Cold War Machinations in the Past: Allende & Bandaranaike

Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, whose chosen title is “The Cold War Killing of Ceylon’s Bandaranaike and Chile’s Allende: ‘Operation Colombo’, Culture War and the Disinformation Game”

Decolonizing Global South History and WOKE Film

 Rithika Kodithuwakku as a Tamil Sakkili Woman in Asoka Handagama’s art house rape fantasy which effectively character assassinated Chile’s Poet Laureate, Pablo Neruda in a different sort of ‘Operation Colombo’ to that which followed the CIA backed coup against Democratic Socialist President Dr. Salvador Allende in September 1973

September marks anniversaries in the chilling deaths of two democratically elected Socialist heads of state during the United States’ led Cold War anti-communist crusade that unfolded across the world for almost half a century between: The first assassination of concern here, happened in Colombo, the capital of the geostrategic Indian Ocean island of Ceylon on September 25, 1959.  The second death happened half way across the world in South America– fourteen years after the assassination of Ceylon’s first Socialist Prime Minister S.W.R.D Bandaranaike.

On September 11, 1973, President Salvador Allende, South America’s first Socialist head of state died during a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), backed coup as military helicopters strafed the Presidential Palace in Santiago de Chile.

Both deaths of democratically elected Socialist heads of State, were Cold War operation (1948 -1991), which sent shock waves around the world at the time. Both Bandaranaike and Allende, had promised to fully de-colonize and nationalize their countries’ plantations, ports, minerals and mines to benefit their native peoples, rather than foreign corporations drawing profits from the resource wealth of Global South countries. Both Bandaranaike and Allende died three years into their terms in office before they were able to deliver on the promise of full Economic independence for their citizens and de-colonization of their countries.

Remarkably, Prime Minister Bandaranaike was killed literally minutes after the US Ambassador, Bernard Gufler, had visited him in Colombo. Details of Gufler’s brief visit to Bandaranaike and departure from the scene of the crime just minutes before the assassination were revealed in de-classified US State department documents, some published on Wikileaks and corroborated by British intelligence source reports.[i]

The narrative that a Buddhist monk had shot the Prime Minister compounded the shock, horror and grief that engulfed the British Dominion of Ceylon which had received faux independence just 9 years earlier in February 1948.

The story that Bandaranaike’s assassin was a home grown Buddhist monk and ipso facto the killing an internal affair served to bury the external finger prints and motives behind the assassination plot of South Asia’s first Socialist head of state during escalating Cold War proxy war killings and regime change operations against socialist leaders in de-colonizing Asia, Africa and South America.

US Ambassador Guffler’s profile is of interest here. He was a Special Ambassador and a veteran of GLADIO, the clandestine NATO and CIA ‘stay behind’ secret operations network in Europe established after World War 2.[ii] Gladio was set up to contain socialism and communists against the Soviet Union/ Russia and would spill over into other containment strategies against Communist China in Indo-China and Southeast Asia, including Ceylon, where religions, particularly, Buddhism and Islam were being weaponized to fight “God-less” communists. GLADIO operations included ‘false flag’ terror attacks staged by right-wing paramilitary cells with secret NATO weapons caches– in order to blame and discredit European Left organizations and networks.

‘Operation Colombo’ in Santiago De Chile:

Remarkably, “Operation Colombo” was the Code Name of the dirty war killing spree and Disinformation Campaign against Chile’s leftists after the regime change coup against President Allende. Indeed, decades later in 2017, General Augusto Pinochet, Allende’s CIA-backed successor was tried for the “Operation Colombo” case, including the disappearance of 119 leftists and other grave human rights violations by the Chilean Secret Police Units or DINA.[iii]

‘Operation Colombo’, was followed by the notorious CIA networked clandestine ‘Operation Condor’, to track and trace communist across South America in partnership with right wing regimes. The US’ Monroe Doctrine helped keep Socialists and Leftist regimes at bay during and indeed after the Cold War.

Was it an accident that ‘Operation Colombo’ was the Code Name for the bloody anti-left violence, disappearances and mutilation which included a particular Dirty War aesthetics of terror, torture and Disinformation to control society that engulfed Santiago de Chile 1973 onwards? Who if anyone in Chile and Pinochet’s inner circle would be familiar with parallel events in Colombo, including the assassination of Prime Minister Bandaranaike halfway around the world in Ceylon’s capital city of Colombo? Or, the more recent purportedly leftist 1971 Janatha Vimukthi Peramnuna (JVP) uprising, ironically to overthrow the elected Socialist government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike– the world’s first woman head of state. At the time of the JVP student insurrection of 1971 there were widespread rumours in Colombo that the CIA was involved in the violence.

