The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

by Vincent Bevins

The Dulles brothers and the CIA got the green light. Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, whom Wisner had hired in 1950, took charge of the mission, which they decided to call Operation Ajax. He had a million dollars to spend in Iran as he pleased, a huge sum for the kind of help he wanted to buy. The CIA bribed every politician it could, and looked for a general willing to take over and install the Shah as dictator. Agents paid street thugs, strongmen, and circus performers to riot in the streets. When CIA station chief Roger Goiran argued the US was making a historic mistake by aligning itself with British colonialism, Allen Dulles recalled him to Washington. The CIA created pamphlets and posters proclaiming that Mossadegh was a communist, an enemy of Islam. They paid off journalists to write that he was a Jew. The CIA hired gangsters to pretend to be Tudeh Party members and attack a mosque. Two of Roosevelt’s Iranian agents, who were handling some of the hired muscle, tried to turn down further work at one point, saying the risk was becoming too great. But Roosevelt convinced them by saying that if they refused, he’d kill them.