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Adventures in the Middle East: Excursions and Incursions

Donald N. Wilber
Reviewed by John C. Campbell
Spring 1987
Adventures in the Middle East: Excursions and Incursions
Donald N. Wilber
Darwin Press
1986
256 pp.
$17.95
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Donald Wilber was both an intelligence agent (OSS and CIA) and a specialist on the history, culture and architecture of the Middle East, Iran in particular. His diverting and occasionally amusing memoirs are long on personal experiences and rather short on intelligence operations, partly by preference, partly because the CIA would not declassify what he wanted to say. He does, however, discuss Operation Ajax, which in 1953 toppled the Mossadeq regime in Iran and restored the shah to his throne. Wilber claims authorship of the plan and goes out of his way to fault Kermit Roosevelt's account in Countercoup (reviewed in Foreign Affairs, Fall 1980) for what he charges are its many errors of fact.

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