The CIA had been working to bring him down since 1964. Nixon’s order: “Make the economy scream.”

William Colby, the CIA director who later testified to Congress about what the US had done in Chile, died under suspicious circumstances in 1996 — his body found on a riverbank that had already been searched.

This is the story of a democracy destroyed for copper, control, and Cold War paranoia. And the question it still asks: what if Allende had been left alone?

One event can be explained away. A sequence becomes harder to dismiss. When repeated sequences form a pattern, doubt begins to look less like healthy scepticism and more like cowardice. A hypothesis that identifies and explains the pattern is hinted at in the following table:

In some important respects, the world is not governed as we are told it is. Neutral does not always mean neutral. Accidents, it seems, are sometimes done accidentally on purpose. The public is encouraged to think in fragments that, in isolation, mean little.

Control by Excision

US regime-change operations are usually discussed one episode at a time, as if each belonged to a sealed moral universe. Iran. Guatemala. Congo. Chile. Vietnam. Indonesia. Each treated as a discrete controversy — regrettable, but isolated.

Stack them, and the picture changes. Not unfortunate misunderstandings and random bad actors, but a recurring logic: when a leader moves from rhetoric to action, the system responds.

Mosaddegh challenged foreign control of Iran’s oil. Árbenz threatened the landholding power of an American corporation. Sukarno articulated a vision of non-alignment that was intolerable to hegemonic powers. Allende pursued economic sovereignty and ran headlong into interests that had no intention of allowing it.

Different countries and different pretexts, but the same underlying offence: acting as though sovereignty meant something.

The response is not always a coup or a bullet. Sometimes it is sanctions, propaganda, colourless diplomatic language, the patient erosion of legitimacy. But the aim is the same: to remove, neutralise, or discipline those who challenge the operating assumptions of power.

Who is behind such acts? Not necessarily a smoky room of sinister men sipping their whisky while conferring on the deeds of the day. Reality is less theatrical and more durable: an interlocking ecosystem of corporations, banks, dynastic wealth, intelligence agencies, bureaucracies and diplomatic networks. Importantly there are people who move between these worlds without ever having to explain themselves to voters.

The Congo Test

The Congo is where Hammarskjöld enters — not as a side note, but as a revelation. He believed the United Nations could be something more than a stage set. He thought that international law could restrain the older pathological habits of empire. The Congo tested that belief to destruction.

The Congo was not merely a post-colonial crisis. It was a test of whether independence would mean anything beyond a formality. The overt architecture of empire was collapsing, but the old habits and expectations remained intact. The valuable minerals were still there. The strategic anxieties remained as did the fear of African independence becoming more than symbolic. Under Hammarskjöld, the UN began to look less like a ceremonial forum and more like an instrument that might actually be used — one that could give real meaning to the independence that new African states had formally acquired, rather than merely supervising a change in terminology.

Hammarskjöld knew the odds. He was not naive about the power games being played by both sides in the Cold War. He understood that neither Washington nor Moscow wanted a truly independent Congo. He knew that that both sides could be ruthless. He insisted on an independent UN regardless. That insistence was, in the end, the point.

The Crash and the Question

On 17 September 1961, his plane came down near Ndola, in what was then Northern Rhodesia. Hammarskjöld and fifteen others were killed. Officially, it was a tragic accident.

The questions began almost immediately and have not stopped since. Local witnesses reported seeing a second aircraft in the vicinity. Others reported hearing shots. Communication records were incomplete, delayed, or missing. Subsequent investigations — including a 2017 independent panel commissioned by the UN — concluded that the evidence was consistent with an external attack or sabotage, and called for further inquiry. No definitive answer has ever been established. The key files in multiple jurisdictions, remain classified, if they have not been lost. [1]

Individual anomalies can always be disregarded as unexplained mysteries. But when they accumulate — the witness accounts, the missing records, the delayed reports, the redactions, the institutional incuriosity — the balance of probabilities shifts. A singular argument can be brushed aside as a one-off. A cumulative argument becomes too strong to be ignored. This is true whether we consider details of this particular plane crash, or the rise of US hegemonic power at the end of the twentieth century.

Parameterised Freedom

What happened at Ndola, whatever its cause, illustrates the process. Modern liberal power does not present itself as tyranny. It invites the public to believe in impartial institutions, sovereign nations bound by constitutions, and curated versions of history.

Independence is tolerated only as long as it remains decorative. Reform may be allowed unless it is structural.

Hammarskjöld believed that principle, exercised through international institutions, could triumph over force. In the Congo, he found the limit of that belief — a ruthless and implacable opposition that did not argue back, but took silent action.

His death matters, not only as a personal tragedy, but for the pattern it reveals alongside the stories of others: Mosaddegh, Árbenz, Sukarno, Allende and more. Each case has its own character and uncertainties, but taken together, there is a pattern and shape that cannot be dismissed as coincidence.

The fragmentation of history serves power well. If every story is isolated, every outrage can be treated as an exception. The larger structure stays invisible and the public can be reassured that troubling incidents are merely a series of unfortunate, but meaningless local events.

But once the episodes are stacked, what becomes visible is a world system whose real priorities are not self-determination but control. Not justice, but continuity. Not truth, but deniability.

The public clings to the accident narrative because it is psychologically cheaper. It is easier to treat the worst events in modern history as anomalies than to accept that they are features, not bugs of the system we are part of.

