After the war, Roosevelt served on the advisory board of the Institute of Arab American Affairs (IAAA) based in New York City, publishing his views on American Zionism and on the partition of Palestine. With others, Roosevelt formed a “Christian group” in 1948 to help the American Council for Judaism promote separate Jewish and Arab states. Roosevelt was executive director of the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land (CJP), founded in March 1948.
In 1951, Roosevelt helped found the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME), a pro-Arab organization often critical of US support for Israel. The CJP was subsumed into AFME in 1951, and Roosevelt served as AFME executive secretary. AFME has been viewed as part of an Arabist propaganda effort in the US secretly funded by the CIA and by the oil consortium ARAMCO.
As a member of the CIA’s Middle Eastern division since the early 1950s, Roosevelt played a key role in Operation Ajax to overthrow Iran’s Prime Minister Mossadegh and bring Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power, for which he received secretly from President Eisenhower the National Security Medal in 1954. Asked to lead a CIA-sponsored 1954 coup in Guatemala, Roosevelt refused arguing that President Jacobo Árbenz enjoyed popular support. After leaving the CIA in 1958, Roosevelt worked for American oil and defense companies.
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