Kermit Roosevelt Jr.
Kermit Roosevelt Jr. | |
---|---|
Born | Buenos Aires, Argentina | February 16, 1916
Died | June 8, 2000 Cockeysville, Maryland, U.S. | (aged 84)
Alma mater | Harvard University |
Spouse |
Mary Lowe Gaddis (m. 1937) |
Children | 4; including Mark |
Parent | Kermit Roosevelt (father) |
Espionage activity | |
Allegiance | United States |
Service branch | Office of Strategic Services Central Intelligence Agency |
Operations | TPAJAX |
Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt Jr. (February 16, 1916 – June 8, 2000) was an American intelligence officer who served in the
Early life
Kermit Roosevelt Jr. (called "Kim," as was standard for alternating generations of Kermits in the Roosevelt family)[citation needed] was born to Kermit Roosevelt Sr., son of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, and Belle Wyatt Roosevelt (née Willard) in Buenos Aires in 1916. At the time, Kermit Roosevelt Sr. was an official for a shipping line and then a manager of the Buenos Aires branch of the National City Bank.[2] The Roosevelt family returned to the US, and Kim, his two brothers, Joseph Willard and Dirck, and his sister, Belle Wyatt, grew up in Oyster Bay, New York, a homestead near Sagamore Hill, the Long Island home of the Roosevelt clan.
Kim attended
Intelligence career
This section needs expansion with: clearly sourced, timelined material on his pre-intelligence activities, from his graduation from Harvard. You can help by adding to it. (June 2015) |
OSS
With the outbreak of World War II, Roosevelt joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA. On June 4, 1943, when Kim was 27, his father, Kermit Sr., committed suicide at Fort Richardson in Alaska where he was posted.[4]: 232 Roosevelt Jr. remained with the OSS after the war and wrote and edited its history.[2]
Postwar period
Roosevelt went on to serve on the advisory board of a largely-Arab organization, the Institute of Arab American Affairs,[5] a New York City-based organization, and Roosevelt wrote an essay in 1948 about his views on American Zionism and the partition of Palestine.[6] In February 1948 Roosevelt joined more than 100 like-minded individuals to form a "Christian group" to aid the fight of the largely rabbinical American Council for Judaism to reverse the ongoing partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land (CJP) was founded on March 2, 1948, with Dean emeritus Gildersleeve serving as CJP chair, former Union Theological Seminary president Henry Sloane Coffin as vice-chair, and Roosevelt as executive director.[7]
In 1951, Roosevelt,
Cold War and CIA
Roosevelt was recruited to the
The historian Hugh Wilford attempts to describe Roosevelt's motivations and views underpinning his intelligence efforts and states:
[Roosevelt Jr.] had this notion of America forming an alliance with the Arab countries as they emerged from under the sway of Britain and France. He was very concerned with backing Arab nationalists in the region. He saw that as the best way of keeping it within the American orbit, as the Cold War was gathering momentum....[8]
The views of the CIA Arabists were not in isolation since Wilford notes that the "
Roosevelt played a highly-critical role in
Roosevelt, 26 years after the Mossadeq coup, wrote a book about how he and the CIA had carried out the operation, Countercoup. According to him, he had slipped across the border under his CIA cover as "James Lochridge" on July 19, 1953.[15]
Roosevelt submitted his Countercoup manuscript to the CIA for pre-publication approval. The agency proposed various alterations, and in the perspective of a CIA reviewer, "Roosevelt has reflected quite faithfully the changes that we suggested to him. This has become, therefore, essentially a work of fiction." The conclusion allowed the release of the book; a catalog of the actual changes made during the review is available.[16]
A former senior adviser to the
After Iran, Roosevelt became assistant deputy director of the Directorate of Plans.[21]
Dulles asked Roosevelt to lead the CIA-sponsored 1954 coup in Guatemala, which deposed the government of Jacobo Árbenz. Roosevelt refused: "AJAX had succeeded, he believed, chiefly because the CIA's aims were shared by large numbers of Iranians, and it was obvious that the same condition did not obtain among Guatemalans." Noting that Árbenz's resignation had been forced largely by rumors "that a full-scale U.S. invasion was imminent," Roosevelt later remarked, "We had our will in Guatemala, [but] it wasn't really accomplished by clandestine means."[22]
Roosevelt left the CIA in 1958[23] to work for American oil and defense firms. He often visited former operatives and the Shah in Iran.[citation needed]
Personal life
Roosevelt married Mary Lowe "Polly" Gaddis in 1937, and they had four children: Kermit III (father of Kermit IV, who also goes by Kermit III), Jonathan, Mark, and Anne.[2]
Death
Roosevelt died in 2000 at a retirement community in Cockeysville, Maryland. He was survived by his wife, children, a brother, and seven grandchildren.[24]
Awards
Roosevelt was the recipient of the National Security Medal which was awarded by Dwight D. Eisenhower to him in a secret ceremony on March 26, 1956 for his services in Egypt and Iran.[25]
Selected bibliography
Articles
- "Propaganda Techniques of the English Civil Wars – and the Propaganda Psychosis of Today." doi:10.2307/3634062.