If Hammarskjöld was killed, his death was a demonstration of how power protects itself. If it was truly an accident, the wider argument still stands. No single hand needs to have directed events. The world he inhabited had perfected something durable but well camouflaged: a system in which corporations, states, intelligence agencies and financial elites had enough in common that coordination was rarely necessary.

Democracy provides the scenery. The casting decisions are made offstage. That is the operating system. And once seen, it cannot be unseen.

[1] Susan Williams’ Who Killed Hammarskjöld? (2011) remains the most thorough examination of the Ndola evidence.

This film follows the threads that connect Hammarskjöld’s death to two of the Cold War’s bloodiest chapters: the Congo, where the CIA backed the overthrow and murder of the country’s first elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba — and Indonesia, where a US-supported coup brought a genocide that killed up to 3 million people, almost entirely unknown in the West.

Hammarskjöld stood in the way of all of it. He believed newly independent nations had the right to govern themselves, free from outside interference. That made him dangerous to the people who preferred chaos and foreign control to self-determination.

Harry Truman put it plainly: “He was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him’.”

It was August 18th 1960, at a meeting of the National Security Council. In a memorandum from that day, Staff Secretary Robert Johnson, the official minute taker, recalled Eisenhower turning to CIA Director Allen Dulles — “in the full hearing of all those in attendance” — and saying that Patrice Lumumba should be “eliminated.”

Five months later, Lumumba, former Prime Minister of the Congo, wrote a farewell letter to his wife and five children before being tortured and killed, with the knowledge and complicity of both Washington and Brussels.

How do we reconcile Eisenhower’s stature with his willingness to deprive a wife of her husband and children of their father? This is not, in the end, simply about Eisenhower — many others would have stood in his shoes given the chance. It is about a society that holds a man capable of this in such high esteem.

From Normandy to the Oval Office

Perhaps at the heart of the issue is a fundamental incompatibility — between the mindset required to command a war machine and the values necessary for civilian leadership. Eisenhower’s career was defined by the industrial-scale disposal of lives in the meat-grinder of Second World War Europe. When you appoint such a man as president, you inevitably import his cold calculus into the Oval Office.

Military command demands secrecy. Plans cannot be shared with a citizenry, decisions cannot be exposed to public scrutiny. For Eisenhower, conducting affairs of state beyond the reach of public accountability would have felt not just necessary but natural.

It also normalises violence as a problem-solving tool. Secrecy and violence, the twin instruments of war, travelled with Eisenhower into peacetime. He deployed clandestine operations to overthrow Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran — democratically elected leaders removed in the name of the very democracy the US claimed to support and had fought to defend.

And then there is democracy itself. Dissent is not a threat to democracy — it is a symptom of it functioning. A military commander cannot afford to tolerate it. Eisenhower, it seems, never unlearned that lesson. It was during his tenure that the CIA transformed from an intelligence-gathering body into a unaccountable paramilitary tool for control.

For the man who had commanded the liberation of Europe, the irony appears to have been lost on him entirely.

A Price Worth Paying - Especially if Others Are Paying it

Lumumba is an early example of a leader removed with lethal force because his vision appeared to some to run counter to US interests. He was committed to liberating the Congo from the legacy of savage Belgian colonisation — but Washington feared he would enable Soviet influence in Africa.

Tragically, Lumumba had only turned to Moscow after the US had rejected his requests for help in stabilising a new democracy. He had asked America first. They refused to help with independence, not wanting a Congo they couldn’t control.

In the short term, the US got what it believed it wanted. Lumumba was replaced by Mobutu — a corrupt and murderous dictator, but one reliably aligned with Washington’s interests. The people of the Congo would suffer decades of repression. From Washington’s point of view, this was a price worth paying — and they weren’t paying it anyway

On January 17th 1961, Eisenhower delivered his farewell address to the nation. In it, he issued a grave warning about the threat posed by what he called the “military-industrial complex” — a machinery of power that only an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” would be able to resist. What Eisenhower did not mention, as he spoke those words, was that Patrice Lumumba had been killed less than an hour earlier, somewhere in remote Central Africa. The man who had ordered his elimination was on television warning America about the very machinery he had just used. As Eisenhower spoke to the TV cameras, Lumumba’s blood was still soaking into the ground

A Precedent Had Been Set

Perhaps the most consequential outcome was not Mobutu, but the precedent. The assassination of a country’s leader had become an accepted instrument of policy — something that could be ordered in a National Security Council meeting, to be taken care of by machinery that, once built, would never dismantle itself.

In Dealey Plaza, November 1963, John F. Kennedy’s presidency was brought to a brutal and sudden end. The threads connecting that moment to Eisenhower’s order to eliminate Lumumba are subtle and indirect — but they are there. A culture of lethal intent towards inconvenient leaders had taken root in Washington. Eisenhower had given it presidential legitimacy. Three years later, Kennedy was consumed by it.

More than sixty years later, it is worth asking not whether this anti-democratic tolerance for secrecy and violence could reappear — but whether it ever stopped.

[1] Office of the Historian: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v23/d11

On the morning of February 13th 1961, three weeks into his presidency, President Kennedy received the news that Patrice Lumumba was dead.

He had been tortured, shot, and dissolved in acid by men working — directly or indirectly — for Western governments. He was thirty-five years old. He had been Prime Minister for less than three months.

