Sheikh Hasina did not plan to leave Bangladesh. On August 5, 2024, with protest crowds bearing down on her official residence and army commanders withdrawing their protection without explanation, she had perhaps forty-five minutes to determine the rest of her life. She chose a helicopter to New Delhi. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose acting chairman Tarique Rahman had spent years directing $3.75 million in Washington lobbying fees from his exile in a London suburb, began celebrating within hours. What they were celebrating, the documents now show, had been years in the making, in offices far from Dhaka.
What follows is not a theory. It is an account of what the documents show: Foreign Agents Registration Act filings held at the US Department of Justice, grant records the National Endowment for Democracy has published on its own website, declassified CIA operational histories that the agency spent decades suppressing, a diplomatic cipher confirmed authentic by a foreign Supreme Court, and an 87-page United States Senate committee report that the American press largely ignored. The conclusion those documents support is one the United States government has already conceded, for other countries, in other decades: that Washington possesses a sophisticated, well-funded, and institutionally durable infrastructure for the removal of governments it finds inconvenient. That infrastructure operated actively in Bangladesh in the years before August 2024. The financial network connecting it to the Biden White House runs through Hunter Biden.
Begin with the confession, because the American government has already provided one. Allen Weinstein co-founded the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983 as the Reagan administration’s institutional solution to a specific problem. After the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Church Committee, conducted its 1975-76 hearings and documented CIA covert interference in the political systems of more than fifty countries, the agency needed a structure that could continue the work without triggering the oversight restrictions the hearings had produced. Weinstein described what was built in 1991, in an interview with Washington Post journalist David Ignatius. “A lot of what we do today,” he said, “was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” The National Endowment for Democracy was designed, by its own co-founder’s account, to launder covert political interference into the publicly defensible language of civil society funding and democracy promotion. That is not an allegation. It is the architect’s admission.
The CIA’s own declassified files record how that predecessor machinery operated. In Iran, the agency ran Operation TPAJAX in 1953 alongside British intelligence’s Operation Boot, a joint effort to remove Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh after he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The CIA’s internal 200-page operational history of the coup, written by agency officer Donald N. Wilber in March 1954 and classified for sixty years, was declassified through Freedom of Information Act proceedings and published by the National Security Archive in 2013. The documents confirm that Kermit Roosevelt Jr., the CIA’s lead field officer, directed the operation from inside Tehran, orchestrating paid street mobs, media manipulation, and military officer recruitment. The CIA’s own language in those materials, as the National Security Archive documented in its published briefing book, states that “CIA ACTION” directly produced Mosaddegh’s fall. In Chile in 1973, the picture is even more precisely documented. The cables of Operation FUBELT, held at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, show that on September 15, 1970, President Nixon convened a meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms and instructed him to prevent Salvador Allende from governing Chile. Nixon’s handwritten notes from that meeting record his exact words: “Make the economy scream.” Between 1970 and 1973, the United States authorized more than $8 million to destabilize Allende’s elected government, according to the Senate Church Committee’s 1975 report on covert action in Chile. The coup that followed, on September 11, 1973, killed Allende and installed General Augusto Pinochet. Henry Kissinger, told of the killings, responded to State Department staff that “this government is better for us than Allende was.”
Ukraine followed the same template, documented by an interception rather than a FOIA request. On February 4, 2014, a recording of a phone call between US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was published online by an account linked to Russian intelligence. The call was real. The State Department confirmed the recording was authentic. In it, Nuland discussed which Ukrainian opposition politicians should receive which government positions before President Yanukovych had fallen. Her stated preference for prime minister was Arseniy Yatsenyuk. “I think Yats is the man with the economic experience, the governing experience,” she told the ambassador. Pyatt agreed. Yatsenyuk became prime minister of Ukraine twelve days after Yanukovych fled. No senior American official was held accountable. The pattern was not new. The documentation was.
The mechanism is consistent enough to constitute a doctrine. First, a target government takes a decision that conflicts with American strategic or commercial preferences. Second, American-funded institutions, primarily the NED and its institutional arms the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, establish an operational presence inside the country: building civil society networks, funding independent media, training activists, commissioning political surveys, and generating political art. Third, diplomatic pressure escalates, framed as concern for elections or governance standards. Fourth, the opposition, its structural position improved by American institutional support, is better placed when the transition moment arrives. William I. Robinson, whose 1996 study “Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony” analyzed NED operations across Latin America and Eastern Europe, identified this template twenty years before it was applied in Dhaka.
