The CIA’s ability to SUCCESSFULLY coop a government has been greatly exaggerated by… the CIA. Seriously, think of how many times they failed at killing Castro.
Egypt 1952 (possibly—at the very least prior knowledge of the coup)
1952 Iran
1954 Guatemala
1960 Laos
1961 Dominic Republic
1965 Indonesia
1973 Chile
1975 Australia (this one’s the most controversial on the list because of the US’s long friendly relationship with the country. If the CIA was involved, it was by encouraging the abuse of existing constitutional powers rather than a direct military coup as in most examples.)
That’s just a list of successful coups I could find quickly on Wikipedia that were clearly backed by the CIA during the Cold War. There were other failed attempts, including multiple 1950s in Syria and Indonesia and, yes, Cuba. And other successful coups where the US was definitely involved but it’s not clear to me from a cursory look that it was via the CIA specifically, like 1971 Bolivia and 1976 Argentina. And there have obviously been CIA actions in the time since.
I think the key fact is that in almost no cases did the CIA singlehandedly do a coup. They supported people on the ground who already wanted to do a coup to make their attempted coup more likely to succeed, and to ensure that they’d be friendly to the US afterwards if they did succeed.
This is one of those topics that Wikipedia really shouldn’t be used for.
The coups that the US has involved themselves with that succeed, succeed because they were supported by the people. Lazerpig goes over it in his How to kill a God. The video started as a commentary on the Putin Carlson interview, but expands into a debunking of Color Revolutions.
They definitely deserve flak for TRYING to overthrow sovereign governments, but you’re right in that the vast majority of their attempts failed spectacularly
The CIA’s ability to SUCCESSFULLY coop a government has been greatly exaggerated by… the CIA. Seriously, think of how many times they failed at killing Castro.
That’s just a list of successful coups I could find quickly on Wikipedia that were clearly backed by the CIA during the Cold War. There were other failed attempts, including multiple 1950s in Syria and Indonesia and, yes, Cuba. And other successful coups where the US was definitely involved but it’s not clear to me from a cursory look that it was via the CIA specifically, like 1971 Bolivia and 1976 Argentina. And there have obviously been CIA actions in the time since.
I think the key fact is that in almost no cases did the CIA singlehandedly do a coup. They supported people on the ground who already wanted to do a coup to make their attempted coup more likely to succeed, and to ensure that they’d be friendly to the US afterwards if they did succeed.
This is one of those topics that Wikipedia really shouldn’t be used for.
The coups that the US has involved themselves with that succeed, succeed because they were supported by the people. Lazerpig goes over it in his How to kill a God. The video started as a commentary on the Putin Carlson interview, but expands into a debunking of Color Revolutions.
They definitely deserve flak for TRYING to overthrow sovereign governments, but you’re right in that the vast majority of their attempts failed spectacularly