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.

With the outbreak of World War II, Roosevelt joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA.

[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.

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 "Eisenhower administration [including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, was] initially quite sympathetic towards... Roosevelt's Arabist agenda" and willing to oppose Middle Eastern regimes seen "as backing the Soviet Union rather than the U.S." Ultimately, the emergence of American public support for Israel and the administration's evolving framework to respond to its principal Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, would lead to failure of the Arabist agenda of Roosevelt and his colleagues.

Although the CIA sent Roosevelt a telegram to flee Iran immediately, he began work on the second coup and circulated a false account that Mossadegh attempted to seize the throne and bribed Iranian agents.

"[18] William Blum wrote that Roosevelt had provided no evidence for his claim that a communist takeover in Iran was imminent but rather "mere assertions of the thesis which are stated over and over.

He tells the story with the relish of a John le Carré knock-off.... Eisenhower, for one, considered reports like this to be the stuff of 'dime novels.

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.

[24] 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.