Over the previous five years, the CIA deputy director had watched as the Middle East region, once a geopolitical backwater, had mushroomed in importance. Part of that was oil, of course, but with the steady diminishing of the French and British imperial powers that had long held sway there, a power vacuum was developing—and all vacuums are eventually filled by something. Across the region, Western-accommodationist monarchies were under threat from a younger generation of Arab nationalists and it behooved the United States, Wisner believed, to make connections and win these emerging leaders to
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