Features

My Decision to Leave Home, 1970 A fateful decision

Published

3 years ago

2022/11/6

By Nimal Wikremanayeke
(Excerpted from A Life In The Law)

I will now turn to the events that made me leave my wonderful country, my beautiful home and my large practice at the Ceylon Bar in order to emigrate to Australia, a land where I knew no one. Today, looking back, I cannot understand what fit of insanity must have overtaken me to make such a stunning, life-changing decision.

It was May 27, 1970, the day when our prime minister, Dudley Senanayake, decided to fight an election against the combined might of Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party, Dr Colvin R De Silva’s Trotskyite Lanka Sama Samaja Party, Mr Pieter Keuneman’s Communist Party and several other miscellaneous parties. We were all extremely confident that Mr Senanayake would triumph and we would have stability in our country for another five years.

My father decided to hold a card party on election night so that we could have an enjoyable night while listening to the election results. Dad was an extremely generous host and he was to provide dinner – a gourmet’s dinner – yellow rice with numerous curries washed down with large quantities of French wines.I woke early that morning, shaved, showered, had my breakfast and went off to vote. The polling booths were filled with supporters of the various parties loudly touting their wares. I took my place in the queue and when it came for my turn to vote, the electoral officer brushed the first joint of my right thumb with indelible ink to prevent me from voting again, took my particulars and gave me my ballot papers. I returned home after voting, confident that our party would be returned to power.

Shortly after 12 noon I left with my wife to go to my club the Twentieth Century Club in Dawson Road, Havelock Town, Colombo. This was a ritual we followed every Saturday morning. When we arrived there, a group of my friends had already commenced their usual Saturday afternoon drinking session. They were seated in a semi-circle outside on the club house lawn and my wife and I joined them.

Life in those days was gracious and we were attended to by solicitous, subservient attendants. After many rounds of fairly heavy drinking, we left for home. We arrived at our well-appointed air-conditioned three-bedroom apartment, with a sitting cum dining room which had French windows opening out onto a covered veranda, and an impressive courtyard. We had two servants, a female cook and a houseboy.

Shortly after three o’clock the cook warmed up our lunch which the houseboy laid out on the dining table. We had our lunch and retired to bed where we were joined by our German shepherd, Sweetheart.We got up later that afternoon, made ourselves ready and went to my parents’ home. My father was one of the leading Queen’s Counsel at the Ceylon Bar. He had a large and spacious home which was built on a quarter of an acre of land over 11,000 square feet together with a quarter-acre of garden.

In addition to his study, the house had five well-appointed bedrooms, with en suite bathrooms in four of them. The home had a large entrance hall, a sitting room, an open-air patio in the middle of the home, a fountain filled with goldfish, an exceptionally large dining room, and attached to it was the billiard room, with a full-sized billiard table and sufficient room to accommodate a large card table.By 7 pm all my father’s guests had arrived and we indulged ourselves in a rousing game of Down the River. This was seven-card stud poker, together with as many jokers as there were players -eleven of us. At about 8.30 pm we sat down to dinner, which we finished by 10 pm. We returned to the card room and sat down to resume playing cards when someone turned on the radio to listen to the election results.

It was customary in Ceylon for the election results to start flooding in at about 10 pm. We did not hear any election results for several hours; all we heard from the local radio station was music, and this went on till about 1 am. We were all extremely puzzled as to why no election results were being declared. Our suspicions should have been aroused by the fact that every half hour, the local radio station kept playing Roger Whittaker’s “New World in the Morning.”

This should have been a warning, a portent of things to come. The local radio station kept repeating this piece of music every half hour until around 1 am, when the election results started flooding in. It was not a defeat, it was not a rout – it was a massacre. As I recall, the Ceylon Parliament consisted of 160 seats in 1970 prior to the election, with the UNP (United National Party) holding 90 seats and the other parties 70 among them. This time, the UNP lost 65 seats and the other parties won 65 seats.The poker game came to an end by 1.30 am and all of us, save for my parents, left for our respective homes. We were shattered. We were completely unaware of the extent to which our lives would change dramatically in the next 12 months as a result of this election.

Astrology

An interesting feature of this election was that Mr Dudley Senanayake’s astrologer was horribly wrong when he predicted that the prime minister would win the election if it was held on May 27, 1970. As a result of the prediction, the prime minister held the election and lost. Some Westerners may scoff at such primitive superstitions, but then why are whole pages devoted in their daily newspapers to astrological predictions?

Regrettably, I too have had my fair share of astrological predictions. In 1960 when I returned to Ceylon and went to the Bar, things were extremely difficult for me. Although my father was chairman of the Associated Motorways Group and a large insurance company, he had sent the secretaries of these companies a directive that I should not be given work.