Kennedy’s reaction, captured in a photograph from that day, is unlike anything you expect to see on a president’s face. His predecessor had ordered the killing. Kennedy looked like a man confronting something he couldn’t yet name.

This seven-minute film tries to name it.

At the age of 23, John F. Kennedy published his Harvard thesis under the title Why England Slept (1940). It sold well enough to buy him a Buick convertible, but more importantly, it offers an early insight into the cast of mind that would later define his presidency.

In his book, Kennedy examines why Britain was ill-prepared to confront Germany at the outset of World War II. He attributes this, in part, to a “natural feeling of confidence, even of superiority” in the English man.

Against this, Kennedy argues that foreign threats demand “clearheaded and informed calculation.”

Even at this early stage, we see the outline of the man: sceptical of national arrogance, and committed to cool, rational judgement.

1951 Tour of Asia

As a young Congressman with ambitions for the Senate, Kennedy knew he needed a deeper grasp of foreign affairs. In the autumn of 1951 he embarked on a seven-week study tour of Asia.

A key stop was French Indochina — today’s Vietnam — where French colonial forces were fighting a war against a communist-led independence movement. After visiting Saigon and hearing a range of informed perspectives, Kennedy concluded the French were doomed to lose. More strikingly, he believed the United States would meet the same fate should the attempt to take the place of the French.

To Kennedy, Vietnam was not an isolated struggle but part of a broader pattern playing out across Asia and Africa: colonial powers were confronting nationalist movements they could no longer contain. It was a conclusion he would never abandon.

A Third Way

For Kennedy, the forces of nationalism and self-determination were too powerful for any empire to suppress indefinitely. This set him apart from much of the foreign policy establishment, which saw European dominance of the Global South as both natural and necessary — above all as a bulwark against China and the Soviet Union.

Kennedy searched for a third way — a path by which newly independent nations might escape colonial rule without being forced into either Western or communist camps.

It was in this context that he formed relationships with leaders such as Diem of Vietnam and Sukarno of Indonesia ― with mixed results. Kennedy had thought that such figures might help nations become independent, stable, and friendly to the United States — without becoming pawns in the Cold War.

1957 Algeria Speech: Kennedy Goes Public

Kennedy’s sympathy for those under colonial rule became unmistakably public in his 1957 Senate speech on Algeria. As in French Indochina, a violent conflict was unfolding between a nationalist independence movement and French colonial powers.

Kennedy broke ranks not just with Washington convention but with America’s NATO obligations, arguing for Algerian self-determination rather than backing France. The New York Times called it “the most comprehensive and outspoken arraignment of Western policy toward Algeria yet presented by an American in public office.”

After a firestorm in the press after the speech and criticisms from his own party, Kennedy worried that he had damaged his career. His father was certain that that the contrary was probably true. Perhaps most importantly, he had demonstrated that he had the courage of his convictions.

An Uneasy Alignment

Despite earlier instincts that challenged imperial thinking, Kennedy’s public position on foreign policy largely aligned with Cold War orthodoxy.

By 1963, France had been expelled from Vietnam, leaving a divided nation at war with itself. In the South, the US-backed Ngo Dinh Diem held power; the North was led by the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh.

Under Kennedy’s presidency, American involvement deepened — thousands of “military advisers” were deployed to the country, alongside growing calls for greater and more direct military intervention.

Kennedy supported this deepening involvement — at least in public, and at least for a time — but it sat in direct conflict with the convictions he had formed in Saigon in 1951 and the empathy he had shown for the victims of colonisation.

1961 The Bay of Pigs: The Spell Is Broken

At some point early in his presidency, Kennedy reassessed the case for US involvement in Southeast Asia. Central to this shift was his growing belief that he had been misled by his own intelligence services.

In 1961, the CIA backed an invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro exiles at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy had made clear he would not commit US forces. Yet when the operation faltered, Kennedy came to believe it had been deliberately designed to fail — in an attempt to force his hand towards the full-scale invasion he had explicitly ruled out.

Kennedy chose humiliation over escalation. In the aftermath, he developed a deep distrust of both military and intelligence advice, reportedly vowing to “smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.”

From this point on, when assured that victory in Vietnam was achievable, Kennedy could no longer suspend his disbelief. Publicly, he maintained support for the war — aware of the political cost of appearing weak. Privately he began to plan for withdrawal.

1963 Honolulu: Building the Plan for Withdrawal

On May 6, 1963, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara chaired a military conference in Honolulu, where he directed US commanders to develop concrete plans for a full withdrawal from Vietnam.

The military leadership was unenthusiastic, even resistant to this change in direction. McNamara was acting on Kennedy’s policy, pushing against the institutional momentum towards escalation.

McNamara–Taylor Report: Justifying the Plan

In September 1963, Kennedy dispatched McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor on a ten-day “fact-finding” mission to South Vietnam.

The resulting McNamara–Taylor Report was supposedly drafted on the flight home, though much of it had been prepared in advance in Washington. Kennedy had decided on withdrawal months earlier; the mission’s purpose was to provide a formal rationale for the decision already taken.

NSAM 263: The Decision in Writing

On 11 October 1963, just days after receiving the McNamara–Taylor Report, Kennedy signed National Security Action Memorandum 263. It set out, in clear terms, his intention to begin withdrawing US personnel from Vietnam.

Six weeks later, Kennedy was dead.