Clearly, those who named code named the Dirty War killing spree against Chilean Leftists “Operation Colombo’ in 1973 were not unfamiliar with events in Ceylon. Retrospectively, the 1971 JVP student uprising in Ceylon that instrumentalized university students and rural discontent, ironically, to overthrow a Socialist government in power in Colombo was a classic GLADIO-style “false flag” event. The JVP uprising in 1971 would serve to delegitimize, divide and fragment the left in Ceylon, and delay the country’s full de-colonization from British Dominion status amidst Cold War headwinds.

Disinformation: Aborada and the Character Assassination of Pablo Neruda

Within two weeks of the death of Allende in September 1973, Pablo Neruda, Chile’s Nobel Laureate and President Allende’s friend and Foreign Minister also died under mysterious circumstances. Neruda had been planning to escape to Mexico and tell the world the truth about the Coup in Chile and Allende’s death. As Neruda’s family members who sought repeated investigations into his death have suggested, he was arguably another victim of ‘Operation Colombo’ and the disinformation campaign against the Chilean Left – not just in Chile.

Neruda had spent time as a young diplomat and Chilean Consul in Colombo during 1929-30, just as in the early 70s, Russia’s now famous Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, was posted to Colombo and learned Sinhala as a young diplomat. Was it a coincidence or a disinformation operation that years, nay decades later in 2021 Colombo, Sri Lanka, a Woke feminist film titled Alborada was released about Pablo Neruda’s purported rape of a beautiful low caste maid? Albaroda based on a poem that Neruda ‘never wrote” effectively served to character assassinate him. May we expect similar salacious future Woke Art House Disinformation about Lavrov in Colombo once he is gone?

How, now, was Neruda who had fallen prey of Operation Colombo in the brutal attack on the Chilean left, decades later, subject to character assassination halfway around the world in Sri Lanka?! The film Albaroda about Neruda’s purported rape fantasy was by a well-known art house director Asoka Handagama. Albaroda’s international release took place in Tokyo.

Handagama who also worked at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL), famous for bond scams leading to the country’s first Sovereign Default in 2022, more recently directed the controversial film called Rani, about the 1989 State-JVP terror period and the killing of academic, human rights and media activist Richard de Soyza purportedly by state aligned paramilitary groups. That film was also funded by USAID.

Released in 2024, the Handagama’s Rani inexplicably glossed over the role of former President Ranil Wickramasinghe in the dirty war violence of 1989-1992. This, despite the fact that US- backed Wickramasinghe was the main beneficiary of the string of political assassinations of leaders of the United National Party (UNP) – including Lalith Athulathmudali, Gamini Dissanaike, and President Ranasinghe Premadasa, around the time of the chilling killing of Richard de Soyza, This being the period of Batalanda terror and torture operations in which he, Wickramasinghe was implicated if the Batalanda Commission Report is accurate.

This period of State-JVP dirty war with both penetrated by external intelligence agencies occurred when Israel’s Mossad and the British SAS officers of the Keenie Meenie mercenaries trained and worked with the Sri Lankan Special Task Forces (STF) in the South of Sri Lanka during the second JVP uprising in 1989-1992. The STF, like the Chilean Secret Police DINA that were accused of paramilitary terror and disappearances, were also later accused of war crimes.

Weaponizing Religion: An assassination by a Monk or a Psy Op?

Bandaranaike’s assassination purportedly by a Buddhist Monk compounded the shock, horror and grief that engulfed the island nation in September 1959. The campaign of disinformation that followed during the British Scotland Yard’s investigation into the Bandaranaike assassination also appeared to be a psychological operation to Gaslight the hapless natives of Paradise Lost.

New research into declassified State Department and Asia Foundation documents indicate that the CIA with the Asia Foundation was weaponizing religion/s, including Buddhism seen as a conservative force to undermine leftist governments. This, to divide socialist and communist de-colonization, national liberation and independence movements sweeping across the Global South, against Euro-American Imperialism.

