What two Cold War killings reveal about empire and disinformation.
By Darini Rajasingham Senanayake*
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka | 1 October 2025 (IDN) — 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 between 1948-91: The first assassination of concern here happened in Colombo, the capital of the geostrategic Indian Ocean Island of Ceylon on 25 September 1959. The second death occurred halfway across the world, fourteen years after the assassination of South Asia’s first Socialist Prime Minister, S.W.R.D.D. Bandaranaike.
On 11 September 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 operations (1948 -1991), which sent shock waves around the world at the time. Both Bandaranaike and Allende had promised to fully de-colonise and nationalise 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 complete economic independence for their citizens.
Remarkably, Prime Minister Bandaranaike was killed 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 declassified 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.
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 in partnership with British intelligence.[ii] Gladio was set up to counter socialism, communism, and the Soviet Union/Russia. GLADIO operations included ‘false flag’ terror attacks staged by right-wing paramilitary cells with secret NATO weapons caches– to blame and discredit European Left organisations and networks. Gladio would later spill over into other containment strategies against Communist China in Indo-China and Southeast Asia, including Ceylon, where religion, notably Buddhism and Islam, was weaponised to combat “God-less” communists and destabilise the region.
The story that Bandaranaike’s assassin was a homegrown Buddhist monk and ipso facto the killing was an internal affair served to bury the external fingerprints and motives behind the assassination plot of South Asia’s first democratically elected Socialist head of state in a period of escalating Cold War killings and regime change operations against socialist leaders in decolonising Asia, Africa and South America. This was a time when retreating Anglo-European empires sought to retain their economic and security interests and influence in the post/colony.
‘Operation Colombo’ in Santiago De Chile
“Operation Colombo” was the Code Name of the dirty war killing spree and Disinformation Campaign against Chile’s leftists that followed 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, trace and eliminate communists 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, designed to spread fear and control society that engulfed Santiago de Chile, September 1973 onwards? Why was the Psychological operation of fear and disinformation in Santiago code-named Operation Colombo? Who, if anyone, in General Pinochet’s inner circle was familiar with parallel events in Colombo, Ceylon, such as the assassination of Prime Minister Bandaranaike? Or, the more recent purportedly leftist 1971 Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) uprising, ironically aimed at overthrowing the elected leftist 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. Clearly, those who named code-named the killing spree against Chilean Leftists “Operation Colombo’ in Santiago de Chile in 1973, referenced these events in Ceylon. Retrospectively, the 1971 JVP student uprising in Ceylon that instrumentalised university students and rural discontent appears as a classic GLADIO-style “false flag” event. The JVP uprising served to delegitimise, divide and fragment the Left in Ceylon. It derailed and delayed the country’s full decolonisation from British Dominion status that Bandaranaike had promised amidst the Cold War’s headwinds.
Art House film and Disinformation
Within two weeks of the death of President Allende in September 1973, Pablo Neruda, Chile’s Nobel Laureate and Allende’s friend and Foreign Minister, also died under mysterious circumstances. Neruda had planned to escape to Mexico to 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, suggested, he was arguably another victim of ‘Operation Colombo’.
Remarkably, Neruda had spent time as a young diplomat and Chilean Consul in Colombo, Ceylon, during 1929-30, just as Russia’s now famous Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, was posted to Colombo and learned Sinhala as a young diplomat in the early 1970s.
Was it a coincidence or a disinformation operation that years, nay decades later, in 2021 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, a Woke feminist film titled Alborada was released about Pablo Neruda’s purported rape of a beautiful low caste maid? Alborada, directed by well-known arthouse film director Asoka Handagama, based on a poem that Neruda never wrote, by Handagama’s own admission, effectively served to character assassinate Neruda. May we expect similar salacious Woke Art House Disinformation about Lavrov’s sojourn in Colombo in the future?
How, now, and why was the Socialist Neruda, who had fallen prey to the anti-Left Operation Colombo carried out by the Chilean secret police DINA in Santiago in 1973, subject to character assassination in Colombo, Sri Lanka, almost fifty years later?!
Alborada’s international release took place in Tokyo. It is no secret that Japan is Washington’s closest Asian ally and a leading member of the QUAD. Handagama, who also worked at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL), is famous for bond scams leading to the country’s first Sovereign Default in 2022. His recent film Rani, about the 1989 State-JVP terror period and the killing of human rights and media activist Richard de Soyza, purportedly by state-aligned paramilitary groups, has also been criticised for a lack of research. USAID also funded that film.
Released in 2024, Handagama’s Rani inexplicably glosses over the role of former President Ranil Wickramasinghe in the Dirty War terror and torture house violence of 1989-1992. This, even though US-backed Wickramasinghe was the primary 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 was 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 charged with war crimes.
It would seem that Handagama’s Woke identity politics films, such as Alborada and Rani, have served to promote Culture Wars, saturate the public sphere, and distract from substantive truths —a form of art-house disinformation?
Weaponising Religion
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. Oxford-educated Bandaranaike was cast as an anti-minority ‘racist’ who had mobilised the Sinhala masses and was blamed for his own death at the hands of a nationalist monk who purportedly converted to Christianity before he was hanged.
New research into declassified State Department and Asia Foundation documents indicate that the CIA, with the Asia Foundation, was weaponising religion/s, including Buddhism, seen as a conservative force to undermine leftist governments. This is to distinguish between socialist and communist decolonisation, national liberation, and independence movements sweeping across the Global South, in contrast to Euro-American Imperialism.
Weasponising and fragmenting religion/s to counter ‘God-less Communists’ was a tried and tested strategy of Washington’s proxy and dirty war, Cold War playbook across South America, Africa and Asia, as Dianne Kirby and other scholars have shown.[iv] Indeed, Kirby, describing the politics of church and state in the Cold War era and the extent to which Evangelical churches played an anti-communist role, affirmed that the ‘Cold War was one of history’s great religious wars.’ In the case of Socialist governments in the Global South, assassination of leaders and or regime change through application of the ‘Jakarta Method’, also to ‘Make the Economy Scream’, were standard operating procedure.
The history of the CIA’s weaponisation 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 Southeast Asia”, published by Yale University Press (2017). Southeast Asian Cold War Area Studies encompassed Theravada Thailand, Burma (now Myanmar), and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
The London Privy Council backed the court case against the accused monks, Thalduwe Somarama and Mapitigama Buddharakkita, as well as his purported lover, Wimala Wijewardena, a Cabinet Minister at the time, and a list of other individuals. 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 recently nationalised geostrategic Colombo Port’s shipping lines was said to have crossed a Norwegian Shipping line somewhere during the assassination plot! Meanwhile, the chief suspect, Deputy Inspector General of Police Sidney de Zoysa, seemingly escaped over the wall, robe in hand, only to return three years later in November 1962 to stage a coup attempt against Bandaranaike’s widow and the world’s first female Prime Minister.
Much like the assassination of Burma’s Buddhist 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] Arguably, so too the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, January 1948, on the eve of India’s Independence, after which India was partitioned.
The national police, armed forces, and law and order institutions in the post-colony, such as the investigative and judicial branches, were penetrated and effectively controlled by Anglo imperial external powers working in conjunction with segments within the state. Ceylon had only received nominal independence from the British Raj in February 1948, when it transitioned from a Crown Colony to a British Dominion. The assassination of Prime Minister Bandaranaike who had promised complete decolonisation would delay Ceylon/ Sri Lanka’s full sovereignty and independence for another 13 years until his widow and world’s first woman Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike delivered on that promise on 22 May, 1972 having faced down the JVP insurrection of 1971, an attempted Coup in 1962, huge disinformation and ongoing attempts to “Make the Economy Scream”.
From the Jakarta Method to Operation Colombo
‘Operation Colombo’ in Santiago, Chile, in 1972, reverberated with the same disinformation that unfolded across Indonesia during the 1965 coup against President Sukarno, who, like Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, was a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the Global South, then referred to as the Third World. President Sukarno had hosted the famous Afro-Asian Bandung Summit, attended by the heads of state of 29 newly independent countries, near the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.
Ten years after the Bandung Conference, the CIA’s “Jakarta Method” Operation unfolded across Indonesia against Sukarno in 1965, and a decade later across Chile and Brazil during the Dirty Wars escalating in South America. These events are brilliantly detailed in the award-winning book by Vincent Bevins, ‘The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anti-Communist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped our world,” published in 2020. 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, was also unleashed in Brazil and Chile.
As Bevins wrote, “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. The graffiti scrawled on walls in Santiago 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, way across the world in 1959. Those who code-named the Chilean Secret Police DINA’s ‘Operation Colombo’ to decimate the Left in Chile in 1973, in the wake of the coup (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, Sirimavo, to divide and delegitimise the Left.
The code name “Operation Colombo” in Santiago de Chile clearly referenced the more recent failed, so-called Marxist insurrection by the JVP in 1971, which resulted in several youths killed and the Left delegitimised. It was another Gladio-style false flag operation. The JVP uprising of 1971 ended with the quashing of leftist youth. Colombo fought off the rebels with the help of neighbouring India, close to Moscow. At the same time, it was widely rumoured that the CIA was involved in destabilising the country to sabotage Ceylon’s push to complete Independence from British Dominion status.
Was the JVP youth uprising in early 1971 staged to disrupt and stymie the Socialist Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s move to deliver on the promise to make Ceylon fully independent? At the time, Sirimavo in Colombo was a close friend of Indira Gandhi in New Delhi. Both ladies were allies of Moscow.
Unsurprisingly, the JVP was virulently anti-Indian, projecting India as a neocolonial power during the Cold War. However, it has shifted its anti-India stance over time, along with its principal foreign patron’s stance against India softening at the end of the Cold War. Indeed, in recent times, the US and India have drawn closer in an apparent collaboration to contain the Chinese dragon and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the Indian Ocean region.
In any event, in the following year, on 22 May. 1972, the fully independent and Sovereign state of Sri Lanka came into existence under the First Republican Constitution. 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 of the JVP uprising in 1971, a Minister expressed strong suspicion that the CIA was involved in the Bandaranaike assassination and the subsequent 1971 JVP insurrection to destabilise 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 Sirimavo Bandaranaike and the left amid the State-JVP Dirty War and the smear campaign of “racism” against the Senior Bandaranaikes that Sri Lanka today barely recognises 22 May or celebrates Republican Day, unlike India, where Republican Day celebrates independence.
De-colonising History
History repeats itself, as Marx rightly said. Sri Lanka became a fully independent Sovereign State on 22 May 1972, officially rid of the British Monarchy, the JVP insurrection notwithstanding, which sought to derail and delay the push to complete independence.
However, the county was precipitated into its first-ever staged Sovereign Default in 2022 amid another regime change operation. This was another leaderless chaos operation against a no doubt unpopular regime by youth tired of two years of brutal COVID-19 lockdowns and militarised mass injections. It was also a GAFAM social media-operated Gen-Z Aragalaya protest against local corruption, which did not mention the global financial supply chain of corruption. The country has since effectively lost economic sovereignty to the Washington Consensus (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 US dollar debt trap.
Clearly, British and US interference in the country’s domestic affairs and political outcomes remain in place, much as in Chile, which speaks to the importance of decolonising history with comparative global South studies across continents, Cold War Area Studies disciplinary partitions, and beyond the modern national state. Clearly, we need to rescue global South history from Orientalist tropes and Eurocentric grand narratives of the violence of ‘dark natives’ and disinformation campaigns like ‘Operation Colombo’.[vi]
Increasingly, patterns in Cold War history and related dirty war violence are visible across continents, Asia, Africa, South America and the Global South. This is despite layers of accumulated disinformation and years and decades of cover-up investigations, with deep penetration of investigation and law enforcement institutions in many countries of the Global South by neocolonial powers, often under the guise of Development Aid, expertise sharing, and technical training. Increasingly, it makes sense for social scientists and historians to triangulate events across continents — to see patterns in a shared Global South Past.
As new scholarship and research based on recently declassified US State Department documents and British Home office sources by brave scholars and journalists like Vincent Bevins and Phil Miller of Declassified UK 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 neighbourhoods. Such reinterpretation of the historical record in Asia, Africa and South America is especially needed as decoding history and recovering what Walter Benjamin called 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.
De-colonising History amid Distracting Culture Wars
Having failed to de-colonise 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 weaponised for social media remote platform coordinated Araglaya protest and regime change operations. The country’s intelligentsia, civil society and funded NGOs remain caught in Disinformation games as seen in the Woke film Alborada. Thus, the vast majority in South Asia’s wealthiest country, by all metrics except the exorbitantly privileged US dollar, believes the country to be ‘Bankrupt’ at this time.
Meanwhile, so-called anti-corruption, levelling crowds unleashed via social media for regime change chaos operations predominantly constituted by deluded youth now fashionable recast as Gen-Z protesters, sabotaging their own futures, burning down courts and parliament seeking regime change as recently happened in Nepal and Bangladesh, appears to be the new normal. 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 recycling and circulation of the same politicians like the Ranil Rajapakses and/ or Political Parties like the JVP, albeit with a puppet show of democratic elections. Meanwhile, the 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 rebranded faux Leftist JVP National People’s Party (NPP) regime that implements with alacrity the dictates 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 a Default in 2022, rushed to sign the IMF’s International Sovereign Bond debt restructuring once it came to power in December 2024. This was arguably the biggest Central Bank bond scam yet!
Having turned its back on the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and 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-colonisers.
The NPP is now in a rush to implement the IMF’s call to “unbundle”, fragment and eventually privatise the Ceylon Electricity Board’s (CEB) national electricity grid system and supply chain. This is done under the guise of ‘reform’ and restructuring the CEBs’ so-called ‘legacy debt,’ which was concocted by the IMF’s accountants. This is instead of outright Debt Cancellation by the state of the state-owned CEB’s debt, as national experts have recommended. Breaking up the CEB into five entities, under the jargon of “unbundling’ would hollow out the CEB while restructuring dubious’ legacy debt’ with private banks as a prelude to privatising the national electricity system presents a clear and present danger to Sri Lanka’s energy and economic security.
Indeed, fragmenting and privatising the electricity grid may present a National Security threat in the context of planned Big Data Centres to benefit GAFAM data mining corporations, which require vast amounts of electricity and water for cooling systems in an era of Digital Colonialism, leading to skyrocketing local electricity bills.[vii]
The JVP’s newest face mask, however, seems to be slipping along with its IMF-designed neo-liberal policies, despite a faux Left (red T-shirt?) veneer labelled “pragmatism” in the legacy press. We live in complex times in an apparently upside-down world. However, those who do not know their history, or those who choose to forget it, are doomed to repeat it.
*Dr Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake is a social and medical anthropologist with expertise in international development and political-economic analysis. She was a member of the International Steering Group of the North-South Institute project: “Southern Perspectives on Reform of the International Aid Architecture”. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Image: 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.
[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 of
junior 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-Russian
or pro-Chinese non-alignment. The Chinese had a rice/rubber agreement and were in there trying
to 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
[vi] https://indepthnews.net/literary-prize-politics-cold-war-and-the-disinformation-game/
[vii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kkre0dQCJRw