The Old Order is Restored

The day after Kennedy’s funeral, his successor, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, signed NSAM 273 overriding Kennedy’s earlier directive. The document was being drafted while Kennedy’s body was lying in state, not yet buried.

While the language of Johnson’s new directive suggested continuity, in substance it emphasised continued military engagement — effectively cancelling Kennedy’s earlier move toward withdrawal.

Five days after the assassination, Johnson, in his televised “Let us continue” speech, urged the nation to “continue” its commitments in Vietnam, leading the American people to think that escalation under the Johnson presidency would be a continuation of Kennedy’s policy. It was in fact, the opposite.

Who Pulled the Trigger?

The precise mechanics of the Kennedy assassination remain obscure. We do not know how many assassins were involved, where they were located or their subsequent fates. No definitive account has ever commanded universal acceptance.

The Warren Commission, established by Johnson, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Yet the report has been widely challenged. Critics have pointed to a troubling misalignment between the nine volumes of evidence collected and the conclusions drawn from them; its failure to establish a credible motive; and its reliance on the highly contested interpretations of evidence such as the “magic-bullet theory.”

The process itself has also drawn scrutiny. The inclusion of Allen Dulles — recently dismissed as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency by Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs fiasco — raised questions about independence, while later investigations, including the 1979 United States House Select Committee on Assassinations, fundamentally contradicted the Warren Commission, concluding that the assassination was likely the result of a conspiracy.

The sequence of events only deepened the uncertainty. Oswald was killed while in police custody by Jack Ruby before he could stand trial, and key questions—around both Ruby’s actions and the killing of Officer J. D. Tippit, also killed that day — remained unresolved.

What emerges is not a settled account, but an absence of one.

Conspiracy Hypotheses

More than sixty years later, competing theories about the assassination persist. These range from Cuban exiles angered by the botched Bay of Pigs, to Texan oil interests opposed to tax changes, to foreign actors such as Israel, reportedly at odds with Kennedy over nuclear policy.

Around these theories swirl conflicting arguments, some well-evidenced, others merely compelling, none conclusive. Remarkably, genuine efforts to establish the truth continue to compete with an apparently deliberate production of professional disinformation.

There are multiple plausible explanations, but they cannot all be true, and none of them is proven.

The Investigation and the Problem of Control

Despite all the doubt and confusion, one issue stands above the rest: the conduct of the investigation itself. Many groups may have had motive and means. Some may have played a role. Others may even have been incentivised to muddy the waters. However, only the US government had the authority to control the investigation and shape the official narrative.

The Warren Commission was largely controlled and overseen by former CIA director Allen Dulles who was the only member of the commission to attend every hearing. Kennedy felt he had been deceived by Dulles over the Bay of Pigs and had fired him. This raised an unavoidable question: could an investigation controlled by a controversial figure drawn from the very institutions under scrutiny be considered independent?

In Conclusion

John F. Kennedy was a serious thinker from a young age, evident in his 1940 book Why England Slept. His divergence from prevailing orthodoxy on colonialism and empire emerged during his 1951 tour of Asia, and became public in his 1957 Senate speech on Algeria. His disillusionment with the military and intelligence establishment deepened after the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion. By May 1963, plans for US withdrawal from Vietnam were being formalised at the Honolulu conference chaired by Robert McNamara. In October, he signed NSAM 263 confirming that intent. A month later, he was dead.

Kennedy’s instinctive sympathy for the colonised placed him increasingly at odds with the strategic logic of American power. The assassination not only stopped him dead, but its dramatic public nature served as a deterrent for anyone else who might follow.

We do not know for sure who, if anyone, was on the grassy knoll nor who fired shots at the president that day. But one thing is clear: to the architects of empire, a president with Kennedy’s convictions was like a crucifix to a vampire.

See also:

• Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa

The Source

All three rivers can be traced to a single source, in a single week of November 1963: the coup in Saigon and the killing of South Vietnam’s leader, Ngo Dinh Diem.

It was Washington’s mirror moment — the instant it chose to kill its own reflection. Diem had been America’s creation: Catholic, anti‑communist, a modernist meant to embody Western virtue in Asian form.

U.S. officials had long sponsored Diem’s brutality, but by 1963 the Vietnamese were disgusted with him, and even Washington found him unbearable. They convinced themselves that removing him would restore control.

When Diem and his brother were executed by CIA‑backed operatives in the back of an armoured car, the bullets and stab‑wounds didn’t just end a regime — they exposed the hypocrisy at the heart of Washington’s mission.

From that week onward, the United States was no longer exporting democracy or even defending business interests, as it had in Guatemala. It was generating chaos — and losing control.

Diem’s murder became the pattern for every later intervention — Vietnam, Iraq, Libya — each founded on the same delusion: that American moral superiority could be imposed through subterfuge and violence.

From a distance, the absurdity is obvious: how could covert killing ever be a force for good? In murdering its own puppet, Washington revealed its own incoherence. It appears as if the stage, the play, and the actors upon it, had all been misunderstood.

The Bureaucracy Takes the Wheel

The Saigon coup was never properly authorised. Between October and early November 1963, Washington’s machinery moved on its own momentum.

Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge whispered one story to the generals; CIA officers spread another. Each presumed presidential approval. By the time doubts reached the Oval Office, events in Saigon had already slipped beyond the president’s control.

The State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA were no longer executing policy — they were creating it.