I knew the secretary, Salman, who told me that there was a brilliant astrologer working as a clerk in the Associated Motorways Group. Salman suggested that I go and see him to obtain an astrological prediction about my future. I went to see him wearing dishevelled clothes and a pair of slippers. I told him what my date and time of birth was and he told me to come a week later. I turned up a week later to see him with Salman. This man looked at me sadly and said, “You poor man. You have no future at all. You are poor and you will always be poor. You have a Kemathrama Yoga.” Salman looked at him and said, “You idiot. This is the chairman’s son!”

One day in the middle of 1964, I was in the Law Library where the advocates normally congregated when they were not in court. I was chatting with two friends of mine, Satyendra and Navaratnarajah, when Satyendra told us that he knew a brilliant astrologer in Jaffna who could read horoscopes and accurately predict the future.

A few days later Nava and I gave Satyendra our respective birth details etc. to pass on to the astrologer who would make up our horoscopes and predict our futures. A couple of weeks later Satyendra turned up with our horoscopes. Satyendra told Nava that the astrologer had predicted a brilliant future for him. Saty then looked at me sadly and said that my horoscope predicted that I had no future. Although it terrified me at the time, this story had both a sad and a happy ending. A month later Nava, contracted hepatitis and died. The happy ending was that I believe the astrologer mixed up our dates of birth, for Nava now had no future and I ended up with a good future.

In fairness to astrology, I must relate an incident that occurred during the middle of 1971. The die was cast and I had crossed the Rubicon. There was a venerable old gentleman at the Ceylon Bar, a Mr M. Somasunderam. He was a contemporary of Dad’s. Someone at the Bar told me that Soma was excellent at reading palms and was an exceptional palmist. I buttonholed him in the Law Library and asked him whether I could speak to him on a personal matter. I told him that I was going to live out my days in Australia so could he please read my palm and tell me what my future was.

He took my palm in his hand and studied it for quite some time. He smiled a gentle smile, then said, “Wikramanayake, you have nothing to worry about. You will have a brilliant future in Australia” I was flabbergasted. I told him that this was impossible as I knew no one in Australia. He patted me on the shoulder smiled, saying, “Remember me when you are famous.” So, Soma, I am having a glass of Blue Label Scotch whisky in remembrance of you while I type this memoir.

Post-election horror

Elections in Ceylon were gory events. As one of the leaders of the Gauls said, when addressing the Roman Senate well over 2,000 years ago, “Vae ago, ae victis – woe to the conquered” The supporters of the successful winning party always exacted their revenge on the supporters of the losing party. A large number of supporters of the losing party were usually viciously beaten up while the police watched on without interfering, and houses belonging to members of the United National Party were torched.

The country was quiet on Sunday, but on Monday, the assaults and beatings started. I remember what happened to a cousin of mine, Michael Wikramanayake. He was the manager of a large government cooperative store. Michael had been known for the fact being a UNP sympathiser. He was seated in his office on Monday morning when the workers stormed in. They tied him to his chair and poured blue and red paint over him. Blue paint symbolised the Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP), the red paint the Communist Party. Michael was badly beaten and lost an eye. The poor man was devastated; he not only lost his job but received no help from the police.

Yet this was only the beginning. Mrs Bandaranaike had more than a two-thirds majority in Parliament, and she amended the constitution. She announced that Sinhalese was to be the national language, and that cases in the law courts would shortly be conducted in the Sinhalese language and not in English, as had been done for over 150 years. Court documents were also to be written in the Sinhalese language. Up to that time, the work in the courts was conducted in English. The government created a High Court, a new court midway between the District Court and the Supreme Court. The government appointed seventeen new judges from lawyers who were members of Mrs Bandaranaike’s party, the SLFP. Lawyers from her party who were competent in Sinhalese were tasked with translating the Civil Procedure Code and the laws of the country into Sinhalese.

My attempt at coping

I took on two extremely competent young Sinhalese-educated lawyers as my readers to help me cope with conducting my cases in Sinhalese. Regrettably, I must confess that although I could speak my mother tongue, I could scarcely read or write it. I would now have to learn to think in Sinhalese. How was I to do this? I was thirty-seven years old.

My father had been a classics scholar before he studied law. He had introduced me to The Iliad, The Odyssey, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides and the like when I was ten years old. English was the language we spoke at home and Sinhalese was used only to speak to the servants. I am not proud of this fact. While I was growing up, the British were in power and my language was suppressed by the British, who called it “the vernacular” This continued until I was fifteen years old.

In school, we had one period a week in Sinhalese before Ceylon received independence. I excelled in all the other subjects, save for my mother tongue. In 1948, when we received our independence the scene changed dramatically. From this time, we had a period of two hours of Sinhalese every day and I just could not cope with it. I was slapped regularly by my Sinhalese master, Mr Jayasekere, for not knowing Sinhalese. I excelled in Latin but failed miserably in Sinhalese. I never received less than 190 marks out of 200 in Latin but no more than 40 out of 200 in Sinhalese. This went on for several years until I went off to England to study, to widen my repertoire and broaden my horizons.

