The Empire’s Playbook

There’s a paper sitting on my desk by a political scientist named Yaniv Voller out of the University of Kent. It’s about how governments in Iraq and Sudan recruited militias from the very populations they were fighting, organized them along tribal and ethnic lines, and used them not to win battles but to shatter the social fabric of the rebel constituency from within. The militias were lousy fighters. Everyone knew it. Baghdad knew it. Khartoum knew it. They kept funding them anyway.

The paper asks why. And the answer it arrives at is elegant in the way a knife is elegant: the point was never military victory. The point was ethnic defection. Turn enough of the population against itself and the insurgency collapses under its own internal bleeding. You don’t have to beat the rebels if you can get their cousins to do it for you.

I read that paper three times. And somewhere between the second and third read, the academic language started sounding familiar. Not because I’d studied Iraqi Kurdistan. Because I’d been reading declassified CIA documents for years.

The playbook is the same.

In 1953, the CIA spent a million dollars to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. His crime was nationalizing British-controlled oil after the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company refused to let auditors look at the books. A million bucks. That bought you rented mobs, bribed newspaper editors, and thugs from athletic clubs in Tehran. A CIA officer named Kermit Roosevelt walked into the country with a suitcase and walked out with a government. About 300 people died. The Shah came back from his vacation in Rome and ruled for 26 years with a secret police force the CIA helped build.

The Agency’s own declassified history, released in 2013 and expanded in 2017, describes the operation as carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy. No hedging. Their words.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution traces directly to that suitcase. Every American hostage, every sanctions regime, every threatening headline about Iran for the last 45 years traces back to a million dollars and a man named Kermit.

I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.

Henry Kissinger, 40 Committee Meeting, June 1970

Guatemala, 1954. President Jacobo Árbenz had the audacity to expropriate unused United Fruit Company land and offer compensation at the tax value the company itself had declared. The Dulles brothers ran the operation. Allen ran the CIA. John Foster ran the State Department. Their law firm had represented United Fruit. Allen had sat on the board. The CIA spent between $5 and $7 million, flew 80 bombing missions over a sovereign country, and installed a dictator. The ensuing 36-year civil war killed over 200,000 people, most of them indigenous Maya.

Che Guevara was in Guatemala City when it happened. He watched a democratically elected government get destroyed by a fruit company with friends in Langley. If you’ve ever wondered where Latin American revolutionary movements got their recruitment material, now you know.

Chile, 1973. Salvador Allende nationalized copper. Nixon’s handwritten order to CIA Director Richard Helms, now declassified and sitting in the National Security Archive at George Washington University, reads: make the economy scream. The CIA spent $6.5 million funding opposition media, parties, and organizations during Allende’s presidency. They arranged the kidnapping of the army chief of staff, General René Schneider, because he was a constitutionalist who wouldn’t support a coup. He was killed with a CIA-supplied weapon. On September 11, 1973, Pinochet’s forces bombed La Moneda Palace. Allende died inside.

Pinochet ruled for 17 years. Over 3,000 killed. Tens of thousands tortured. Operation Condor spread the method across South America like a franchise.

The Congo, 1960. Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, lasted weeks. A CIA cable from Allen Dulles declared his removal an urgent and prime objective. The Agency’s in-house chemist, Sidney Gottlieb, personally flew to the Congo carrying poisoned toothpaste. When the poison plot stalled, they bankrolled Colonel Mobutu with briefcases of cash, backed a coup, and facilitated Lumumba’s transfer to Katanga province, where he was shot by firing squad. A Belgian police commissioner kept one of his teeth as a souvenir for 60 years. It was repatriated in 2022.

Mobutu ruled for 32 years. One of the most corrupt leaders in African history. Continuous CIA support the entire time.

Indonesia, 1965. After an earlier failed attempt to break the country apart through secessionist revolts, the CIA cultivated anti-communist army officers. When General Suharto launched his purge, a U.S. Embassy political officer named Robert Martens compiled lists of Communist Party members and handed them to Indonesian security forces. Declassified cables released in 2017 show American officials had detailed knowledge of the killings. Historian Bradley Simpson’s assessment: they were willfully and gleefully pushing for mass murder.