The countries where this sequence has played out share a characteristic that policy analysis rarely states plainly: they are almost invariably nations at the developmental middle of the international system. Large enough to hold strategic or commercial significance. Not wealthy or powerful enough to absorb sustained American pressure without structural damage to their institutions. Iran in 1953 had oil and an elected government that wanted it back. Chile in 1973 had copper and a socialist who intended to redistribute it. Ukraine in 2014 had a border with Russia and an association agreement the European Union wanted signed. Bangladesh in 2024 had the Bay of Bengal, a garment sector that had made it the world’s second-largest apparel exporter, a government whose development model had been built through sovereign economic choices rather than dollar-denominated conditionality, and a documented refusal to subordinate its strategic geography to Washington’s requirements. The mechanism is not designed to target powerful states. It is designed to displace governments of developing nations that have enough leverage to make their displacement strategically worthwhile, and insufficient external protection to resist it.
Ambassador Peter Haas arrived in Dhaka in March 2022. On September 22, 2023, the State Department announced visa restrictions on Bangladeshi individuals it described as undermining democratic electoral processes. The restrictions applied to Hasina government officials and security forces. They were not applied to leaders of a political party that the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit had designated a Tier III terrorist organization in case number 17-1056, based on that party’s documented associations with organizations that carried out mass-casualty attacks inside Bangladesh. The asymmetry in how American diplomatic pressure was applied carried a clear beneficiary. Donald Lu, the US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, had already demonstrated how such pressure is operationalized. In March 2022, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan publicly disclosed a diplomatic cipher he said had been transmitted from the Pakistani ambassador in Washington, in which Lu communicated that Pakistan’s relationship with the United States was contingent on a change in government in Islamabad. Pakistan’s National Security Committee reviewed the cipher and confirmed its existence. Pakistan’s Supreme Court cited it in subsequent constitutional proceedings. Khan was removed in a parliamentary no-confidence vote in April 2022. Lu visited Dhaka in May 2024. By August 5, 2024, Hasina’s helicopter was in the air.
Among the specific demands the Hasina government faced in the period before the transition was American interest in St. Martin’s Island, a small coral island at the southernmost tip of Bangladesh at the mouth of the Bay of Bengal. Sheikh Hasina stated publicly after leaving office that she had been pressured to permit American access to St. Martin’s Island, and that she had refused. The island’s position is strategically significant: it commands approaches to the Bay of Bengal, lies in proximity to shipping lanes connecting the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asian markets, and provides a vantage point from which a monitoring or naval presence could observe maritime traffic between the Andaman Sea and the broader Indo-Pacific. Washington’s documented competition with China for position in the Bay of Bengal has made every significant coastal island a subject of great-power negotiation. A government that controlled one of those islands, and that had refused to extend access, was a government Washington had structural incentive to prefer replaced. The public record does not include the American requests themselves. What it includes is Hasina’s statement that they were made, her statement that she refused, and the documented sequence that followed.
The commercial layer of the pressure campaign runs through a lobbying firm called Blue Star Strategies, and Blue Star runs through Hunter Biden. Department of Justice Foreign Agents Registration Act filings, accessible in the public FARA database, show that Blue Star registered as a foreign agent in August 2018 to represent BNP interests, with the contract arranged through Tarique Rahman’s London-based exile network and documented payments of at least $278,582 over the initial registration period. The filings describe services including educating American officials, media figures, and policy organizations about the BNP and Bangladesh electoral conditions. By 2022, Bangladesh’s State Minister for Foreign Affairs stated publicly that the BNP had directed $3.75 million in total toward Washington lobbying infrastructure across the period the diplomatic pressure was simultaneously escalating.