My lack of knowledge of my mother tongue had now returned to haunt me. After the election in May 1970, I mentioned my displeasure at this new turn of events in the Law Library to a Sinhalese-educated advocate. He sniggered and said sarcastically, “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on” Yes, the caravan was moving on and leaving me behind barking madly.

I thought to myself, how the hell am I going to think and address the court in Sinhalese? I was at my wits’ end wondering what to do. As the situation continued like this for a few months I was beginning to despair. The two new Sinhala-educated lawyers I had employed tried to help me cope with my lack of knowledge of the Sinhalese language but to no avail.

I happened to go to the Magistrates’ Court in Colombo South in August 1970 and met a friend of mine, Clarence Fernando. We were discussing our situation and pondering what we were to do. Clarence told me that all was not lost. A friend of his, Frank Pereira, had recently migrated to Australia. He told me that Frank was in the legal profession and was doing extremely well. Heartened by this little titbit, I decided to emigrate to Australia. Had I known the truth about Frank Pereira, I certainly would not have abandoned my large practice at the Ceylon Bar and migrated to Australia. I could still have conquered the Sinhalese language and have had a gracious life in Ceylon.

I returned home and asked my dear wife Anna Maria, “Shall we go to Australia?” Anna Maria, bless her, was always game for anything I wanted to do. It was only many years later that she told me she was terrified when I had asked her whether we should go to Australia.When I came to Australia I learned that Frank Pereira was a law clerk earning a relatively small income of $30 a week. In 1970, secretaries in Australia were earning $60 a week.

Napoleon Bonaparte

In desperation I turned for guidance to my Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon had been a great source of inspiration to me ever since my school days. One of my classmates, Ralph Deraniyagala, was an avid disciple of Napoleon. He suffered from a bad case of Napoleonitis and was an eccentric young boy. When we were young lads in our early teens, he had selected most of us, in class, to be Napoleon’s marshals and I was fortunate to be chosen as Marshal Ney.

Ralph was not only eccentric but also extremely impulsive. He would disrupt our lessons in class by springing up from his seat and shouting out to one of his marshals to charge. He would seriously upset the equilibrium in the class but the masters tolerated his bizarre behaviour. As a result of Ralph, I started devouring whatever books I could read on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, starting with Abbott’s magnificent treatise on the life of Napoleon. Napoleon was of the view that there was always a “Career open to talent” He proclaimed that he was “a Corsican by birth, a Frenchman by adoption and an Emperor by conquest”. It was his belief that if one had ability, one could succeed anywhere in the world. So I decided to take up the challenge and emigrate to Australia.

Ronnie de Kretser

One of my father’s readers, Ivor Misso, had left for Australia in the 1950s. Misso had a substantial practice in the District Court of Colombo but had left for what he thought would be greener pastures. Dad wrote to him to ask him whether he could help me in my new adventure. Ivor Misso wrote back, suggesting that Dad write to Ronnie de Kretser, a partner in the solicitors’ firm of Weigall & Crowther in Melbourne. Ronnie had qualified as a proctor of the Ceylon Supreme Court in 1948 and left for Australia at the same time as Ivor Misso in 1956. Dad then wrote to Ronnie who advised me to put in my application for immigration and send him a copy, as the Minister for Immigration, Mr Phillip Lynch, was a good friend of his.

We duly made our application for immigration in November and we were successful due to the efforts of Ronnie de Kretser. I received a warm letter from Phillip Lynch congratulating me on my application and wishing me all the best in my new country. We were passed for immigration in December and it was only then I began to have second thoughts about migrating to Australia.However, Melbourne, my intended destination, was not unfamiliar to me as Dad had brought us out to Australia on a one-month holiday in 1952.1 had liked it then.

Distribution of work

Late in 1970, all the government corporation work was given to friends of the SLFP, Mrs Bandaranaike’s party. This was nothing new. Each successive government in Ceylon repaid its loyal supporters by giving them government legal work. (I was to be unpleasantly surprised many years later to also find that some work in Australia is handed out on patronage and privilege.)

One of the privileged few was P Herat who did work on the “motion roll”, which consisted of the list of summary matter applications to be heard in the Motion Court. That was the extent of his practice. The five District Courts had an hour’s work on the motion roll every morning before the trials for the day were heard. These summary matters were determined by the judge. Herat had never conducted a trial prior to Mrs Bandaranaike coming to power in 1970, and did not know how a trial should be conducted.

As I mentioned earlier, I had a large and a lucrative commercial practice. I was briefed for the defendant in a “mortgage bond” case. In Ceylon, a mortgage under Roman-Dutch law could only be enforced by court proceedings, unlike in Australia, where proceedings for possession could be issued after the mortgage had been terminated by appropriate notice. I had no defence to the action as my client was seriously in default of his obligations under the mortgage.