Between 500,000 and a million people were killed. The CIA’s own internal report called it one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century. Time magazine called it the West’s best news for years in Asia.

Same sentence. Same event. Two different truths, depending on which side of the filing cabinet you’re sitting on.

The academic literature calls them proxy forces, indigenous militias, civilian defense forces. Voller calls them defector militias. I call them disposable people, because that’s what the historical record shows they are.

The Contras in Nicaragua. Reagan called them the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. The CIA built them from scratch with help from Argentine intelligence. When Congress cut off funding through the Boland Amendments, the White House went off-book. Saudi Arabia kicked in $32 million. Oliver North built a private arms-and-money pipeline with its own planes, pilots, airfield, a ship, and Swiss bank accounts. Iran paid $48 million for weapons, and the profits went to Central America. The CIA mined three Nicaraguan harbors in 1984. Republican Senator Barry Goldwater wrote a furious letter calling it an act of war.

The International Court of Justice agreed. Ruled the United States in violation of international law. America’s response was to withdraw from compulsory ICJ jurisdiction, veto a Security Council resolution, and ignore a General Assembly vote of 94 to 3.

That’s not a rogue operation. That’s a country telling the entire international legal order to go to hell. On the record.

What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe?

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Le Nouvel Observateur, 1998

Afghanistan. Operation Cyclone. Over $2 billion in CIA money. Saudi Arabia matched dollar for dollar. All aid was funneled through Pakistan’s ISI, which directed most of it to hardline Islamist factions. Approximately 2,300 Stinger missiles shipped. Brzezinski admitted in 1998 that the U.S. signed the first secret aid directive on July 3, 1979, five months before the Soviet invasion. Not a response. A provocation. Asked if he had any regrets about empowering Islamic fundamentalism, he gave the quote above.

The mujahideen splintered. The Taliban emerged. Al-Qaeda found sanctuary. The rest is every front page from September 2001 onward.

Syria. Timber Sycamore. Approximately $1 billion a year by 2015. One of the CIA’s largest covert operations in history. Over 60,000 rebels across at least 42 groups. Weapons purchased from Eastern European surplus, including TOW anti-tank missiles. Corrupt Jordanian intelligence officials stole CIA-supplied weapons and sold them on black markets. An EU-funded study confirmed the program significantly increased the weapons available to ISIS. Trump killed the program in 2017, calling it dangerous and wasteful.

The Sons of Iraq. The Anbar Awakening. The U.S. paid approximately 91,000 Sunni fighters $300 a month each, spending $16 million a month at peak. Total investment exceeded $400 million. When responsibility transferred to the Iraqi government, Prime Minister Maliki called the Sons of Iraq a national threat and dismantled the program. The abandoned, unemployed fighters became recruitment fodder for ISIS, which swept through Anbar and took Mosul.

Carter Malkasian wrote in Foreign Affairs that almost everything the United States fought for from 2003 to 2007 was lost.

This is the ethnic defection model in Voller’s paper, running at industrial scale. Recruit local fighters along tribal lines. Pay them. Arm them. Use them. Leave them.

The Kurdish story deserves its own section because it’s the clearest proof that the pattern is deliberate.

In 1972, Kissinger authorized CIA support for Mustafa Barzani’s Kurdish insurgency against Iraq, at the Shah of Iran’s request. The Pike Committee later revealed that the United States never intended Kurdish victory. The goal was for the insurgents to simply continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of Iraq. When the Shah cut a deal with Saddam in 1975, all American support vanished overnight. Barzani sent Kissinger a desperate letter. There was no reply. Two hundred thousand Kurds became refugees. Saddam razed 1,400 villages.

The Pike Committee’s assessment: even in the context of covert action, ours was a cynical enterprise.

Kissinger’s response, now part of the public record: covert action should not be confused with missionary work.

In 1991, George H.W. Bush called on Iraqis to take matters into their own hands. The Kurds rose up. The U.S. provided no support. Saddam used helicopter gunships. Over 20,000 Kurds killed.

In 2019, Trump withdrew from northern Syria after a phone call with Erdoğan. The YPG and SDF, the primary U.S. allies against ISIS, the people who did the actual ground fighting and dying, were abandoned. Turkey invaded. Two hundred thousand people displaced.

