Propaganda Broadcasts and Cold War Politics the Carter Administration’S Outreach to Islam

Propaganda Broadcasts and Cold War Politics The Carter Administration’s Outreach to Islam ✣ Javier Gil Guerrero Introduction The main international events that shaped and determined Jimmy Carter’s presidency—the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David accords, the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—took place in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Carter’s achievements and failures in the region underscored the Middle East’s centrality for U.S. interests. Above all, those landmark events signaled the necessity of a new approach to the area and to Muslims more generally. Especially in the cases of Iran and Afghanistan, the rise of militant Islam was interpreted as a phenomenon that needed to be urgently addressed because of its potential to shape the future of the region. The sudden emergence of anti-American sentiment among Muslims added a sense of urgency to the issue. Prompted by revolutionary Iran’s hostility toward the United States, the U.S. effort to influence foreign Muslims took the shape of a public diplomacy campaign that would dispel misunderstandings and fallacies about the United States and its stance in the region. The U.S. government had to underscore its goodwill toward Islam and convey the message that it welcomed the role of religion in the Middle East. The hostage crisis and the growing popularity of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini among Muslims elevated the issue’s importance among U.S. officials on the National Security Council (NSC) staff and at the State Department. A public diplomacy and propaganda effort specifically directed at Muslims was not a novel idea. During the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s, the United States first launched an aggressive outreach campaign to nationalists and left-wing movements threatening Middle East monarchs backed by Washington. Some officials from the Carter administration, especially National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, were anxious to revitalize the effort and adapt it to new circumstances. The basic assumption was that U.S. “soft power” could not be neglected for its ability to win the Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 2017, pp. 4–37, doi:10.1162/JCWS_a_00716 C 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 4 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00716 by guest on 30 September 2021 Propaganda Broadcasts and Cold War Politics “hearts and minds” of Muslims. Staged events and public remarks to showcase U.S. sympathy toward Islam thus became commonplace in the White House. The proposed initiatives aimed at mending relations with Muslims included carefully planned gestures on the part of Carter (such as visits to mosques and greeting Muslims on key dates during the year), the holding of meetings with professors and experts on Islam and the Middle East, receptions for delegations of Muslim leaders, a surge of radio broadcasts directed at Mus- lim audiences, improvement of cultural exchanges, the holding of events that brought together U.S. and foreign Muslim scholars, and the shaping of a more tailored public discourse regarding Islam. The main problem was that anti- American rhetoric was fueled by prominent Muslim religious leaders whose piety and devotion could not be challenged. Washington needed to counter their discourse without diminishing its appreciation for the Islamic faith. The effort involved disassociating the U.S. crisis with Ayatollah Khomeini and other prominent Muslims from Islam itself. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan to save a Communist government in Kabul from a religious-oriented rebellion added a new facet to the propaganda campaign that almost distorted it. Brzezinski was one of the first to argue that the Soviet threat represented an opportunity to channel the forces of militant Islam. By siding with the Afghan resistance and airing the machi- nations of the “atheist” Soviet Union, the United States would no longer need to tame the anger of resurgent Islam. By redirecting the Muslim focus toward Moscow instead of Washington, Brzezinski hoped to improve U.S. credentials in the Middle East while inflicting a severe blow to Soviet interests in the region. Furthermore, Brzezinski aimed at turning Islam, as a mobilizing force and a source of inoculation, against Communism in the region. But the Carter administration was not content merely to weaken the Soviet position in the Middle East. The Soviet invasion not only heralded the resurrection of containment and the abandonment of detente,´ but also breathed life into Brzezinski’s strategy of “competitive engagement,” which meant challenging the USSR within its own sphere of influence.1 Brzezinski’s ambitious plans called for expanded radio broadcasts to include Soviet Muslims in Central Asia and the Caucasus. These broadcasts were meant to address the predicaments of Muslim communities within the Soviet Union and the notion that Islam was “under foreign domination” if Muslims in the Soviet Union did not free themselves from Moscow’s rule. The State Department also sponsored scholars, such as Professor Edward Allworth from Columbia 1. See Barbara Zanchetta, The Transformation of American International Power in the 1970s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 271–293. 