Herat was briefed to appear for the plaintiff, the State Mortgage Bank, a government institution. When we went to court, he was gloating and told me that the days of the English-speaking advocates were over for it was now the turn of the Sinhala-educated lawyers.

The case was called on for hearing before Judge Vaitialingam. Herat opened his case with bravado and then led his evidence. He kept smirking as he knew my client had no defence. The evidence he led was short and sweet. He led evidence that the mortgage had not been paid, then sat down. He did not lead any evidence that my client was in default. He did not lead any evidence that a demand had been paid for the arrears. Nor did he lead any evidence that my client had failed to cure his default. He then closed his case.

I asked him whether he had finished. He said “yes” I asked him several times whether he had finished and he kept getting angrier and angrier. The judge then asked him whether he had finished and he again replied “yes” I then made a No Case submission upon which Herat sought to re-open his case. The judge refused his application, saying that I had asked him sever-at times whether he had finished to which Herat had replied “yes” The judge had also asked him the same question and got an answer in the affirmative. He refused Herat’s application and dismissed his case.

It cost the bank Rs 150,000 or the equivalent of $30,000, a substantial sum of money in 1970.1 gave Herat the two-finger salute which Henry V’s longbowman gave the French at the Battle of Agincourt and walked out of court.Suffice it to say that Herat did not get another government brief. This case was not included here for the purpose of skiting about my forensic ability, but for the purpose of illustrating that patronage can occasionally go wrong.

All News Advertisement

Features

The NPP Government is more than a JVP offspring:

Published

1 day ago

2026/04/12

Thilina Walpola

Rohana Wijeweera

It is also different from all past governments as it faces new and different challenges

No one knows whether the already broken ceasefire between the US and Iran, with Israel as a reluctant adjunct, will last the full 10 days, or what will come thereafter. The world’s economic woes are not over and the markets are yo-yoing in response to Trump’s twitches and Iran’s gate keeping at the Strait of Hormuz. The gloomy expert foretelling is that full economic normalcy will not return until the year is over even if the war were to end with the ceasefire. That means continuing challenges for Sri Lanka and more of the tough learning in the art of governing for the NPP.

The NPP government has been doing what most governments in Asia have been doing to cope with the current global crisis, which is also an Asian crisis insofar as oil supplies and other supply chains are concerned. What the government can and must do additionally is to be totally candid with the people and keep them informed of everything that it is doing – from monitoring import prices to the timely arranging of supplies, all the details of tender, the tracking of arrivals, and keeping the distribution flow through the market without bottlenecks. That way the government can eliminate upstream tender rackets and downstream hoarding swindles. People do not expect miracles from their government, only honest, sincere and serious effort in difficult circumstances. Backed up by clear communication and constant public engagement.

But nothing is going to stop the flow of criticisms against the NPP government. That is a fact of Sri Lankan politics. Even though the opposition forces are weak and have little traction and even less credibility, there has not been any drought in the criticisms levelled against the still fledgling government. These criticisms can be categorized as ideological, institutional and oppositional criticisms, with each category having its own constituency and/or commentators. The three categories invariably overlap and there are instances of criticisms that excite only the pundits but have no political resonance.

April 5 anniversary nostalgia

There is also a new line of criticism that might be inspired by the April 5 anniversary nostalgia for the 1971 JVP insurrection. This new line traces the NPP government to the distant roots of the JVP – its April 1965 founding “in a working-class home in Akmeemana, Galle” by a 22-year old Rohana Wijeweera and seven others; the short lived 1971 insurrection that was easily defeated; and the much longer and more devastating second (1987 to 1989) insurrection that led to the elimination of the JVP’s frontline leaders including Wijeweera, and brought about a change in the JVP’s political direction with commitment to parliamentary democracy. So far, so good, as history goes.

But where the nostalgic narrative starts to bend is in attempting a straight line connection from the 1965 Akmeemana origins of the JVP to the national electoral victories of the NPP in 2024. And the bend gets broken in trying to bridge the gap between the “founding anti-imperialist economics” of the JVP and the practical imperatives of the NPP government in “governing a debt-laden small open economy.” Yet this line of criticism differs from the other lines of criticism that I have alluded to, but more so for its moral purpose than for its analytical clarity. The search for clarity could begin with question – why is the NPP government more than a JVP offspring? The answer is not so simple, but it is also not too complicated.

For starters, the JVP was a political response to the national and global conditions of the 1960s and 1970s, piggybacking socialism on the bandwagon of ethno-nationalism in a bi-polar world that was ideologically split between status quo capitalism and the alternative of socialism. The NPP government, on the other hand, is not only a response to, but is also a product of the conditions of the 2010s and 2020s. The twain cannot be more different. Nothing is the same between then and now, locally and globally.

