CIC Tracked Anti-American Sentiment in Egypt and Palestine

By Miriam Adler · August 17, 2026

Civilians across the Middle East were scrutinized for their opinions of Americans and Soviet ties in files that mapped the region's political dissent.

People in Egypt and Palestine had their political loyalties weighed and their opinions mapped by a foreign power they did not invite. The cost was a legacy of suspicion and a blueprint for the surveillance of Arab dissent that would persist long after the war.

According to a scope-and-content description from the US National Archives catalog, the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) maintained a rigorous rhythm of regional and monthly reports focusing on the Middle East Theater. These were not merely military logs; the file's catalogue entry records a focused interest in "political activities" across Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. This was the groundwork of a surveillance apparatus designed to categorize the thoughts and affiliations of people living in a region that the public record describes as an extensive, contiguous theatre of war, where land, naval, and air campaigns were fought for control of the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

The Watchers in Cairo

In Egypt, the focus of the CIC was not on the movements of Axis troops, but on the minds of the local population. The archival description explicitly lists "anti-American activities in Egypt" and "Soviet influence in Egypt" as primary subjects of the reports. To the analysts in the CIC, a citizen's political leaning was a data point to be harvested, a risk to be mitigated.

When a government monitors "anti-American activities" in a foreign land, it is rarely looking for one specific crime. It is looking for a mood. It is looking for the moment a population decides that the presence of a foreign military is an occupation rather than a liberation. By tracking Soviet influence, the CIC was essentially mapping the boundaries of acceptable thought in Cairo and beyond. The records described in the catalog suggest a system where the political autonomy of Egyptians was viewed through the lens of American security interests, turning private convictions into intelligence targets.

Arab Opinion in Palestine

Palestine occupied a specific niche in these reports. The National Archives catalogue entry notes that the series covered "Arab opinion about Americans in Palestine." There is a cold, clinical quality to that phrasing. To reduce the complex, lived experience of a people under colonial pressure to a category of "opinion" is to strip them of their agency.

For the people of Palestine, the stake was not a theoretical policy debate. It was the reality of being watched by an entity that functioned as a shadow government. The reports sought to quantify how the local population viewed the United States, effectively treating the Palestinian public as a laboratory for sentiment analysis. This was not a dialogue; it was an observation. The CIC wanted to know what the people thought, but they did not want to ask them directly. They wanted the truth stripped of its context, delivered in a monthly summary to a commander's desk.

Syria and Lebanon

The scope of this surveillance expanded further east. The catalog records that the CIC reports included "intelligence summaries from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) about Syria and Lebanon." The OSS, the precursor to the CIA, brought its own methodology to the effort, contributing to the broader map of "local political and propaganda activities."

By incorporating OSS summaries, the CIC created a comprehensive net. The people of Syria and Lebanon were not just subjects of their own local conflicts; they were assets or threats in a global game of influence. The description of these files points to a seamless integration of intelligence gathering, where the boundaries between military necessity and political espionage were entirely blurred. The "propaganda activities" mentioned in the records were likely any expressions of nationalism or anti-colonialism that threatened the stability of the American position in the theater.

This pattern of monitoring is mirrored in other National Archives holdings, such as the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) Reports (NAID 75866642) and the Decimal Files (NAID 75866078), which suggest a systemic approach to informant-based intelligence. In related series, such as the Monthly Reports of Counter Intelligence Corps Area One, the records include "liaison, informant, and administrative updates," confirming that this intelligence was built on a foundation of paid eyes and ears within the community.

The catalog description leaves us with a glimpse of the machinery, but it hides the victims. We know the regions—Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon—and we know the categories of interest—Soviet influence, anti-Americanism, and Arab opinion. But the names of the individuals who were flagged as "anti-American," the informants who betrayed their neighbors for a CIC paycheck, and the specific political activists whose lives were disrupted by these monthly reports remain locked inside the files themselves. The catalogue entry identifies the folders, but the people within them remain redacted by time and silence.