists and formed the subject of academic discourse indicates the importance of the genre, perhaps not for literary critics, but certainly for publishers, who were aware of market share as they invested in authors who could produce spy novels and thrillers to satiate the appetite of an ever-growing readership. The popularity of spy novels and thrillers, coinciding with the paperback publishing explosion , generated demand for product, and authors complied, broadening the range of subjects from World War II to the Cold War and beyond. More and more titles were published and the numbers of American authors began to exceed the British. Before the late 1960s, American authors writing in the context of American foreign policy used the Middle East as the scenic backdrop for adventures about retrieving microfilm or combating Communist-backed military coups. F. Van Wyck Mason, who began writing in the 1920s, had his G-2 agent Colonel Hugh North securing microfilm in Tangiers, rescuing Secular Jihad Int e r nat ional Terro rism an d E conomic D e s t abilizatio n S e c u l a r J i h a d 69 Americans held hostage in Turkey and solving murders in Cairo.1 Unlike the British, who had been in the region for a century, however, Americans had little familiarity with the Middle East and its cultures. They read vicariously from the British spy novels that had been published simultaneously in America; but, for a good part of the twentieth century, the Middle East seemed to them more or less terra exotica. During the early years of the Cold War, deserts and casbahs were fascinating settings for adventure stories, replete with fantastic local color. They provided splendid opportunities for using picturesque adjectives, but unlike the Soviet Union, the Middle East did not yet present a physical threat to the United States. Fictionalized American heroes appeared in plots where they were sent to the Middle East and North Africa to meet defecting Soviet scientists.2 Of the heroes in 148 spy novels published between 1916 and 1959, fewer than a dozen, including three adventures featuring F. Van Wyck Mason’s Colonel North, are American. Most authors had their agents defer to the British on more complicated issues. When American operatives did venture eastward, Middle Eastern characters waxed nostalgically for British experience in the region: “But the world is complicated these days,” the prescient imam said in a novel published in 1960. “When the English were here, at least they kept order. Today, a stone cast in Jidrat can smash the skyscrapers of New York City.”3 The Holy Land had always been a part of American consciousness, but only in mid-century did American policymakers and writers really discover the Middle East. Missionaries, travelers, and journalists wrote about the area, and Americans ventured into the region during the Barbary Wars in the early nineteenth century and through trade. American merchants supplied the Ottoman Empire with kerosene, prompting a diplomat to remark in 1879 that “even the sacred lamps over the Prophet’s tomb at Mecca are fed with oil from Pennsylvania.”4 In the early twentieth century, as a result of America’s entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson raised political consciousness about self-determination throughout the region. But for the most part, United States diplomatic involvement in the Middle East— both overt and covert—was of little consequence until the post World War II period. As late as 1939, with their stake in the region’s petroleum production increasing, US oil executives had more influence in Middle East capitals , especially Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, than did American diplomats.5 Like the British during World War I, during World War II the United States began to institutionalize its own intelligence services. In 1942, with Americans involved in the war, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt S p i e s a n d H o l y...