Three betrayals. Same people. Five decades apart. Same playbook.

Coups and proxy wars are the loud parts. But the machinery runs on quieter instruments too, and they operate continuously, for years, before anyone notices.

Sanctions. In 1996, Madeleine Albright went on 60 Minutes and Lesley Stahl told her that half a million Iraqi children had died under the sanctions regime. More children than died in Hiroshima. Stahl asked if the price was worth it. Albright said: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it. On camera. Two senior UN humanitarian coordinators resigned in protest. Denis Halliday called the sanctions genocidal. Iraq was allowed to buy a sewage treatment plant under the Oil-for-Food program but blocked from purchasing the generator to run it.

The National Endowment for Democracy. Founded in 1983. Co-founder Allen Weinstein told the Washington Post in 1991: a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA. Nearly 100% funded by Congressional appropriations. NED President Carl Gershman explained the logic: it would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA. So they created a funding vehicle with a different name. Same money. Same objectives. Better optics.

The numbers tell the story. $22.4 million in 334 grants to Ukraine since 2014. Funding to Venezuela quadrupled to $877,000 before the 2002 coup attempt. $4 million across 54 projects in Nicaragua before the 2018 unrest. Over $10 million total in Hong Kong since 1994. NED board members have included CIA Director William Burns, Victoria Nuland, and Iran-Contra figure Elliott Abrams.

That’s not democracy promotion. That’s regime change with a 501(c)(3).

The School of the Americas. Renamed WHINSEC in 2001. A former director of instruction, Major Joseph Blair, stated publicly that there are no substantive changes besides the name. Over 83,000 Latin American military and security personnel trained at Fort Benning, Georgia. Graduates include Manuel Noriega, Efraín Ríos Montt, the Guatemalan general convicted of genocide, Hugo Banzer of Bolivia, and Roberto Viola of Argentina’s dirty war. A UN panel found that 19 of the 27 soldiers who murdered six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her 16-year-old daughter in El Salvador were School of the Americas graduates. In 1996, the Pentagon released SOA training manuals that advocated torture, extortion, blackmail, and targeting civilians.

They renamed it. That was the reform.

There’s a quote attributed to Franklin Roosevelt about Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza: he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch. Historians have never found archival evidence that Roosevelt actually said it. The phrase first appeared in a 1948 Time article, three years after FDR died. Whether or not the man said the words, every administration since has executed the policy.

The Shah of Iran. Installed via CIA coup, supported through decades of SAVAK torture. Pinochet. Came to power in a CIA-backed coup, killed 3,000, tortured tens of thousands. Suharto. Rose to power amid U.S.-facilitated mass killings of half a million to a million people, ruled for 32 years. Mobutu. Installed after the CIA-facilitated assassination of Lumumba, looted the Congo for three decades. The Somoza dynasty. Installed with U.S. Marine support, ruled Nicaragua for 42 years. Saudi Arabia. Ongoing strategic alliance, no further comment necessary.

And the leaders overthrown? Mossadegh wanted to audit the oil company’s books. Árbenz wanted unused farmland distributed to peasants. Allende nationalized copper. Lumumba wanted resource sovereignty for a country that had been a Belgian king’s personal plantation.

Land reform. Oil audits. Copper revenue. These were the crimes that warranted coups, bombing campaigns, and decades of dictatorship.

We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.

George Kennan, Policy Planning Study 23, February 1948 (declassified)

That’s not an accusation from a foreign adversary. That’s a classified U.S. State Department document, written by the head of Policy Planning, in 1948. Kennan went on to recommend that the United States cease talking about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization, and instead deal in straight power concepts. The document is declassified and published in the Foreign Relations of the United States series. You can read it yourself.

The thing that keeps me reading declassified documents at 3 AM is not the operations. It’s the candor. These people wrote the quiet part down. They said the quiet part into microphones. They testified about the quiet part to Congressional committees, and the committees published it.

Kissinger, in a declassified State Department cable from March 1975, to the Turkish Foreign Minister: before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, the illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer. Verified. It’s in the cable archive.