Weasponizing religion/s and fighting ‘God-less Communists’ with religion was a tried and tested strategy of Washington’s Cold War, Dirty war, playbook, both in South America and Asia as Dianne Kirby and other scholars have shown.[iv]

In the case of Socialist governments, assassination of leaders and or regime change through application of the ‘Jakarta Method’ and Shock Doctrine to ‘Make the Economy Scream’ were standard. The history of the CIA’s weaponization of Theravada Buddhism as part of an anti-communist strategy is brilliantly documented in the book “Cold War Monks: Buddhism and America’s Secret Strategy in South East Asia”, published by Yale University Press (2017). Southeast Asian Cold War Area Studies included Theravada Thailand, Burma/Myanmar, and Ceylon/ Sri Lanka.

While the London Privy Council backstopped the court case against the accused monks, Thalduwe Somarama and Mapitigama Buddharakkita, his purported lover, Wimala Wijewardena who was a Cabinet Minister at the time, and a list of bit players, the British Scotland Yard’s investigation of the Bandaranaike assassination reads retrospectively like a classic disinformation and psychological operation: A cover up investigation worthy of the plot of Peter Greenaway’s classic film “The Cook the Thief, his Wife, and her Lover”.

The accused Monk Buddharakita’s interest in the geostrategic Colombo Port’s shipping lines were said have crossed a Norwegian Shipping line somewhere entwined in the assassination plot! Meanwhile, the chief suspect, Deputy Inspector General of Police Sidney de Zoysa seemingly escaped over the wall; only to return to stage a Coup attempt three years later in November 1962, against Bandaranaike’s widow and the world’s first woman Prime Minister.

Much like the assassination of Buddhist Burma’s Socialist leader, General Aung San on the eve of that country’s independence in 1947, which effectively sabotaged Burma’s unity, or the murder of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in 1961in a Belgian and CIA operation, Bandaranaike’s killing it appears was partly an ‘inside job’.[v] The national police, armed forces and law and order institutions, like the investigative and judicial branches being penetrated by Anglo imperial powers. Ceylon had only received faux independence from the British Raj, morphing from a British crown colony into a British Dominion, when Bandaranaike who had promised full de-colonization was killed. The assassination of Prime Minister Bandaranaike would delay Ceylon/ Sri Lanka’s full sovereignty and independence for another 13 years.

PART 2

From Operation Colombo to the Jakarta Method: The JVP and CIA

‘Operation Colombo’ in Santiago de Chile, reverberates with the same Disinformation that unfolded in Indonesia during the coup against President Sukarno who was like Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement in the Global South, then called the Third World. President Sukarno had hosted the famous Afro-Asian Bandung Summit with the heads of state of 29 newly independent countries near the Indonesia capita Jakarta.

What later came to be termed the “Jakarta Method” or ‘Jakarta Operation’ to destroy the world’s largest Communist Party outside of China, in Indonesia in 1965 was later unleashed in Allende’s Chile and across Brazil.  The CIA’s “Jakarta Method” Operations in Indonesia against Sukarno that unfolded across Brazil during the Dirty war in that country are detailed in Vincent Bevin’s book, ‘The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anti-Communist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped our world” published in 2020.

As Bevins writes “Operation Jakarta was the name of a secret part of an extermination plan… which was aimed at destroying the structure of the Brazilian Communist Party.. the goal was the physical elimination of communists. Operation Jakarta was a hidden plan to extend state terror to communist party members operating openly with civil society groups or the media (pg. 194). The Brazilian Public would not hear the words Operation Jakarta for another three years. But in Chile the word “Jakarta” made a very public arrival”. It was a warning that Allende’s days were numbered.

Clearly, whoever code named the campaign against Chile’s Leftists in the wake of the Jakarta Operation leading to the death of President Allende, “Operation Colombo”, was fully updated not just about Socialist Prime Minister Bandaranaike’s assassination in Colombo, Ceylon half way across the world in 1959.

Those who code named the Chilean Secret Police DINA’s ‘Operation Colombo’ to decimate the Left in Chile 1973 in the wake of the coup against Allende (until Operation Condor superseded Operation Colombo), were clearly fully cognisant of more recent developments in Ceylon. That is, the attempted 1971 Leftist youth insurrection by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), against Bandaranaike’s wife and successor, the Socialist Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, also to divide and de-legitimize the Left.

“Operation Colombo” in Santiago de Chile that saw hundreds of leftist intellectuals killed, mutilated and disappeared after the death of Allende in 1973, clearly referenced the more recent failed, partly CIA-backed Marxist insurrection by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in 1971. Reportedly partly CIA instigated the JVP uprising was staged against the ruling socialist Sirimavo Bandaranike government in Colombo, Ceylon. The result was numbers of youth killed and the Left delegitimized. It was another Gladio style false flag operation.