A pragmatic way to look at the differences between the origins of the JVP and the circumstances of the NPP government is to look at the very range of criticisms that are levelled against the NPP government. What I categorize as ideological criticisms include criticisms of the government’s pro-IMF and allegedly neo-liberal economic policies, as well as the government’s foreign policy stances – on Israel, on the current US-Israel war against Iran, the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean, and the apparent closeness to the Modi government in India. These criticisms emanate from the non-JVP left and Sinhala Buddhist nationalists.

Strands of nationalism

To digress briefly, there are several strands in the overall bundle of Sri Lankan nationalism. There is the liberal inclusive strand, the left-progressive strand, the exclusive Sinhala Buddhist Nationalist (SBN) strand, and the defensive strands of minority nationalisms. Given Sri Lanka’s historical political formations and alliances, much overlapping goes on between the different strands. The overlapping gets selective on an issue by issue basis, which in itself is not unwelcome insofar as it promotes plurality in place of exclusivity.

Historically as well, and certainly after 1956, the SBN strand has been the dominant strand of nationalism in Sri Lanka and has had the most influential say in every government until now. Past versions of the JVP frequently straddled the dominant SBN space. Currently, however, the dominant SBN strand is in one of its more dormant phases and the NPP government could be a reason for the current dormancy. This is an obvious difference between the old JVP and the new NPP.

A second set of criticisms, or institutional criticisms, emanate from political liberals and human rights activists and these are about the NPP government’s actions or non-actions in regard to constitutional changes, the future of the elected executive presidency, the status of provincial devolution and the timing of provincial council elections, progress on human rights issues, the resolution of unfinished postwar businesses including the amnesia over mass graves. These criticisms and the issues they represent are also in varying ways the primary concerns of the island’s Tamils, Muslims and the Malaiyaka (planntationn) Tamils. As with the overlapping between the left and the non-minority nationalists, there is also overlapping between the liberal activists and minority representatives.

A third category includes what might be called oppositional criticisms and they counterpose the JVP’s past against the NPP’s present, call into question the JVP’s commitment to multi-party democracy and raise alarms about a creeping constitutional dictatorship. This category also includes criticisms of the NPP government’s lack of governmental experience and competence; alleged instances of abuse of power, mismanagement and even corruption; alleged harassment of past politicians; and the failure to find the alleged mastermind behind the 2019 Easter bombings. At a policy and implementational level, there have been criticisms of the government’s educational reforms and electricity reforms, the responses to cyclone Ditwah, and the current global oil and economic crises. The purveyors of oppositional criticisms are drawn from the general political class which includes political parties, current and past parliamentarians, as well as media pundits.

Criticisms as expectations

What is common to all three categories of criticisms is that they collectively represent what were understood to be promises by the NPP before the elections, and have become expectations of the NPP government after the elections. It is the range and nature of these criticisms and the corresponding expectations that make the NPP government a lot more than a mere JVP offspring, and significantly differentiate it from every previous government.

The deliverables that are expected of the NPP government were never a part of the vocabulary of the original JVP platform and programs. The very mode of parliamentary politics was ideologically anathema to the JVP of Akmeemana. And there was no mention of or concern for minority rights, or constitutional reforms. On foreign policy, it was all India phobia without Anglo mania – a halfway variation of Sri Lanka’s mainstream foreign policy of Anglo mania and India phobia. For a party of the rural proletariat, the JVP was virulently opposed to the plantation proletariat. The JVP’s version of anti-imperialist economics would hardly have excited the Sri Lankan electorate at any time, and certainly not at the present time.

At the same time, the NPP government is also the only government that has genealogical antecedents to a political movement or organization like the JVP. That in itself makes the NPP government unique among Sri Lanka’s other governments. The formation of the NPP is the culmination of the evolution of the JVP that began after the second insurrection with the shedding of political violence, acceptance of political plurality and commitment to electoral democracy.

But the evolution was not entirely a process of internal transformation. It was also a response to a rapidly and radically changing circumstances both within Sri Lanka and beyond. This evolution has not been a rejection of the founding socialist purposes of the JVP in 1968, but their adaptation in the endless political search, under constantly changing conditions, for a non-violent, socialist and democratic framework that would facilitate the full development of the human potential of all Sri Lankans.

