It was just past midnight in Guatemala City in May 1954 when a station calling itself the Voice of Liberation cut into the airwaves.
It told terrified Guatemalans that a rebel army was already inside the country, advancing fast, unstoppable, and that resistance was pointless.
Families gathered around their radio sets that night, listening closely to catch every word, certain they were tuned into a genuine voice of the resistance. They pictured a ragged band of patriots crouched somewhere in the highlands, transmitting between gunfights, risking their lives to warn the nation of what was coming.
The truth is, they weren't.
The signal was coming from a CIA facility outside Opa-locka, Florida, three thousand kilometres away. The "unstoppable" invasion force it described was, in reality, a few hundred men who had barely crossed the border.
And that deception was not incidental to what was happening in Guatemala. It was central to it.
To understand why Washington had gone to such lengths to convince an entire country that an overwhelming invasion was already underway, you first have to understand what President Jacobo Árbenz had done to provoke it.
On paper, it sounded almost unremarkable. Guatemala's first freely elected leader had passed a land reform law, taking unused, idle land and handing it to landless peasants, with compensation paid to the owners.
The trouble was who owned the land.
The single largest owner was the United Fruit Company, an American conglomerate that controlled Guatemala's railways, its only real port on the Atlantic, and vast stretches of land it wasn't even farming. United Fruit's lobbyists in Washington had old ties to two brothers who now ran American foreign policy, one at the State Department, the other at the CIA.
Within months, American newspapers were describing a modest land reform bill as the first foothold of Soviet influence in the Western Hemisphere.
What followed, was Operation codenamed PBSuccess.
It shattered what Guatemalans had long believed to be true. Unmarked American planes dropped bombs on the capital. Fabricated stories flooded the press, including one claiming Árbenz was forcing Catholic soldiers to join a new church that worshipped Stalin. The panic was being fuelled from within by spies in his own government.
Árbenz did not have to lose on the battlefield. He only had to lose control over the narrative. By the end of June 1954, his own generals told him the fight was over. He resigned and went into exile for the rest of his life.
What Guatemala got in return was nearly four decades of military rule and a civil war that killed an estimated two hundred thousand people, most of them Indigenous Maya, in what a UN-backed truth commission later called a genocide. It was 1954 that gave the term “banana republic” its real meaning, when a fruit company’s commercial interests fabricated a radio campaign and helped bring down an elected government.
Seven decades later, the broadcast tower has been replaced by the algorithm. The tools are faster, quieter, and far more difficult to see, but the underlying method remains remarkably familiar.
The desk
And unlike Guatemala, we do not have to speculate about what an information operation built for the social-media age might look like. It is documented by the very people who carried it out.
When Elon Musk opened Twitter's internal records to journalist Matt Taibbi in late 2022, what emerged in the release that came to be known as the Twitter Files was a company that had, in its own staff's words, become something close to a subsidiary of the FBI.
Taibbi described contact between the bureau and Twitter's trust and safety team as constant and pervasive, running into hundreds of emails over a two year period. After the 2016 election, the FBI set up a dedicated task force that eventually grew to around eighty agents. It routinely sent Twitter spreadsheets flagging accounts for review, including some with almost no followers and others that had posted little more than jokes.
The CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security all had their own channels into the company.
This was not a foreign government exploiting an American platform from the outside. This amounted to parts of the American state apparatus gaining a direct line into the platform, with the ability to flag content and accounts that could shape what hundreds of millions of users around the world, including in India, ultimately saw.
If this could happen within the United States, it is fair to ask what might happen to the rest of the world?
The Shape
Look closely at what has happened around India in the last four years, and a shape starts to appear.
Sri Lanka, 2022. Economic collapse, shortages, inflation, and anger over corruption triggered mass protests, much of it organised and amplified through social media. The movement grew rapidly, protesters occupied key government buildings, and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa eventually fled the country and resigned.
Bangladesh, 2024. What began as a student protest against government job quotas quickly grew into a nationwide uprising, amplified through Facebook and messaging platforms. Within weeks, the movement had become a broader revolt against Sheikh Hasina’s government, ending her fifteen years in power and forcing her to flee to India. Months earlier, Hasina had claimed that a “white man” had offered her an easier path to remain in power if she allowed a foreign country to establish an airbase in Bangladesh. She refused, and later alleged that foreign interests had played a role in her removal.