The JVP uprising in 1971 ended with the quashing of leftist youth, segments of which were backed by the CIA.  Colombo fought off the rebels with the help of neighbouring India, another NAM friend close to the Soviet Union, while it was widely rumoured that the CIA was involved in destabilizing the county, also to sabotage Ceylon’s the push to full independence from British Dominion status.

Was the JVP youth uprising in early 1971 staged to disrupt and stymie the Socialist Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranike’s move to deliver on the promise to make Ceylon fully independent? At the time Colombo was a close allie of Indira Gandhi who was in turn an allie of Moscow.

The CIA-backed JVP was virulently anti-Indian at the time of its 1989 Dirty War operations against the State, but has shifted over time with its principle patron’s stance against India softening with the end of the Cold War.  The US and India have drawn closer in an apparent collaboration to fight and contain the rising Chinese dragon in the Indian Ocean region.

In any evert, in the following year, on May 22. 1972, the fully independent and Sovereign state of Sri Lanka came into existence under the First Republican Constitution of 1972. The county’s name changed from the British Dominion of Ceylon to the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. The island’s courts became independent of London’s Privy Council.

At the time a Minister even expressed strong suspicion that the CIA was involved in the Bandaranaike assassination and the subsequent 1971 JVP insurrection to destabilize the Socialist Government of the world’s first woman head of state, a staunch leader of the Non-Aligned Movement.

But so great was the disinformation campaign against the Left that the country barely recognizes May 22 or celebrates Republican Day unlike India where Republican Day is a main celebration of Independence.

History repeats? Towards a Global South Historical Methodology of the Present

Sri Lanka became a fully independent Sovereign State on May 22, 1972; officially rid of the British Monarchy despite the JVP insurrection of 1971 seemingly also to derail and delay the push to full independence

However, the county was precipitated into its first ever staged Sovereign Default in 2022 amid another regime change operation. This was a another leaderless chaos operation against a no doubt unpopular regime by youth tired of two years of brutal Covid-19 Lockdowns and militarized mass injections. It was also a GAFAM social media remote platform operated Gen-Z Aragalaya protest. The country has since effectively lost its economic sovereignty to the Washington Twins (IMF and World Bank), BlackRock and other colonial Club de Paris Vulture Funds, and International Sovereign Bond or Eurobond holders whose names are secret, being caught in a neocolonial debt trap.

British and US interference in the county’s domestic affairs and political outcomes remain in place, much as in Chile, which speaks to the importance of de-colonizing history with comparative global South studies across continents, Cold War Area Studies disciplinary partitions, and beyond the modern national state– in order to see patterns in Cold War history across continents and the Global South.

Given layers of accumulated disinformation, with years and decades of cover up investigations with deep penetration of investigation and law and order institutions of many countries in the Global South by neocolonial powers, often under the guise of Development Aid, expertise sharing and technical training, it makes sense to triangulate events across continents — to see patterns in a shared Global South history.

As new scholarship and research based on recently de-classified US State Department documents and British Home office sources circulates through open source channels the space exists for countries in the Global South to brush history against the grain and understand how apparently ‘internal’ conflicts and violence were often substantially contoured in Cold War regional proxy wars which roiled much of Asia, Africa and South America –with a great deal of Operation Colombo- style disinformation.

Thus, events like the Bandaranaike assassination or the JVP insurrections of 1971 and 1989-91, read through a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion” may be better understood via “Operation Colombo” in Santiago de Chile, or the ‘Jakarta Method’ in Brasilia’s favelas and elite neighbor hoods. Such reinterpretation of the historical record in Asia, Africa and South America is especially needed as decoding history and recovering the Oppressed Past in the Global South from ‘history’s apparent victors’ (Euro-centric history), is further complicated by Artificial Intelligence (AI), algorithms designed to game our national history, archives and local memory, and divide us from ourselves.

Having failed to de-colonize its history and pivot to the BRICS and Global South, Sri Lanka today continues to witness barely concealed regime change operations, system shocks, ethno-religious, gender LGBTQ.. xyz Culture Wars, that may be weaponized for social media remote platform coordinated Araglaya protest and regime change operations. The country’s intelligentsia, civil society and funded Woke NGOs remain caught in Disinformation games as seen in the Woke film Alborada.  Thus, South Asia’s wealthiest country by all metrics bar the exorbitantly privileged US dollar believes itself to be bankrupt!