Pamphlets
- "Partition of Palestine: A Lesson in Pressure Politics." (Pamphlet No. 7). New York (160 Broadway): Institute of Arab American Affairs (Feb. 1948).
Books
- Arabs, Oil, and History: The Story of the Middle East. London (1948). ISBN 0804605327.
- Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran. New York: ISBN 0070535906.
See also
- Theodore Roosevelt (grandfather)
- Kermit Roosevelt (father)
- Kermit Roosevelt III (grandson)
References
- ^ Allen-Ebrahimian, Bethany (June 20, 2017). "64 Years Later, CIA Finally Releases Details of Iranian Coup". Foreign Policy.
- ^ a b c d e Molotsky, Irvin (June 11, 2000). "Kermit Roosevelt, Leader of C.I.A. Coup in Iran, Dies at 84". The New York Times. Retrieved June 17, 2015.
- ^ Kelly, Mark Ribbing and Jacques (June 10, 2000). "Kermit Roosevelt, 84, TR's grandson". baltimoresun.com. Retrieved August 14, 2021.
- accessed June 16, 2015.
- ISBN 0292757484, see [2], accessed June 18, 2015.
- ^ Kermit Roosevelt [Jr.], 1948, The Partition of Palestine, The Middle East Journal, 2 (January 1948), pp. 1–16. Reprinted with same author, 1948, Partition of Palestine: A Lesson in Pressure Politics, New York: Institute of Arab American Affairs, Pamphlet No. 7, February 1948, 14 pp. plus front and back material, see [3], accessed June 18, 2015.
- ^ Thomas A. Kolsky, 1992, Jews Against Zionism:The American Council for Judaism, 1942–1948, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, pp. 181–182, see [4], accessed June 18, 2015.
- ^ a b c d e f Kira Zalan, 2014, "How the CIA Shaped the Modern Middle East [Hugh Wilford interview]," U.S. News & World Report (online), January 16, 2014, see [5], accessed June 17, 2015. [Subtitle: "History Professor Hugh Wilford chronicles the agency's involvement in the region."]
- ^ , accessed June 17, 2015.
- ^ ISBN 0773521887, see [7], accessed June 17, 2015.
- ^ OCLC 64591926.
- Daniel Kovalik's The Plot to Attack Iran. Skyhorse. New York. 2018.
- ^ Kinkead, Gwen (Dec 16, 2010). "Kermit Roosevelt." Harvard Magazine.
- ^ "CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup". nsarchive.gwu.edu.
- ISBN 978-0070535909.
- ^ Malcolm Byrne, Ed. (2014). Iran 1953: The Strange Odyssey of Kermit Roosevelt's Countercoup. [National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 468, edited with introductory comment by M. Byrne.] The National Security Archive (May 12, 2014), see [8], accessed June 17, 2015. They are declassified CIA documents relating to the agency's proposed edits to Roosevelt's Countercoup: The Struggle for Control of Iran (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979).
- ^ Mark Ländler, 2009, "U.S. Is Seeking a Range of Sanctions Against Iran," The New York Times (online), September 27, 2009, see [9], accessed June 17, 2015.
- ^ Ray Takeyh, 2014, "Comment: What Really Happened in Iran: The CIA, the Ouster of Mosaddeq, and the Restoration of the Shah," Foreign Affairs, July/August 2014 (June 16, 2014), see [10], accessed June 18, 2015.
- ISBN 1-84277-369-0, see [11], accessed June 17, 2015.
- ^ Milani, Abbas (December 8, 2009). "The Great Satan Myth". The New Republic. Retrieved August 11, 2014.
- OCLC 64591926.
- ISBN 978-0465019656.
- ^ "Kermit Roosevelt Obituary". The Telegraph. June 21, 2000.
- The Baltimore Sun, June 10, 2000, Local, p. 4B, see [12], Retrieved June 17, 2015.
- ISBN 9780815737353.