The burden of expectations is unmistakable, but what is also remarkable is their comprehensiveness and the NPP’s formal commitment to all of them at the same time. No previous government shouldered such an extensive burden or showed such a willing commitment to each and every one of the expectations. In the brewing global economic crisis, the criticisms, expectations and the priorities of the government will invariably be focussed on keeping the economy alive and alleviating the day-to-day difficulties of millions of Sri Lankan families. While what the NPP government can and must do may not differ much from what other Asian governments – from Pakistan to Vietnam – are doing, it could and should do better than what any and all past Sri Lankan governments did when facing economic challenges.

by Rajan Philips

Features

A Fragile Ceasefire: Pakistan’s Glory and Israel’s Sabotage

Published

1 day ago

2026/04/12

Thilina Walpola

Smokes over Beirut: Israel’s Ceasefire Attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon

After threatening to annihilate one of the planet’s oldest civilizations, TACO* Trump chickened out again by grasping the ceasefire lifeline that Pakistan had assiduously prepared. Trump needed the ceasefire badly to stem the mounting opposition to the war in America. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu wanted the war to continue because he needed it badly for his political survival. So, he contrived a fiction and convinced Trump that Lebanon is not included in the ceasefire. Trump as usual may not have noticed that Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Shariff had clearly indicated Lebanon’s inclusion in his announcement of the ceasefire at 7:50 PM, Tuesday, on X. Ten minutes before Donald Trump’s fake deadline.

True to form on Wednesday, Israel unleashed the heaviest assault by far on Lebanon, reportedly killing over 300 people, the highest single-day death toll in the current war. Iran responded by re-closing the Strait of Hormuz and questioning the need for talks in Islamabad over the weekend. There were other incidents as well, with an oil refinery attacked in Iran, and Iranian drones and missiles slamming oil and gas infrastructure in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar.

The US tried to insist that Lebanon is not part of the ceasefire, with the argumentative US Vice President JD Vance, who was in Budapest, Hungary, campaigning for Viktor Orban, calling the whole thing a matter of “bad faith negotiation” as well as “legitimate misunderstanding” on the part of Iran, and warning Iran that “it would be dumb to jeopardise its ceasefire with Washington over Israel’s attacks in Lebanon.”

But as the attack in Lebanon drew international condemnation – from Pope Leo to UN Secretary General António Guterres, and several world leaders, and amidst fears of Lebanon becoming another Gaza with 1,500 people including 130 children killed and more than a million people displaced, Washington got Israel to stop its “lawn mowing” in southern Lebanon.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to “open direct negotiations with Lebanon as soon as possible,”. Lebanese President Joeseph Aoun has also called for “a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, followed by direct negotiations between them.” Israel’s involvement in Lebanon remains a wild card that threatens the ceasefire and could scuttle the talks between the US and Iran scheduled for Saturday in Islamabad.

Losers and Winners

After the ceasefire, both the Trump Administration and Iran have claimed total victories while the Israeli government wants the war to continue. The truth is that after more than a month into nonstop bombing of Iran, America and Israel have won nothing. Only Iran has won something it did not have when Trump and Netanyahu started their war. Iran now has not only a say over but control of the Strait of Hormuz. The ceasefire acknowledges this. Both Trump and Netanyahu are under fire in their respective countries and have no allies in the world except one another.

The real diplomatic winner is Pakistan. Salman Rushdie’s palimpsest-country has emerged as a key player in global politics and an influential mediator in a volatile region. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Chief of Defence Field Marshal Asim Munir have both been praised by President Trump and credited for achieving the current ceasefire. The Iranian regime has also been effusive in its praise of Pakistan’s efforts.

It is Pakistan that persisted with the effort after initial attempts at backdoor diplomacy by Egypt, Pakistan and Türkiye started floundering. Sharing a 900 km border and deep cultural history with Iran, and having a skirmish of its own on the eastern front with Afghanistan, Pakistan has all the reason to contain and potentially resolve the current conflict in Iran. Although a majority Sunni Muslim country, Pakistan is home to the second largest Shia Muslim population after Iran, and is the easterly terminus of the Shia Arc that stretches from Lebanon. The country also has a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia that includes Pakistan’s nuclear cover for the Kingdom. An open conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia would have put Pakistan in a dangerously awkward position.

It is now known and Trump has acknowledged that China had a hand in helping Iran get to the diplomatic table. Pakistan used its connections well to get Chinese diplomatic reinforcement. Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar flew to Beijing to brief his Chinese counterpart and secured China’s public support for the diplomatic efforts. The visit produced a Five-Point Plan that became a sequel to America’s 15-point proposal and the eventual ten-point offer by Iran.

There is no consensus between parties as to which points are where and who is agreeing to what. The chaos is par for the course the way Donald Trumps conducts global affairs. So, all kudos to Pakistan for quietly persisting with old school toing and froing and producing a semblance of an agreement on a tweet without a parchment.

It is also noteworthy that Israel has been excluded from all the diplomatic efforts so far. And it is remarkable, but should not be surprising, the way Trump has sidelined Isreal from the talks. Prime Minister Netanyahu has been enjoying overwhelming support of Israelis for starting the war of his life against Iran and getting the US to spearhead it. But now the country is getting confused and is exposed to Iranian missiles and drones far more than ever before. The Israeli opposition is finally coming alive realizing what little has Netanyahu’s wars have achieved and at what cost. Israel has alienated a majority of Americans and has no ally anywhere else.