Nepal, 2025. A government ban on major social media platforms became the immediate trigger for a wave of youth-led protests. What began as anger over digital restrictions quickly widened into frustration over corruption, unemployment, and the political establishment. Within days, the Gen Z-led uprising had grown into a national political crisis, forcing Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli from office.
Three of India’s immediate neighbours. Three governments shaken or brought down within just a few years, with social media platforms headquartered thousands of miles away playing a major role in how each movement spread, organised, and gathered momentum.
India has already had its own encounter with this kind of digital mobilisation this year.
The Cockroach Janta Party began as a satirical social media movement after a controversial “cockroach” remark by the Chief Justice triggered an online backlash. Within weeks, satire turned into organised protest over exam paper leaks. The movement drew vested interest groups to Jantar Mantar and within days the protests turned violent and spilled onto the streets. This agitation ended up with the resignation of a Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
Global commentators drew the comparison instantly. Was India next in the queue, after Colombo, Dhaka and Kathmandu?
The connection
In March 2026, India's National Investigation Agency arrested an American citizen at airports in Delhi, Lucknow and Kolkata.
His name was Matthew VanDyke, a self-styled war correspondent and the founder of a Washington-based private military consultancy called Sons of Liberty International. Travelling with him were six Ukrainian nationals.
The NIA's case, laid out in court since, alleges that the group entered India on tourist visas, moved without permits into Mizoram, and crossed illegally into Myanmar. There, they allegedly trained Kuki-Chin ethnic armed groups in drone warfare, drone assembly and signal jamming, using hardware reportedly smuggled in from Europe.
Those same ethnic armed networks are active along the corridor connected to the conflict in Manipur.
VanDyke, by his own account, had done comparable training work with Ukrainian forces fighting Russia. His involvement in foreign conflicts went back much further. During Libya’s 2011 civil war, he travelled there to join rebels fighting Muammar Gaddafi, he was captured by government forces and held for nearly six months, then returned to the front after his release. He later fought with Libya’s National Liberation Army during the battle for Sirte. He is the kind of operative American agencies rely on when the work is meant to stay out of sight.
Whatever the formal charges ultimately establish, the optics are difficult to ignore. An American operative with a documented history of paramilitary training was found helping build drone warfare capability in a theatre bordering one of India’s most volatile states, just as relations between New Delhi and Washington were entering one of their most strained periods in years.
The timing
That strain isn't a matter of speculation. It's on the record, in Washington's own admission.
India has repeatedly resisted pressure to fall in line with Washington and its allies. It continued buying discounted Russian crude despite Western calls to curb those purchases. It declined to fully align itself with the American position on strikes against Iran. And when Donald Trump threatened India with tariffs earlier this year, New Delhi chose to absorb the economic pressure rather than surrender ground on its trade terms.
And in March 2026, at the Raisina Dialogue in Delhi, US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said the quiet part out loud. Discussing the trade deal being negotiated between the two countries, he told his Indian hosts that Washington did not intend to repeat the mistake it made with China two decades earlier, when it opened its markets and then watched Beijing turn around and out-compete it commercially.
It was a remarkably candid admission. By Washington’s own account, its engagement with India is shaped not simply by a desire to support its growth, but to ensure it never rises far enough to become a genuine competitor.
The platform
The deeper question is one of sovereignty: how much control does India truly have over its public discourse when the platforms carrying that discourse are owned, governed, and ultimately answerable to foreign jurisdictions?
The Twitter Files were not warning about what might happen. They documented what already had: a relationship between government agencies and a private platform that sat at the centre of political debate in the United States. If such influence could be exercised over a platform serving America’s own citizens, there is little basis for assuming that India would somehow be treated with greater restraint.
A sovereign platform is not about censorship, and it isn't about building a iron curtain. It's about making sure that the switch, the one that decides which stories trend, which accounts get suspended, and which narratives get quietly throttled during a moment of national stress, sits in Delhi and not in Menlo Park or Washington.
Árbenz didn't lose Guatemala because his land reforms were unpopular. He lost it because he never controlled the airwaves the misinformation was coming.
Seventy years on, the airwaves have become social media platforms. The question facing India now is whether, in its next crisis, it wants its public square to remain dependent on companies headquartered abroad or whether it wants the infrastructure of its national conversation to remain within its own sovereign control.