Blue Star Strategies was also Burisma’s lobbying firm. Karen Tramontano, who founded Blue Star after serving as a senior official in the Clinton White House, managed parallel FARA registrations for Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden served from 2014 to 2019. On September 23, 2020, the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Senator Ron Johnson with co-authorship by Senator Chuck Grassley, released an 87-page report titled “Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Corruption: The Impact on U.S. Government Policy and Related Concerns.” The report stated, in its own language, that Hunter Biden had been “instrumental in convincing Burisma to retain Blue Star’s services.” The finding is in the congressional record. It has not been challenged. A Washington firm instrumental to Hunter Biden’s commercial network, simultaneously registered under FARA to represent a Ukrainian energy company with active interests before the Biden State Department and to rehabilitate a Bangladeshi political party that American federal courts had designated a terrorist organization, is a conflict of interest the Senate investigation did not fully pursue. As Sputnik News India has documented, the network connecting those interests is not peripheral to what happened in Bangladesh. I have previously examined Hunter Biden’s lobbying connections to Bangladesh in detail; those findings have not been refuted.
The BNP’s own legal designation sharpens what the record implies. The Tier III terrorist classification, confirmed in case 17-1056 by the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, rested on the party’s documented associations with Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, which carried out coordinated bombings across more than sixty sites in Bangladesh on August 17, 2005, killing two judges and injuring hundreds, and with Al Qaeda’s South Asia affiliate AQIS. US courts formally designated the BNP on that basis. That designation did not prevent the NED from directing funding to civil society organizations operating in the political space the BNP sought to reclaim. It did not prevent Blue Star from accepting millions to rehabilitate the party’s image in official Washington. It did not qualify the State Department’s diplomatic pressure campaign against the government the designated terrorist organization was working to remove. The BNP’s documented connections to Al Qaeda affiliate AQIS and the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh were available in public court records throughout the entire period the lobbying campaign and the diplomatic escalation were running simultaneously. The information existed. No one in the accountability chain treated it as disqualifying.
What Bangladesh lost in the transition that this machinery produced is a question the Western press has been uncomfortable asking. Sheikh Hasina governed a country that, over the preceding decade, had become one of the fastest-developing economies in the world. Annual GDP growth averaged above six percent across more than a decade of Awami League government, pulling tens of millions of people measurably out of poverty. Women’s labor force participation reached levels without precedent in South Asian history. The garment sector employed approximately four million workers, more than eighty percent of them women, and established Bangladesh as the world’s second-largest apparel exporter behind China. That development record was built without ceding sovereign control over the country’s strategic assets, its territorial waters, or its island geography to any external power. In the months following August 2024, minority communities across Bangladesh reported systematic violence; figures affiliated with the extremist networks the BNP had cultivated returned to public life; and international assessments registered significant economic disruption. Whether what replaced the Hasina government serves Bangladeshis better is a judgment the evidence must eventually supply. The early evidence does not support a confident affirmative.
I do not have the classified cables that moved between Langley, Foggy Bottom, and the US Embassy in Dhaka in the years preceding August 5, 2024. No journalist does. Every claim in this piece rests on materials that are publicly available: the FARA filings are in the DOJ database; the NED grants are acknowledged on ned.org; the Senate Homeland Security Committee report is in the congressional record; the CIA’s Iran operational history is in the National Security Archive’s published briefing book; the FUBELT cables are at the National Security Archive at George Washington University; the Nixon handwritten notes recording his “make the economy scream” order are in the same collection; the Donald Lu cipher was read aloud by a sitting prime minister and its existence confirmed by his country’s Supreme Court. What those public documents collectively show is that every institutional mechanism the United States has historically used to facilitate political transitions was operational in Bangladesh in the years before August 2024. The funding was there. The activist infrastructure was there. The diplomatic pressure was escalating. The registered lobbyists were simultaneously employed by a Ukrainian energy company tied to the sitting vice president’s son and by a political party American federal courts had designated a terrorist organization. The assistant secretary of state with a documented pattern of preceding political transitions in at least five countries was in Dhaka three months before the prime minister fled.
Whether that constitutes a coordinated operation is a judgment each reader must draw from what the documents disclose. What Washington will not supply, and what it has never supplied for any country where this sequence has played out, is an answer to the question the full record makes inescapable: if no American administration would tolerate a foreign government funding opposition networks in American cities, training activists at American universities, placing registered lobbyists in Washington to reshape American domestic politics, and dispatching senior diplomats with records of preceding multiple successive government removals to assess the capital’s political temperature, why does that same architecture remain American policy when the capital being assessed is Dhaka?
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