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