Kermit Roosevelt, Jr.

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For other persons with the same name, see Kermit Roosevelt (disambiguation).

Kermit Roosevelt

Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt, Jr. (February 16, 1916 – June 8, 2000), was the grandson of American president Theodore Roosevelt, and the mastermind of CIA Operation Ajax that orchestrated the coup against Mohammed Mossadegh and returned Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, from self-imposed exile to Iran's Peacock Throne in August 1953.

1 Early life and father's death
2 Head of Operation Ajax
3 Roosevelt tells his story
4 Books
5 External links
- 5.1 Listening

[edit] Early life and father's death

Kim was born in Buenos Aires in 1916, the eldest son of Kermit Roosevelt and Belle Wyatt Roosevelt. At that time, his father was assistant manager for Buenos Aires' National City. He had two brothers, Joseph Willard Roosevelt and Dirck Roosevelt, and a sister also named Belle. Kim graduated from Harvard University.

When Kermit, Jr. was only twenty-seven, his father -- a talented writer, decorated World War I soldier, businessman, explorer, and companion of his own father, Theodore Roosevelt, on two of his most famous expeditions to Africa and the Amazon -- died in Alaska. He had been stationed there by the U.S. Army in part to give him a useful assignment in the face of chronic alcoholism; Kermit, Sr. had battled chronic depression since his father's death in 1919, saying at that point that he had nothing to live for. In fact his cousin, then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had intervened to get him re-admitted to the U.S. Army after an earlier medical discharge. Despite such efforts on his behalf, he continued to struggle with depression and alcoholism. Kermit Roosevelt committed suicide in 1943. The suicide was a closely guarded family secret for many years.

[edit] Head of Operation Ajax

By the early 1950s, Kermit, Jr. was a successful senior officer in the CIA's Middle Eastern division. At that time, there was a political crisis centered in Iran that commanded the focused attention of British and American intelligence outfits. In 1951, the Iranian parliament, under the leadership of the nationalist movement of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, voted unanimously to nationalize the oil industry. This shut out the immensely profitable Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which was a pillar of Britain's economy and political clout. A month after that vote, Mossadegh was named prime minister of Iran. In response to nationalization, Britain placed a massive embargo on Iranian oil exports, which only worsened the already fragile economy. Neither the AIOC nor Mossadegh was open to compromise in this period, with Britain insisting on a restoration of the AIOC and Mossadegh only willing to negotiate on the terms of its compensation for lost assets. The U.S. president at the time, Harry S. Truman, was categorically unwilling to join Britain in planning a coup against Mossadegh, and Britain felt unable to act without American cooperation, particularly since Mossadegh had shut down their embassy in 1952. Truman's successor, Dwight Eisenhower, was finally persuaded by arguments that were anti-Communist rather than primarily economic, and focused on the potential for Iran's Communist Tudeh Party to capitalize on political instability and assume power, aligning Iran and its immense oil resources with the Soviet bloc. Coup plans which had stalled under Truman were immediately revived by an eager intelligence corps, with powerful aid from the brothers John Foster Dulles (Secretary of State) and Allen Welsh Dulles (CIA director), after Eisenhower's inauguration in 1953.

On June 19, 1953, Roosevelt slipped across the border under his CIA cover as "James Lockridge." He was put up in the capitol, Teheran, in a place rented by British intelligence. As Mr. Lockridge, he became a regular at the Turkish Embassy where he played tennis. No one suspected that "Mr. Lockridge" was the grandson of the 26th US President but he came close to blowing his cover. When playing tennis and making some frustating mistake he would cry out, "Oh Roosevelt!" Puzzled by this, his friends asked him about this interesting way of expressing his annoyance with his game. He explained that as loyal member of the Republican party back in the States, that every Republican had nothing but scorn and hatred for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and that he despised the man so much that he took to using FDR's name as a curse.

It is well-documented that under Roosevelt's direction, the CIA and British intelligence funded and led a coup d'etat to overthrow the prime minister with the help of military forces loyal to the Shah through Operation Ajax. [1] The plot hinged on orders signed by the Shah to dismiss Mossadegh as prime minister and replace him with General Fazlollah Zahedi, a choice agreed on by the British and Americans. Despite the high-level coordination and planning, the coup initially failed and the Shah fled Iran. After a brief exile in Italy, however, the Shah was brought back again, this time through a second coup which was successful. The deposed Mossadegh was arrested, given a show trial, and placed in solitary confinement for three years in military prison, followed by house arrest for life. Zahedi was installed to succeed prime minister Mossadegh.

After that coup, the Shah is alleged to have said to Kim, "I owe my throne to God, my people, my army - and to you." The CIA-backed coup remains extremely controversial. It had overthrown Iran's immensely popular, independent-minded Prime Minister and the democratically elected government. On the other hand, the coup's defenders often argue that Communism in Iran was permanently destroyed and the country was stable and friendly to the West for several decades.

In the long term, the Shah's rule became despotic and would prove to fire the movement of Iranian religious exiles that led to the Shah's overthrow by the Shi'a Muslim cleric, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 in the Iranian Revolution. After the deposed Shah was granted admission to the U.S., Iranian militants held 66 American diplomats hostage in what would become known as the Iran Hostage Crisis.

[edit] Roosevelt tells his story

Twenty-six years later, Kim Roosevelt took the unusual step of writing a book about how he and the CIA carried out the operation. He called his book Countercoup to press home the idea that the CIA coup was staged only to prevent a takeover of power by the Iranian Communist Party (Tudeh) closely backed by the Soviet Union. He also may have meant to imply that the exile of the Shah constituted the initial coup, and that he was merely restoring the rightful leader to power.

Roosevelt was certainly arguing that Mossadegh had to be removed to prevent a communist takeover of Iran because of his seizure of the oil industry and his other Socialist reforms as well as his cooperation with the Tudeh Party. This view was shared by many in the Intelligence community, although most notably the head of the CIA station in Iran resigned rather than participate in the coup. Many outside the intelligence community, including some in the Truman administration, had felt that Mossadegh should be kept in power to prevent a Communist takeover.

There is some speculation that Kim Roosevelt may have been part of a British plot to maintain an anglophile alliance with the United States. He remained convinced that the coup had been just and noble until his death in 2000.

[edit] Books

Arabs, Oil, and History: The Story of the Middle East (1949, reprint(?) Kennikat Press, 1969) ISBN 0-8046-0532-7.
Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran (McGraw-Hill, 1979) ISBN 0-07-053590-6.
Kinzer, Stephen (2004). All The Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-26517-9.
Kapuściński, Ryszard (1982). Shah of Shahs. Vinage. ISBN 0-679-73801-0