In mid-1962, alarmed by Qasim's threats to invade Kuwait and his government's expropriation of 99.5% of the British- and American-owned Iraq Petroleum Company's (IPC) concessionary holdings, President John F. Kennedy ordered the CIA to make preparations for a military coup that would remove him from power. Archie Roosevelt, Jr. was tasked with leading the operation.[30] A high-ranking CIA officer stationed in Iran at the time told Gibson that "while the CIA was interested in the Ba'ath Party, the military was in fact its primary focus."[2] Around the same time, the CIA penetrated a top-secret Iraqi-Soviet surface-to-air missile project, which yielded intelligence on the Soviet Union's ballistic missile program.[31]