It will be a busy Saturday in Islamabad, where the US and Iranian delegations are set to meet. Iran would seem to have insisted and secured the assurance that the US delegation will be led by Vice President Vance, while including Trump’s personal diplomats – Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Iran has not announced its team but it is expected to be led, for protocol parity, by Iran’s Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and will likely include its suave Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Vice President Vance’s attendance will be the most senior US engagement with Iran since Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal under President Obama.

The physical arrangements for the talks are still not public although Islamabad has been turned into a security fortress given the stakes and risks involved. The talks are expected to be ‘indirect’, with the two delegations in separate rooms and Pakistani officials shuttling between them. The status of Iran’s enriched uranium and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz will be the major points of contention. After Netanyahu’s overreach on Wednesday, Lebanon is also on the short list

The 2015 nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Action Plan) took months of negotiations and involved multiple parties besides the US and Iran, including China, France, Germany, UK, Russia and the EU. That served the cause of regional and world peace well until Trump tore up the deal to spite Obama. It would be too much to expect anything similar after a weekend encounter in Islamabad. But if the talks could lead to at least a permanent ceasefire and the return to diplomacy that would be a huge achievement.

(*As of 2025–2026, Donald Trump is nicknamed “TACO Trump” by Wall Street traders and investors as an acronym for “”. This term highlights a perceived pattern of him making strong tariff threats that cause market panic, only to later retreat or weaken them, causing a rebound.)

by Rajan Philips

Features

CIA’s hidden weapon in Iran

Published

1 day ago

2026/04/12

Thilina Walpola

We are passing through the ten-day interregnum called a ceasefire over the War on Iran. The world may breathe briefly, but this pause is not reassurance—it is a deliberate interlude, a vacuum in which every actor positions for the next escalation. Iran is far from secure. Behind the veneer of calm, external powers and local forces are preparing, arming, and coordinating. The United States is unlikely to deploy conventional ground troops; the next moves will be executed through proxies whose behaviour will defy expectation. These insurgents are shaped, guided, and amplified by intelligence and technology, capable of moving silently, striking precisely, and vanishing before retaliation. The ceasefire is not peace—it is the prelude to disruption.

The Kurds, historically instruments of Tehran against Baghdad, are now vectors for the next insurgency inside Iran. This movement is neither organic nor local. It is externally orchestrated, with the CIA as the principal architect. History provides the blueprint: under Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi, Kurdish uprisings were manipulated, never supported out of sympathy. They were instruments of leverage against Iraq, a way to weaken a rival while projecting influence beyond Iran’s borders. Colonel Isa Pejman, Iranian military intelligence officer who played a role in Kurdish affairs, recalled proposing support for a military insurgency in Iraq, only for the Shah to respond coldly: “[Mustafa] Barzani killed my Army soldiers… please forget it. The zeitgeist and regional context have been completely transformed.” The Kurds were pawns, but pawns with strategic weight. Pejman later noted: “When the Shah wrote on the back of the letter ‘Accepted’ to General Pakravan, I felt I was the true leader of the Kurdish movement.” The seeds planted then are now being activated under new, technologically empowered auspices.

Iran’s geographic vulnerabilities make this possible. The Shah understood the trap: a vast territory with porous borders, squeezed by Soviet pressure from the north and radical Arab states from the west. “We are in a really terrible situation since Moscow’s twin pincers coming down through Kabul and Baghdad surround us,” he warned Asadollah Alam. From Soviet support for the Mahabad Republic to Barzani’s dream of a unified Kurdistan, Tehran knew an autonomous Kurdish bloc could destabilize both Iraq and Iran. “Since the formation of the Soviet-backed Mahabad Republic, the Shah had been considerably worried about the Kurdish threat,” a US assessment concluded.

Today, the Kurds’ significance is operational, not symbolic. The CIA’s recent rescue of a downed F-15 airman using Ghost Murmur, a quantum magnetometry system, demonstrated the reach of technology in intelligence operations. The airman survived two days on Iranian soil before extraction. This was not a simple rescue; it was proof that highly mobile, technologically augmented operations can penetrate Iranian territory with surgical precision. The same logic applies to insurgency preparation: when individuals can be tracked through electromagnetic signatures, AI-enhanced surveillance, and drones, proxy forces can be armed, guided, and coordinated with unprecedented efficiency. The Kurds are no longer pawns—they are a living network capable of fracturing Iranian cohesion while providing deniability to foreign powers.