The apparatus designed to serve democracy had instead, seized its power. After Diem’s death there was no turning back. A few discreet assassinations were cheaper than invasions, cleaner than debate, and infinitely easier to deny when things went wrong — as they soon did, horrifically, in Vietnam.

Kennedy seemed to sense the danger. Into his dictaphone he confessed, “I should not have given my consent to it,” referring to the memo that triggered the coup. His own government had killed an ally he had once personally befriended.

Perhaps one day Kennedy would have tamed the beast; he had reportedly said that he wished to “scatter the CIA to the winds.” But three weeks later, he too was dead. Within four weeks, his order to exit from Vietnam had been cancelled by President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The Deep State Finds Its Voice

After November 1963, the institutions that had acted beyond presidential control carried on with little restraint. A new consensus hardened in Washington: presidents come and go, but “policy” must endure. The will of the electorate became secondary to the preferences of a permanent bureaucracy.

The entity we now call the Deep State had found its feet. The 1954 Guatemalan coup had been a corporate experiment; Saigon was a proof‑of‑concept that had spun catastrophically out of control. The result was the Vietnam War — millions dead, a nation divided, and America’s image of itself in ruins.

But Washington learned the wrong lessons. Instead of humility, it sought more power. Disaster was a merely a narrative. The control of perception replaced the pursuit of truth.

The Dream That Wouldn’t End

The three rivers — JFK’s assassination, the slaughter in Vietnam, and the manufactured fear of communism — merged into a single dark current that transformed the American soul.

A generation came of age believing their government had murdered their president, lied them into a war, and were generating unnecessary conflicts that could end the American way of life. Such suspicions were pushed below the surface, but never left. They mutated, hardened, and were passed on to the next generation in different forms.

Something terrible happened in 1963. It unfolded like a fever dream: an honourable republic sleepwalking into a corrupt empire, guided by illusions and haunted by suppressed guilt.

More than half a century later, America is still trying to wake up.

On Monday November 4th 1963, with his children playing in the background, President Kennedy dictated a quiet confession into a dictaphone.

Over the weekend, a coup had taken place in Saigon. Two men were dead. And Kennedy knew that America bore responsibility.

Three weeks later, Kennedy too was dead. The withdrawal order he had signed was reversed before his funeral.

This seven-minute film traces what happened — and why it still matters.

Rivera already understood the dynamics clearly: who ordered it, who paid for it, and who the victims were. Mainstream historians would take decades to catch up. The CIA didn’t formally acknowledge the character and scale of its activities until 1997.

The sky in the painting is blue. The trees are attractive shades of green. But the ground is soaked blood-red. Rivera connects the handshake to the body count, the boardroom to the bomb, the bishop’s blessing to the unmarked grave.

We would like to think we live in more civilised times. We know that we do not.

The film is a three-minute tour of Rivera’s devastating canvas. Join me.

Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, exiled for his extremism, was pushed forward to rule the country as Washington’s chosen dictator: obedient and loudly “anti‑communist.”

Installed through the CIA’s Operation PBSuccess, he was selected for pliability rather than ability. He depended on U.S. advisers whispering policy into his ears and American dollars to keep an illusion afloat that he was anything but a disaster.

Even the CIA saw the cracks — a paranoid man with no charisma, lost without orders. Yet a myth was created: Guatemala “liberated,” democracy “restored.”

The story of Castillo Armas is as much about the West’s ability to deceive itself as it is about Guatemala’s unravelling.

The Architect’s Delusion

Overthrowing Árbenz had been almost embarrassingly easy and Washington drew the wrong lesson. If the Guatemalan people could be programmed into accepting an externally selected dictator perhaps they could also be controlled long-term?

So it was with full U.S. support that Castillo Armas assumed power — winning an election in which he was the only candidate and all political parties were banned.

Castillo Armas’s rule began with the arrest of thousands of opposition leaders, branded “communist” and placed in specially built detention centres. He acted in line with U.S. priorities, reversing the land reforms of his predecessor so that the American United Fruit Company regained control of the bananas — much to the satisfaction of the Dulles Brothers — men who knew United Fruit rather well. This was a blow to rural Guatemalans, but changes to electoral rules meant they were silenced. Peasants who refused to leave the land when told were simply arrested. At the same time, lists were compiled of suspected communists, leading to further arrests, dismissals, and a climate of fear. The U.S. provided the regime with financial assistance, advice, and guidance.

But people are not programmable. The policies imposed by Washington via Castillo Armas did not settle Guatemala; they fractured it. Legitimacy was manufactured, dissent suppressed, and stability continually propped up from abroad.

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When Control Becomes Chaos

Washington’s assumption that they could control Guatemala collapsed on contact with reality. The officers and mercenaries who had helped put Castillo Armas in power proved unequal to the task of running a country — and thoroughly corrupt. As Castillo Armas silenced the press and crushed unions, the economy showed little sign of stabilising, despite the incoming flow of dollars.

It was a regime built on fear and fantasy, and it began to devour itself. Every purge, every “communist plot,” every midnight arrest revealed a government terrified of its own shadow.

The Puppet String Snaps

In July 1957, Castillo Armas was shot dead by one of his own guards. A regime built on paranoia had finally turned the gun inward. It wasn’t so much an assassination as an implosion — the system had lost its ability to distinguish friend from foe.

