On 30 March 1949, Syrian Army Colonel Husni al-Za'im seized power from President Shukri al-Quwatli in a bloodless coup d'état. There are "highly controversial" allegations that the American legation in Syria—headed by James Hugh Keeley Jr.—and the CIA engineered the coup. Assistant military attaché (and undercover CIA officer) Stephen J. Meade, who became intimately acquainted with Colonel Za'im several weeks prior to the coup and was considered his "principal Western confidant" during Za'im's brief time in power, has been described as the coup's architect—along with the CIA's Damascus station chief, Miles Copeland Jr. Copeland later authored several books with "extraordinarily detailed accounts of CIA operations in, among other countries, Syria, Egypt, and Iran," considered "one of the most revelatory set of writings by a former U.S. intelligence officer ever published." However, Copeland's memoirs have a strong literary quality and contain many embellishments, making it difficult to gauge the historical accuracy of the events he describes. Moreover, Copeland's account of the Syrian coup in his 1989 autobiography "The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA's Original Political Operative" contradicts the earlier version presented in his 1969 "The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics".