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 frist 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 thay 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 tensions.
art House Disinformation: From Neruda to Lavrov and Beyond?
Table of Contents
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 inquiry 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.
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. Simultaneously occurring, 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 autonomous? 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” agai
Sri Lanka’s Self-Sabotage: Disinformation, Debt, and a Dangerous Course
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).
Concurrently, 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 peopel,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.
The Assassination of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and US Involvement
This account details the assassination of Sri Lankan Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike in 1959, and explores the geopolitical context surrounding his death, especially his non-aligned foreign policy which leaned against Western interests.
According to an interview with Lowenstein, an intelligence source informed him of Bandaranaike’s shooting with the stark message, “Chap’s been shot. The PM old boy.” The source confirmed the assassination occurred shortly after Lowenstein had last seen Bandaranaike alive, with Gufler believed to be the last person to see him before the event.
Bandaranaike’s policies marked a departure from previous pro-Western Sri Lankan governments. He embraced the non-aligned movement, positioning himself as a counterpart to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Though, this “non-alignment” was not neutral; it was demonstrably “much more anti-American than it was pro-Russian or pro-Chinese non-alignment.” China was actively seeking influence in Sri Lanka through a rice/rubber trade agreement. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2024-06-18/pinochet-regime-declassified-dina-gestapo-type-police-force-chile
The assassination of Bandaranaike is reminiscent of other politically motivated killings of leaders during the Cold War era, such as the assassination of General Aung San. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2024-06-18/pinochet-regime-declassified-dina-gestapo-type-police-force-chile
Note: The provided text includes several broken links (“applewebdata://…”) which are placeholders and have been omitted. The remaining links have been retained. Further research would be needed to fully understand the extent of any foreign involvement in Bandaranaike’s assassination.