He was followed by successive iterations of non-democratic rule, while the disenfranchised rural population became more organised and violent in its resistance. The consequence was thirty-six years of civil war. Between 1960 and 1996, the country saw massacres, disappearances, and a genocidal campaign against indigenous Mayan communities. More than 200,000 civilians were killed.

In 1999, the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification found that ninety-three percent of the atrocities were committed by Guatemala’s U.S.-backed military. These murderous decades were the long echo of 1954 — fear turned into a system.

The Illusion of Control

Castillo Armas’s brief rule exposed Washington’s delusion — the belief that artifical controls, once installed, could endure. America’s chosen dictator died in his palace, shot by one of his own men. Yet the paranoid arrogance that created him persisted — assimilated and lurking within the operating model of the West.

The empire’s enemy was never really communism. It was reality itself.

5 minute film telling the story of the Guatemalan coup of 1954:

In the spring of 1954, a former actor, playwright and prisoner of war sat down at a typewriter in Honduras and began manufacturing a country’s defeat. His name was David Atlee Phillips. He worked for the CIA. And the war he was about to conjure from words alone would bring down a democratically elected government without a single decisive battle being fought.

Their secret weapon was not soldiers but stories.

We are all, at some level, confirmation bias machines. Each piece of information we absorb shapes how we select and interpret the next — and the next, and the next. In an age of social media and information flood, we feel this acutely: the struggle to distinguish signal from noise, truth from fabrication, news from theatre. But this vulnerability is not new, and it has been understood and exploited for a very long time. In Guatemala in 1954, the CIA ran the first modern experiment in manufactured reality — and it worked with devastating precision.

A corporate grievance over Guatemala’s bananas had been brought to the attention of the Dulles brothers, each with close professional ties to the United Fruit Company — John Foster as its longtime lawyer, Allen as a board member. The brothers, as heads of both the State Department and the CIA, reframed the situation as a communist crisis. President Eisenhower’s administration was persuaded, and authorised a covert operation to remove the elected government of Jacobo Árbenz.

Operation PBSuccess

The coup’s codename was PBSuccess — “PB” being the CIA’s cryptonym for Guatemala. Under CIA Director Allen Dulles, with Frank Wisner and Tracy Barnes directing fieldwork, a small clandestine crew was assembled. Their weapons were not guns but narratives — and the man they needed was not a soldier but a storyteller.

The Gentleman-Spy

Front and centre stood David Atlee Phillips: former bomber-crewman, actor, playwright, and editor of The South Pacific Mail in Chile. Fluent in Spanish and an instinctive narrator, he understood something that military planners often miss — that people do not respond to reality, but to their perception of reality. Change the perception, and you change everything else.

In 1954 he scripted and voiced La Voz de la Liberación — a fake rebel radio network broadcasting from Honduras. Each bulletin announced imaginary victories, phantom defections, and the imminent fall of Guatemala City. Phillips created an entire war from words. He was a gentleman-spy whose typewriter was more lethal than a pistol.

Beyond radio theatrics, CIA operators sent counterfeit military communications on frequencies they knew Guatemalan officers monitored — dispatch after dispatch describing units deserting or switching sides. CIA-friendly journalists printed stories that the country’s well-equipped 7,000-man army faced a vastly larger force of invading rebels. In reality, America’s chosen proxy, Carlos Castillo Armas, commanded only 600 lightly armed men — a militia that would have been crushed in open battle. But the Guatemalan officers didn’t know that. They knew only what they were hearing. And what they were hearing was the sound of a war they were already losing.

Theatre of War

To complete the illusion of apocalypse, a handful of borrowed aircraft of World War II vintage lumbered over Guatemala City dropping a scattering of antiquated bombs. Two or three civilians were killed, yet the psychological effect was immense. CIA-friendly reporters amplified the explosions into a narrative of devastation. Rumours swirled that U.S. Marines were poised to land if Árbenz didn’t surrender.

Each new story confirmed the last. Each report made the next more believable. The Guatemalan army — absorbing broadcast after broadcast, intercept after intercept — became convinced that resistance was hopeless and capitulated. Castillo Armas flew in and took control. The coup wasn’t won on the battlefield. It was won inside people’s heads.

Fallout and Afterlives

What followed was brutal: decades of dictatorship, civil war, and hidden graves. Washington’s “success” planted the seeds of a catastrophe that would cost countless lives. PBSuccess wasn’t just a coup d’état — it was a media simulation of war.

The information flood we navigate today — social media, rolling news, algorithmic echo chambers — is in many ways a vast, anarchic version of what Phillips built in Honduras with a transmitter and a typewriter. The technology has changed. The vulnerability it exploits has not. We are still confirmation bias machines. We still believe what we are primed to believe. And there are still people who know it and use it.

Once Guatemalans stopped believing in their own sovereignty, they lost it. A question always worth asking is: what are we being primed to believe right now?

Postscript

Years later, some of the characters from this story would reappear in other dark corners of American history.

During the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations, CIA-sponsored Cuban exile Antonio Veciana testified that he had seen Lee Harvey Oswald — the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy — in conversation with his CIA handler — a man he knew as “Maurice Bishop”, He saw this in Dallas in September 1963, two months before the assassination.

The committee’s seasoned investigator, Gaeton Fonzi, became convinced — though could not prove it — that “Maurice Bishop” was an alias for Phillips himself. Later, on the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination, Veciana would confirm in a letter to Fonzi’s widow, that yes, Bishop and Philips were one and the same.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

In 1954, the United States overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala. The official reason was communism. The real reason was bananas.

