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There is a peculiar alchemy in the world of intelligence work. Spend long enough marinating in the culture of suspicion, and reality itself warps. Every handshake is a coded exchange, every silence conceals a plot, and every stranger is a potential assassin in disguise. In this worldview, the universe is an endless chessboard of threat and counter-threat — and the only sane response is to move first, hit harder, and never, ever let the other side see you blink. It is a mindset that breeds not guardians, but paranoiacs with security clearances; not peacekeepers, but professional arsonists armed with plausible deniability.

The public is told these agencies are our shield — the last line between us and anarchy. We are sold an endless parade of threats, each requiring more secrecy, more surveillance, and more latitude for shadowy actors to do “what must be done”. The problem is that the line between protector and perpetrator has long since dissolved. The very institutions that claim to keep us safe are often the ones creating the dangers they then heroically “save” us from.

Domestically, their aim is less about defending liberty than managing the population. The FBI’s COINTELPRO operation wasn’t dismantling terror cells; it was dismantling dissent. Civil rights leaders, anti-war activists, and union organisers were wiretapped, infiltrated, and in some cases blackmailed into silence. Martin Luther King Jr, whose crime was speaking too effectively against injustice, was subjected to surveillance so obsessive it bordered on psychosis. Across the Atlantic, Britain’s Special Demonstration Squad embedded officers into protest groups for decades, with some maintaining romantic relationships under false identities. When the truth emerged, it was less James Bond and more EastEnders meets Kafka.

The same tactics persist in modern form. Peaceful protests find themselves salted with plainclothes agents who mysteriously seem to be the first to throw a brick, conveniently inviting a police crackdown. Whatever did happen to Ray Epps? In Canada’s 2022 trucker protests, there was no need for water cannons — the financial system itself became the weapon, freezing bank accounts and cutting people off from their own money for the crime of political disobedience.

If their behaviour at home corrodes democracy, their conduct abroad burns entire nations to the ground. The CIA and MI6’s fingerprints can be found in coups and covert operations from Tehran to Tegucigalpa. In 1953, Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown not for tyranny, but for the heresy of nationalising oil. In 1954, Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz met the same fate after challenging the stranglehold of United Fruit. Chile’s Salvador Allende was replaced in 1973 by Pinochet—a dictator whose “economic miracle” was fertilised with blood and electrocution.

The pattern is too consistent to be coincidence. In the 1980s, the CIA armed Afghan mujahideen in their jihad against the Soviets, among them a young Osama bin Laden. A generation later, the United States would spend trillions allegedly fighting the monster it had helped to train. And in 2003, a dodgy dossier on Iraq’s mythical weapons of mass destruction became the casus belli for an invasion that killed hundreds of thousands, destabilised the region, and paved the way for ISIS.

The 21st century has not brought restraint. The 2014 Maidan uprising in Ukraine was no spontaneous people’s revolt; leaked phone calls revealed U.S. officials selecting preferred leadership like items from a takeaway menu. Ukraine is now the front line in a NATO–Russia proxy war, its cities shelled and its young men fed into the grinder of geopolitics. In 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown apart — a surgical strike on Germany’s energy supply. Officially, no one knows who did it. Unofficially, the silence from Washington speaks volumes.

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