Meanwhile, so-called anti-corruption, levelling crowds unleashed via social media for regime change chaos operations predominantly constitute by deluded youth now fashionable recast as Gen-Z protesters sabotaging their futures, burning down courts and parliament seeking regime change as recently happened in Nepal and Bangladesh. All this of course advances the program to “Make the Economy Scream” (as Nixon famously instructed the CIA to do to stymie and eventually take down President Salvador Allende in Chile in early 1970).

Simultaneously, woke disinformation amid endless Culture Wars helps the re-cycling and circulation of the same politicians and/ or Political Parties like the JVP, albeit with a puppet show of democratic elections. Meanwhile, elected representatives of the people whether Right wing, Green or Left, all push the same Washington Consensus designed neoliberal policies. Such is the case of the current re-branded Leftist JVP National People’s Party (NPP), that implements with alacrity the dictate of the Washington Consensus! The rebranded JVP in the form of the NPP government having benefited from the Araglaya chaos operation for regime change and staged Default in 2022, thus rushed to sign the IMF’s International Sovereign Bond debt restructure once it came to power in December 2024. This was arguably, the biggest CBSL bond scam yet!

Having turned its back on the BRICS, Shanghai Corporation Organization, greater integration with Asia and the Global South, the JVP-NPP regime in Colombo continues to dance to the tunes of Sri Lanka’s Anglo-European neo-colonizers.

The NPP is now in a rush to implement the IMF’s call to “unbundle”, fragment and eventually privatize the Ceylon Electricity Board’s (CEB) national electricity grid system and supply chain. This under the guise of ‘reform’ and restructuring the CEB’s so-called “legacy debt” concocted by IMF’s accountants. This in lieu of outright Debt Cancellation by the State of the state owned CEB’s debt– as national experts have recommended. Breaking up the CEB into 5 entities, under the jargon of “unbundling’ would hollow out the CEB while restructuring dubious ‘legacy debt’ with private banks as a prelude to privatizing the national electricity system presents a clear and present danger to Sri Lanka’s energy and economic security.

But the JVP’s latest face mask seems to be slipping. Its IMF designed neo-liberal policies with a faux Left (red T-shirt?) veneer is called “pragmatism” in the legacy press.

We live in complex times in an apparently upside down world.  But clearly, those who do not know their history like those who chose to forget it, are doomed to repeat it!

[i] LOWENSTEIN: Well, Bandaranaike was assassinated shortly after Gufler arrived. I went with  Gufler to the Prime Minister’s as a note taker. When we got there, he said, “I don’t think I will take a note taker, stay in the car and wait for me.” He went in and came out and we left Bandaranaike’s house. As we drove out the gate and down the street, there was a popping noise.We got back to the Embassy and a friend of mine from the British Mission who was their  intelligence guy called me and said, “Chap’s been shot.” I said, “What chap?” He said, “The PM  old boy.” I said, “Really, that is impossible, we just saw him.” “Well,” he said, “He was shot  right after you saw him.” And indeed he was. I think Gufler was the last person who saw him  alive. I can’t imagine that anybody else could have gotten in there between Gufler’s departure and the time.

https://adst.org/Readers/Sri-Lanka.pdf initially uploaded at Wikileaks Lowenstein’s interview is fascinating and provides insight into the wider geopolitical backdrop of Bandaranaike’s killing.

Q: The previous governments had been pro-Western, but Bandaranaike was not.

LOWENSTEIN: He was very much in the non-aligned movement and saw himself as a sort ofjunior Nehru, and so did all his successors. Non-alignment was a very big thing, but it was a loaded non-alignment. It was much more anti-American non-alignment than it was pro-Russianor pro-Chinese non-alignment. The Chinese had a rice/rubber agreement and were in there tryingto carve out a sphere of interest.. https://adst.org/Readers/Sri-Lanka.pdf

[ii] https://files.libcom.org/files/NATOs_secret_armies.pdf

[iii] See Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/128985-operation-colombo and https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2024-06-18/pinochet-regime-declassified-dina-gestapo-type-police-force-chile;

[iv] https://www.scribd.com/doc/262246516/Dianne-Kirby-Religion-and-the-Cold-War

[v] Who killed General Aung San? https://www.irrawaddy.com/from-the-archive/who-killed-gen-aung-san.html