President Jacobo Arbenz had made a simple promise to his country’s poor: land reform. He kept it. In doing so, he made an enemy of the United Fruit Company — and through them, of two of the most powerful men in Washington.

The Dulles brothers didn’t send an army. They sent a radio station, a handful of planes, and a suitcase of cash. It was enough.

What followed — for Guatemala — was seventy thousand dead, three decades of civil war, and the longest armed conflict in Latin American history.

What followed — for Washington — was a template. The same playbook to be used again and again. And again.

Guatemala 1954 is an essential piece of the puzzle. The below film provides a five minute overview:

In the summer of 1953, two American conflicts ended - but only one in the way that Washington had hoped.

The Korean War took three years and millions of lives, including those of 36,515 American soldiers. At the end there was no victor, just a frozen battlefield and a country partitioned into North and South - two alienated halves, condemned to mirror each other’s fear forever. What a waste of blood and treasure.

At the same time, another conflict was unfolding in Iran. To the average American it was invisible. It lasted just a few weeks and was waged by the CIA with rumours, bribes, and hired mobs creating chaos in the streets of Tehran. Success came swiftly. The government fell and Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was put on trial. His American‑backed accusers demanded his execution.

For President Eisenhower and his advisers, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles, the contrast could not have been starker: failure in Korea at a staggering cost; success in Iran for small change.

Kermit Roosevelt Jr., the CIA officer who ran the coup, later wrote that he had been authorised to spend one million dollars - but had used far less. The Korean War, by contrast, cost about thirty billion dollars - that translates to around three hundred million per day in today’s dollars - for three years.

You can imagine the cogs turning in the brains of the Washington elite. Korea was war in the old style - warships, bombers, and more than a million American troops. Iran was led by a handful of men who needed only their guile and a suitcase full of cash. No American deaths. No parades of coffins. No questions asked. And no questions asked meant no story told — except the one Washington chose to tell.

Almost by accident, America had discovered how nations could be subdued cheaply and quietly - without the moral and political liabilities that came with vast expenditure and endless casualty lists. Big wars produced scrutiny; cheap coups did not.

For Washington insiders, the revelation was intoxicating. Here was a new kind of warfare that meant no battlefields, no American body bags, and—most importantly - no accountability.

It was the political equivalent of splitting the atom: power, without accountability.

For decades, the American people would be distracted by entertainment and inspiring stories of “freedom and democracy”. Meanwhile America’s rulers could shape the world in their own image - and on the cheap. That was the revelation of 1953.

The discovery changed not only Iran, but the American imagination itself. Less than a year later, in a small Central American country of Guatemala, similar tactics would be used again - carefully refined and improved.

And from that point forward, America no longer needed wars to conquer. It only needed to tell stories.

Four minute account of the 1953 Coup in Iran:

In the early 1950s, two American brothers quietly reshaped the political order of the world. John Foster and Allen Dulles were President Eisenhower’s twin hammers - one striking in public through diplomacy, the other in secret through the CIA.

When Eisenhower took office in 1953, the Dulles brothers gave his administration both its moral compass and its concealed blade. John Foster, as Secretary of State, cast America’s ambitions in righteousnes light, using language suited for the pulpit.

Meanwhile Allen, acting behind the scenes as CIA Director, carried out the unholy, often deadly, work to impose that ambition on the world.

Their first great enterprise - the 1953 coup in Iran - was executed with ruthless efficiency. A way of controlling the destinies of far-off countries had been discovered.

Why did the influence of these two men reach so far? Because perception always bends to suit preconceived attitudes. Each of us sees the world through the lens we are familiar with. Architects see solutions in buildings; doctors, in medicine. Teachers see the power of education. And soldiers like Eisenhower? Their answers revolve around the use of deadly force.

President Eisenhower was the victorious general of World War II. Allen Dulles had spent those years in shadowy intelligence work across Europe. His elder brother Foster had served the interests of international oil and banking giants at Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm where corporate empire and statecraft blended seamlessly.

As postwar America turned to confront the Soviet Union, the Eisenhower–Dulles alliance forged a new national identity - morally certain, economically predatory, armed to the teeth and skilled at clandestine operations.

If Eisenhower was the figurehead, the Dulles brothers were the brains. Descended from stern Presbyterians - missionaries, ministers, and cabinet members - they saw politics as a struggle between virtue and damnation. Neutrality, collectivism, or anti‑imperialism smelled to them like moral decay.

Theirs was not a reflective faith but a punitive one. Compromise was not prudence; it was a weakness, a sin. So Iran was overthrown. Then Guatemala. Then the Congo, Then Indonesia...on and on.

Each intervention became another nail for the same hammer - the corporate, covert, crusading machine pounding the world into an American likeness - soaking the ground in blood as they proceeded.

By the end, even Eisenhower seemed to sense the monster that had taken shape on his watch. In his famous 1961 farewell address, he warned against “the military‑industrial complex” and “the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” The antidote, he said, would be “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.”

Sixty‑five years later, as Western bombs again fall on Iran, few believe the justifications offered for the violence - even fewer believe that these wars reflect any democratic will.

