# Kermit Roosevelt Jr. Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt Jr. (1916–2000) was the [[CIA]] officer who directed Operation Ajax — the [[1953 Iranian Coup]] that overthrew Iran's elected prime minister [[Mohammad Mosaddegh]] and restored [[Mohammad Reza Pahlavi]] to absolute power. A grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, he embodied the patrician, Ivy-educated culture of the early American intelligence establishment. ## Background Roosevelt came to the CIA from its wartime predecessor, the OSS, and rose to head the agency's Near East and Africa division. He belonged to the gentleman-spy cohort that staffed the early CIA — well-connected, self-assured, and convinced of America's right and ability to reshape other countries' politics in the Cold War contest with the Soviet Union. ## Operation Ajax In the summer of 1953 Roosevelt ran the coup on the ground in Tehran. Working with British intelligence and a network of Iranian assets, he orchestrated the bribery of officials, military officers, and journalists; the planting of propaganda; and the organization of paid street mobs — some posing as communists to discredit Mosaddegh, others as royalists. When the first attempt failed and the Shah fled, Roosevelt pressed on rather than abort, and the second push on August 19 succeeded. He left Iran a clandestine hero within the agency, having demonstrated that a small team with money and nerve could topple a government. ## Legacy and Countercoup Roosevelt later wrote a self-aggrandizing memoir, *Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran* (1979), which overstated his personal role and was so embarrassing that BP's predecessor reportedly pressured to alter its account of British involvement. He left the CIA in 1958, in part reluctant to run a similar operation against Egypt's Nasser. ## Why It Matters For the vault, Roosevelt personifies the founding moment of American covert regime change. Operation Ajax became the institutional template — a proof of concept that the CIA replicated in Guatemala in 1954 and beyond — and the embodiment of [[Covert Action Doctrine]]: secret presidential warfare conducted beyond public knowledge or accountability. The "success" he engineered is also the textbook case of blowback, planting the grievance that detonated in the [[Iranian Revolution]] a generation later. *See also: [[Iranian History Hub]], [[1953 Iranian Coup]], [[Mohammad Mosaddegh]], [[CIA]]*