Major General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honor recipient, in 1935: I spent thirty-three years in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. He said looking back, he might have given Al Capone a few hints, because Capone only operated in three districts. Butler operated on three continents. He published it as a book called War Is a Racket. You can buy it on Amazon for eight dollars.

The Church Committee. 1975-76. Senator Frank Church of Idaho. Two thousand seven hundred and two pages across six volumes. Documented CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, illegal domestic surveillance, covert action in Chile, and media manipulation. Confirmed that the CIA maintained relationships with over 50 American journalists and a network of several hundred foreign individuals providing access to newspapers, radio stations, and publishers. Confirmed over 1,000 books produced or sponsored by the Agency before 1967. Estimated annual cost of CIA information operations: $265 million.

That was 1975 money. Adjusted for inflation, you’re looking at well over a billion dollars a year spent on shaping what people think is true.

The committee published it. All of it. The United States Senate published the detailed mechanics of how its own intelligence services subverted democracy at home and abroad, bound it in six volumes, and put it in the Library of Congress. And then changed almost nothing.

I started this piece with Voller’s paper because the academic language maps so precisely onto the American record that it reads like a case study they forgot to include.

Ethnic defection. Governments recruit militias from the rebel constituency, organize them along tribal and ethnic lines, use them to deepen existing cleavages, and create dependence. The defectors can’t go back. The insurgency fractures. The incumbent doesn’t need to win the war if the war becomes an internal feud.

The Ba’th regime in Iraq did this with Kurdish tribes through the National Defense Battalions. Instructions from Baghdad stated that each battalion should include about 500 people, all belonging to the mustashar’s tribe. The Sudanese government did it with Toposa, Murle, and Shilluk militias in the South, explicitly instructing ethnic groups to attack their neighbors. Both governments meticulously documented tribal feuds in intelligence files and used that information to target recruitment.

Now read that paragraph again and replace “Ba’th regime” with “CIA.” Replace “Kurdish tribes” with “Hmong” or “Contras” or “Sons of Iraq” or “mujahideen.” Replace “National Defense Battalions” with “Anbar Awakening” or “Timber Sycamore.” Replace “instructions from Baghdad” with “Langley.” The structure is identical. Find existing social fractures. Exploit them. Arm one side. Create dependence. Walk away when the strategic objective changes.

The Hmong in Laos. The CIA recruited approximately 60% of Hmong men into Special Guerrilla Units during the Secret War. Food drops were used as leverage: villages that didn’t provide soldiers lost food supplies. By the end, boys as young as 13 were fighting. When the U.S. withdrew in 1975, about 2,500 Hmong were evacuated. An estimated 150,000 escaped on their own, walking through jungles and swimming the Mekong on bamboo rafts. The Pathet Lao targeted them for execution. Hmong veterans are still not officially recognized as American service veterans.

Voller writes that the recruitment of defector militias left the insurgency weakened, distanced from the local population, and devoid of uniform popular support. He’s describing Chechnya. But he’s also describing every U.S. proxy force in the last 70 years.

I keep coming back to this: the American record is self-documenting. Nixon said make the economy scream and Helms wrote it down. Kissinger said Chilean voters couldn’t be trusted with their own democracy, in a meeting with minutes. Albright said half a million dead children were worth it on national television. The NED’s co-founder explained to the Washington Post that they were doing the CIA’s work openly. Smedley Butler called himself a gangster for capitalism and published it as a book. The Church Committee spent two years documenting the mechanics and then printed the whole thing in six volumes.

Nobody had to leak this. Nobody had to hack a server. The principals wrote it down, said it out loud, and in several cases, published it themselves. The world’s most powerful democracy systematically overthrew democracies. The champion of human rights trained torturers at a school in Georgia and then renamed the school when people noticed. The advocate of international law withdrew from the International Court of Justice when the court ruled against mining another country’s harbors.

And the playbook Voller describes in Baghdad and Khartoum, the ethnic defection model, the deliberate fragmentation of societies through proxy militias that exist to divide rather than to fight, runs from the Hmong in 1961 to the Kurds in 2019 with barely a variation.

The declassified record doesn’t support the critique. It is the critique. Written in the government’s own handwriting, on the government’s own letterhead, and stored in the government’s own archives.

All I did was read it.