Iran’s engagement with Iraqi Kurds was always containment, not empowerment. The Shah’s goal was never Kurdish independence. “We do not approve an independent [Iraqi] Kurdistan,” he stated explicitly. Yet their utility as instruments of regional strategy was undeniable. The CIA’s revival of these networks continues a long-standing pattern: insurgent groups integrated into the wider calculus of international power. Israel, Iran, and the Kurds formed a triangular strategic relationship that terrified Baghdad. “For Baghdad, an Iranian-Israeli-Kurdish triangular alliance was an existential threat,” contemporary reports noted. This is the template for modern manipulation: a networked insurgency, externally supported, capable of destabilizing regimes from within while giving foreign powers plausible deniability.

Iran today faces fragility. Years of sanctions, repression, and targeted strikes have weakened educational and scientific hubs; Sharif University in Tehran, one of the country’s leading scientific centres, was bombed. Leaders, scholars, and innovators have been eliminated. Military readiness is compromised. Generations-long setbacks leave Iran exposed. Against this backdrop, a Kurdish insurgency armed with drones, AI-supported surveillance, and precision munitions could do more than disrupt—it could fracture the state internally. The current ten-day ceasefire is a mirage; the next wave of revolt is already being orchestrated.

CIA involvement is deliberate. Operations are coordinated with allied intelligence agencies, leveraging Kurdish grievances, mobility, and ethnolinguistic networks. The Kurds’ spread across Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria provides operational depth—allowing insurgents to strike, vanish, and regroup with impunity. Barzani understood leverage decades ago: “We could be useful to the United States… Look at our strategic location on the flank of any possible Soviet advance into the Middle East.” Today, the calculation is inverted: Kurds are no longer instruments against Baghdad; they are potential disruptors inside Tehran itself.

Technology is central. Ghost Murmur’s ability to detect a single heartbeat remotely exemplifies how intelligence can underpin insurgent networks. Drones, satellite communications, AI predictive modeling, and battlefield sensors create an infrastructure that can transform a dispersed Kurdish insurgency into a high-precision operation. Iran can no longer rely on fortifications or loyalty alone; the external environment has been recalibrated by technology.

History provides the roadmap. The Shah’s betrayal of Barzani after the 1975 Algiers Agreement demonstrated that external actors can manipulate both Iranian ambitions and Kurdish loyalties. “The Shah sold out the Kurds,” Yitzhak Rabin told Kissinger. “We could not station our troops there and keep fighting forever,” the Shah explained to Alam. The Kurds are a pivot, not a cause. Networks once acting under Tehran’s influence are now being repurposed against it.

The insurgency exploits societal fissures. Kurdish discontent in Iran, suppressed for decades, provides fertile ground. Historical betrayal fuels modern narratives: “Barzani claimed that ‘Isa Pejman sold us out to the Shah and the Shah sold us out to the US.’” Intelligence agencies weaponize these grievances, pairing them with training, technological augmentation, and covert support.

Geopolitically, the stakes are immense. The Shah’s defensive-offensive doctrine projected Iranian influence outward to neutralize threats. Today, the logic is inverted: the same networks used to contain Iraq are being readied to contain Iran. A technologically augmented Kurdish insurgency, covertly backed, could achieve in months what decades of sanctions, diplomacy, or repression have failed to accomplish.

The operation will be asymmetric, high-tech, and dispersed. UAVs, quantum-enhanced surveillance, encrypted communications, and AI-directed logistics will dominate. Conventional Iranian forces are vulnerable to this type of warfare. As Pejman reflected decades ago, “Our Army was fighting there, rather than the Kurds who were harshly defeated… How could we keep such a place?” Today, the challenge is magnified by intelligence superiority on the insurgents’ side.

This is not a temporary flare-up. The CIA and its allies are constructing a generational network of influence. Experience from Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon proves these networks endure once operationalised. The Shah recognized this: “Iran’s non-state foreign policy under the Shah’s reign left a lasting legacy for the post-Revolution era.” Today, those instruments are being remade as vectors of foreign influence inside Iran.

The future is stark. Iran faces not simply external threats, but a carefully engineered insurgency exploiting historical grievances, technological superiority, and precise intelligence. The Kurds are central. History, technology, and geopolitical calculation converge to create a transformative threat. Tehran’s miscalculations, betrayals, and suppressed grievances now form the lattice for this insurgency. The Kurds are positioned not just as an ethnic minority, but as a vector of international strategy—Tehran may be powerless to stop it.

Iran’s containment strategies have been weaponized, fused with technology, and inverted against it. The ghosts of Barzani’s Peshmerga, the shadows of Algiers, and the Shah’s strategic vision now converge with Ghost Murmur, drones, and AI. Tehran faces a paradox: the instruments it once controlled are now calibrated to undermine its authority. The next Kurdish revolt will not only fight in the mountains but in the electromagnetic shadows where intelligence operates, consequences are lethal, and visibility is scarce.

by Nilantha Ilangamuwa