(2020-09-16) Coups Lies Dirty Tricks The Polices Stewart Copeland On His Cia Agent Father

Coups, lies, dirty tricks: The Police's Stewart Copeland on his CIA agent father. In 1986, a 69-year-old Miles Axe Copeland Jr gave a memorable interview to Rolling Stone magazine. His three sons were all music industry powerhouses – Stewart played drums in the Police, Miles III was their manager and Ian their booking agent – and Miles himself had been a jazz trumpet-player in his youth. But the interview wasn’t about music. The subject was his days as the CIA’s man in the Middle East between 1947 and 1957, during which time he dined with President Nasser of Egypt, partied with the Soviet spy Kim Philby and, as a pioneer of “dirty tricks”, played a part in removing the leaders of Syria and Iran. Inconveniently for his youngest son, he concluded the interview by implying that the Police were a psy-ops outfit who played shows to “70,000 young minds open to whatever the Police decide to put into them”.

He tried to turn his father’s CIA years into a movie, but investors wanted to emphasise the Police connection and he didn’t, so it has mutated into a very entertaining nine-part podcast for Audible.

After leaving the agency in 1957, Miles became a well-paid consultant and conservative journalist. Not until 1969, when he published his bestseller The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics, did Miles’s offspring finally discover what he’d been up to. His children had been as oblivious to his clandestine activities as he had to Kim Philby’s.

Only later does Stewart confront the geopolitical implications and talk to Middle Eastern historians who blame his father for what later unfolded in Iran: no coup against prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, no tyrannical Shah, no Islamic revolution in 1979. Stewart hotly disagrees. “Guys, 70 years have gone by! The current regime of Iran was not chosen by the CIA. It’s what happened when the Iranians chose their system of governance. For right or wrong, it’s theirs.”

“My father’s view was that democracy was like two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner,” says Stewart, “and indeed in the Arab world it’s very much like that. My father wasn’t in the business of exporting democracy. He was in the business of getting the oil to the west by hook or by crook.”

My Dad the Spy, an Audible Original Podcast, is available to download.