director. In 1951, Roosevelt, Virginia Gildersleeve; Dorothy Thompson; and a further group of 24 American educators, theologians, and writers (including Harry Emerson Fosdick) founded the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME), a pro-Arab organization often critical of US support for Israel. The CJP, which Roosevelt had helped form in 1948, was subsumed into the AFME in 1951, and Roosevelt served for a time as the AFME executive secretary for the group of intellectuals and spokespersons. The historians Robert Moats Miller, Hugh Wilford, and others have stated that from its early years, AFME was a part of an Arabist propaganda effort within the US that was "secretly funded and to some extent managed" by the CIA, with further funding from the oil consortium ARAMCO. Cold War and CIA Roosevelt was recruited to the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) in 1950 by its chief, Frank Wisner. Assigned to Egypt, Roosevelt impressed his colleagues with Project FF, which encouraged the Free Officers Movement to carry out a coup d'état in 1952, and Roosevelt developed close CIA links to the new leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The historian Hugh Wilford attempts to describe Roosevelt's motivations and views underpinning his intelligence efforts and states: 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. In discussing Roosevelt's role, Wilford describes him as being among "the most important intelligence officers of their generation in the Middle East." Roosevelt played a highly-critical role in Operation Ajax as the ground operational planner, especially in getting the Shah to issue the firmans, or decrees, dismissing Mossadegh. He established networks of Anglophiles and sympathizers in Iran, who were willing to take part in various aspects of the coup. The tactics aided in dividing and dissolving Mossadegh's political power base within the National Front, the Tudeh, and the clerics. However, the first attempt at the coup failed, likely because Mossadegh had learned of his impending overthrow. Although the CIA sent Roosevelt a telegram