5 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00716 by guest on 30 September 2021 Gil Guerrero University, to give an impartial academic assessment that concurred with the goals of the public diplomacy campaign. Professor Allworth and others insisted that the Soviet Union feared the notion of the Islamic community or “ummah” and that Moscow wanted to eradicate the concept. U.S. officials accused the Soviet regime of deliberately accentuating ethnic differences among Muslims in Central Asia to divide them and keep them under control, thus avoiding the emergence of a “supranational Islamic community.”2 The new approach to Islam and the use of “friendly” scholars was largely the result of Paul B. Henze’s efforts. An NSC staffer whose portfolio included the Soviet nationalities question, Henze helped bring the fringe views of scholars such as Alexandre Bennigsen to Washington. Bennigsen and Henze believed that “disaffection among Soviet Muslims could be instrumentalized as a Cold War weapon,” and thanks to Brzezinski the idea began to be taken seriously in at least some policy circles.3 Thus, the germ of the strategy of using Islam came not from the intelligence community or the foreign service but from Brzezinski’s NSC and its interactions with some scholars focused on Muslim resistance to Soviet rule. This article explains how the propaganda strategy unfolded from its ori- gins as a damage-control effort meant to amend relations between Muslims and the United States, to its evolution into an attempt to rally Muslims—both outside and within the Soviet Union—against Moscow. Because the corner- stone of Brzezinski’s plan was the use of radio broadcasts, I devote the last part of the article to analyzing the difficulty in expanding radio broadcasts and the bureaucratic obstacles that ultimately hampered Brzezinski’s vision for an expansion and increase in multilingual radio broadcasts directed at Muslims. Many scholars have discussed the role the Middle East played in the Cold War, and specialized studies have dealt with the role Muslims and Islam played in it. Books by Edward Said, Douglas Little, Melani McAlister, and Mah- mood Mandani have explored how the United States viewed and interacted with Muslims during those years, devoting considerable attention to the role 2. CIA Iran Task Force memorandum, “Islam and Shiism in Iran and Central Asia, Comments of Academic Specialists in a Conference Sponsored by the Congressional Research Service, 8 February 1980,” Confidential, 12 February 1980, in CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), CIA- RDP81B00401R000400130004–3, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). As of 2017, all CREST documents were integrated into the CIA’s Electronic Reading Room and are finally also available online. 3. Artemy M. Kalinovsky, “Encouraging Resistance: Paul Henze, the Bennigsen School, and the Crisis of Detente,”´ in Michael Kemper and Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Reassessing Orientalism: Interlocking Orientologies during the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 211. 6 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00716 by guest on 30 September 2021 Propaganda Broadcasts and Cold War Politics the media played.4 At the core of their research is a story of how the United States manipulated—depending on the circumstances and the occasion—the phenomenon of Islam. Journalist Robert Dreyfuss has shed light on how the different administrations in Washington helped unleash radical Islam to ad- vance U.S. interests in the region.5 But little scholarly attention has been paid to Carter’s outreach to Muslims during his presidency and Brzezinski’s use of Islam for Cold War politics (with the notable exception of some works by Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Odd Arne Westad, and Andrew J. Rotter).6 The available research has tended to focus on Carter’s approach to Iran or Afghanistan without a global analysis of the impact of his policies and intentions on Mus- lims in general. For this article, I have made use of newly declassified documents from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta. I have gone systemati- cally through the memoranda, handwritten letters, reports, and other primary sources located in the archive. Many of the documents I found at the Carter Library have never been used before. I have also consulted documents from the National Security Archive in Washington, DC, as well as the documents taken after the U.S. embassy seizure in Tehran. To a lesser degree, I have relied on the documentary collection of Jimmy Carter’s public papers. I have also benefited from the thoughtful advice of James Critchlow, who was a witness to the events described in this article an also an outstanding expert on the Soviet Union.

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