Kermit Roosevelt is the CIA officer John Kiriakou names when he is asked for the agency’s worst act rather than its worst mistake: the man credited with overthrowing Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953. Kiriakou has told the story many times, and over the years his version of it has changed in a way the story itself is about — because the documents turned out not to match the confession.
The conventional account
The sequence, as Kiriakou lays it out, begins in London rather than Washington. The British came to the Americans in the early 1950s, after Mosaddegh was elected prime minister of Iran, because they wanted to keep their oil — and they were, in his words, “essentially stealing from the Iranian people.”[1] They talked Kermit Roosevelt, whom Kiriakou describes as a son of Theodore Roosevelt and a senior CIA officer, into overthrowing Mosaddegh. “And we did,” he says — “and our relations with the Iranians have never recovered.”[2]
He places the operation inside a broader indictment of the Directorate of Operations. Asked whether the intelligence agencies had been asleep at the switch and acting as promoters of American imperialism, Kiriakou said the questioner was exactly right, and offered his own career as support: the agency that is supposed to be the best and the brightest has missed literally every major international development since its creation in 1947.[3] His list runs from the building of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the Berlin Wall and everything in between, and takes in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Shah’s regime in Iran.[4]
Iran is where the two categories meet. The Directorate of Operations did not merely fail to see the Shah fall; it had installed him. It completely destroyed democracy in Iran, Kiriakou says, by overthrowing Mosaddegh on behalf of British Petroleum.[4] Mosaddegh was replaced with the Shah, who was himself overthrown in 1979.[5]
The phone book
That the officer in charge came to regret it is a matter of record for an unusual reason, and Kiriakou tells the story of how it got on the record as a story about journalism.
Bob Scheer — a great friend of his, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who spent decades at the Los Angeles Times, and the man who during the 1976 campaign got Jimmy Carter to say that he had lusted in his heart — was fascinated as a young reporter by the overthrow of Mosaddegh.[6][7] Everybody knew Kermit Roosevelt had done it, and nobody had ever interviewed him. Scheer told his wife he would love to; she told him to call. It had never occurred to him simply to find a number.[8]
Newsrooms in the big cities then kept telephone books from around the country. Scheer took down the Washington directory, and Kermit Roosevelt was listed in it — living, at eighty-odd, in an old people’s home up by the zoo in Northwest Washington.[9][10] He telephoned, said who he was, and asked for the whole story of the overthrow of the Iranian government. Roosevelt had never given an interview; he was at the very end of his life, and he decided to give one for posterity.[9]
It was Scheer’s first big scoop, and it produced the sentence the operation is remembered by. Roosevelt said he had had a long life and a long CIA career, and that the coup was the only decision he ever regretted — the worst mistake he had ever made in his life.[10][11]
What the documents say
Kiriakou’s account of the coup has since been overtaken by his own reading in the National Archives, where, he notes, papers on what look like conspiracies sit unexamined because nobody looks at real paper any more.[5] Asked for the best thing he had found there, he named the 1953 Iran coup — and the finding is that the Americans “were actually a little bit late to the game.”[12]
The documents, in his telling, show the coup as an MI6 operation. The British were not confident they could bring it off alone, and what they needed from Washington was money: money to finance anti-government riots, and money to arm the people who wanted Mosaddegh gone. The plan’s author was an MI6 officer who never gave a single interview in his life and died in the 1970s or 1980s.[13][14] Roosevelt’s own role Kiriakou puts at liaison: he was the American liaison to MI6, and a publicist by temperament — he wanted the story leaked, and the operation ran on dropped pamphlets and staged riots and counter-riots.[15]
The contrast between the two officers is the point Kiriakou presses. The Englishman who designed the coup never spoke; Roosevelt, “as soon as he retired, just started yakking and then wrote a book like how I overthrew the Iranian government.” Kiriakou addresses him directly: “dude, I understand you want your own place in history, but you didn’t overthrow the Iranian government. Not according to the CIA documents. You wish you did. You tried to help to overthrow the government, but this was a British operation.”[14][16]
Who paid for the boast
Kiriakou does not treat the correction as an exoneration. He treats Roosevelt’s self-promotion as itself a cause of what followed, and the price as one Americans paid rather than Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was “so successful in convincing people that the CIA overthrew Mosadic” that when the Iranian revolution came, in February 1979, it was the American embassy that was stormed and American diplomats who were taken and held for 444 days.[16] Forty-six years on there are still no diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran — while the British, who by his account actually ran the operation, are “perfectly good to go. No, no worries.”[17] The Iranians, he adds, do not hate Americans as a people; they distrust the government, and “they have good reason to.”[17]
The failures behind the failure
For Kiriakou the coup belongs to the category of agency error that gets all the attention and deserves less of it. The operational failures are the ones everybody knows about; he has said his friend and attorney Bruce Fein — one of the most important constitutional scholars in America, in his estimate — had been talking about writing a book on the CIA’s analytic failures instead.[11]
Those, he argues, have been the more dangerous through history, because it is analysis that policymakers rely on to make foreign policy, and the CIA has frequently been so wrong that the resulting policy has been a disaster.[18] The distinction holds up against his own Iran material. An agency bad at operations produces scandals. An agency bad at analysis produces wars — and an agency that misreports its own operations, as he says Roosevelt did for thirty years, produces a history the country then has to be governed by.