Eisenhower’s farewell address still hangs in the air: Did we, the citizenry, remain alert and knowledgeable? The question is rhetorical. Once a nation shapes itself into a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail - and the Western world has been pounding these nails ever since.

It is too much to blame everything on the Dulles brothers, yet difficult to underestimate their impact. They embedded a filter in the Western mind: We are good; others represent an evil that must be stamped out. From that conviction came decades of moral blindness, secrecy and violence.

By 1969 both brothers were gone, but their creed lives on - spread through policy papers and talking heads, sanctified in parliaments and stock markets and enforced by missiles and drones. The consequences have been vast.

And terrible.

See 4 min film:

When Mossadegh nationalised the Anglo‑Iranian Oil Company (the ancestor of BP) in 1951, he broke a British monopoly that had financed London’s post‑war recovery. The decision was popular in Tehran but caused conniptions in Westminster. Britain’s foreign‑policy establishment and oil men were of one mind: Mossadegh had to go.

MI6’s Christopher “Monty” Woodhouse, then station chief in Tehran, drew up a blueprint called Operation Boot, a covert plan to topple the PM and restore the Shah. But Mossadegh saw through their manoeuvring: in October 1952 he expelled the entire British mission, including Woodhouse’s intelligence team.

Suddenly London had lost its agents, its informants, and its leverage.

That’s when Whitehall’s witches turned their eyes towards Washington. Woodhouse, now operating from Cyprus, prepared the case; Roger Makins, a deft Foreign Office diplomat with close U.S. ties, took it to the Americans. Their timing was unlucky: Harry Truman and his Secretary of State Dean Acheson were not interested. To them, Iran was a colonial oil dispute of little interest.

Rebuffed, Makins waited. When Dwight Eisenhower won the 1952 election, the stage changed. Woodhouse and Makins repackaged the pitch: Mossadegh, they now whispered, was a potential communist The story was completely fake, but it pressed every Cold War button. Eisenhower’s lieutenants - the Dulles brothers - were more than eager to stamp out any buds of communism. Within months, the British plan was reborn as the CIA’s Operation TPAjax.

In August 1953, Mossadegh’s government fell. The Shah returned to rule with U.S. backing, and Western oil flowed again - no longer purely British but now shared with American firms.

It was Britain’s spell that set the tragedy in motion: oil as the goal, paranoia as the method.

Just as Macbeth’s witches foretold fate to make men destroy themselves, Whitehall’s envoys cast their prophecy in Washington - “Communism in Tehran!” - and let another nation strike the blow.

The charm worked. The consequences still echo. The witches on that blasted heath would be proud.

The US driven coup that Whitehall conjured — in four minutes:

So we begin one step earlier: Iran, 1953. As American missiles rain down on Tehran, it could hardly be more topical.

In 1953, a 37-year-old CIA officer named Kermit Roosevelt spent the summer in Tehran, operating out of the U.S. Embassy with little more than cake tins stuffed with cash and a network of rent-a-mob rioters. Within weeks, he had brought down the elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh. and changed the course of history for Iran - and for the world.

As I write this in February 2026, the United States has just launched a major attack on Iran. Aircraft carriers, submarines, and the full weight of its military machine is assembled, ready to do battle with this ancient civilisation.

But to understand the present, we must understand the past that flows into it. This is both common sense and yet a principle routinely ignored.

Similarly, we are often told that those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat its mistakes. But what if they were not mistakes at all? What then?

Join me on a journey to find out. We begin in Iran, 1953 — with Kermit and Mohammed.

Some years ago — for reasons I’ll explain another time — I set about researching the story of President John F. Kennedy: his life and his violent demise. I discovered, perhaps unsurprisingly, that many lies had been told. When you find that important falsehoods have been deliberately spread, you are forced to ask: why? By whom? To what end?

I even conducted a small piece of original research into the JFK story. It was a simple experiment, but the results surprised me. Nearly half a century after the assassination, the tentacles of corruption were still there, pushing and pulling at the edges of the story — and even reaching towards me! That was unexpected. It taught me something about how power operates.

The Kennedy story does not stand in isolation. It emerged from a labyrinth of precedents and produced consequences that reach deep even into the present day. Its significance is difficult to overstate. JFK’s fate was not a one-off, not a strange rupture in an otherwise stable order. It was a moment in a much longer and larger struggle.

The struggle is ongoing and concerns something hard to define. “Evil” may be the simplest word for it — a force that is always there, organised, adaptive, and skilled at disguise.

I am far from the first to travel down these sometimes dark and winding lanes. Many serious scholars have done stellar work mapping the territory I cover only superficially. The best of them have no rivals — certainly not me. But sometimes the overall arc can get buried under the immense detail that scholarship demands.

My aim with HistoryInBites is to lay down some basic signposts — pointers to the shape of a vast story, one that spans the globe and at least half a century. It has shaped the world we live in whether we realise it or not. My goal is to illuminate something of this larger pattern without getting lost in the weeds.

Some of this material is uncomfortable and it is tempting to look away. But a life lived with blinkers on is not a full life. Asking questions often leads to more questions rather than answers — but the process, I believe, is both enlightening and enriching. With understanding comes the possibility for change.

Begin with Kermit and Mohammed.

See also youtube.com/@history-in-bites and x.com/HistoryInBites.

Trying to answer these question tends to lead only to the asking of more questions - but the journey that this process entails is at least enlightening., Welcome to History In Bites begin the journey with Kermit and Mohammed