2 The Enemy Within

 2

The Enemy Within

You should also know that these enemies are here. They are not to be found abroad. They are close to us and even within our ranks.1

Hissène Habré, president of Chad

On the night of 28 June 1762, Catherine was asleep at Monplaisir, a summer villa at Peterhof Palace. Sitting just metres above the waters ofthe Gulf of Finland, it was a tranquil retreat outside the hustle and bustle of imperial St Petersburg.2

Suddenly, a man stormed into Catherine’s bedroom. ‘The time has come! You must get up and come with me!’ the soldier said. Notyet fully awake, a confused Catherine replied: ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Passek is arrested,’ he said.3

Catherine was now playing against time. Captain Passek was in on her plot to overthrow her husband, Tsar Peter III of Russia. If Passek weretortured, her involvement wouldn’t remain secret for long. And if she were to be found out, her journey to the scaffold would followswiftly.4

The last couple of years had been difficult for Catherine. The tsar had long alienated his wife, and Catherine eventually became convincedthat he wanted to remove her and marry his mistress Elizaveta. Peter insulted and humiliated his wife in public.5 He made drunken threats.He lied, deceived and plotted. Catherine’s life was in acute danger.

Months into his reign, Peter had antagonised just about every faction around the court that mattered. Many soldiers were upset becausePeter was strangely pro-Prussian. His obsession with Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, was so intense that he forced his soldiers to dresslike Prussians.6 Whereas his predecessor had waged war against Prussia with Austria, one of Peter’s first moves was to save Russia’senemy from certain defeat. He could have marched on Berlin but didn’t. When Frederick offered him lands to stop the war, he refused totake them. Then, with his troops exhausted from a war from which they didn’t seem to gain anything because Peter was unwilling topress Russia’s advantage, he decided to prepare for war with Denmark because Denmark had control over Schleswig. That didn’t reallyhave anything to do with Russia, but, once again, it was one of Peter’s strange obsessions.7 As a result of these events, many of thesoldiers were seething.

Unlike Peter, Catherine was exceptionally good at forging alliances with the powerful at court. From day one in Russia, the Germanprincess had embraced the culture. She learned Russian and did her best to take Russian Orthodoxy seriously. She acted, as she put it, ‘sothe Russians should love me’.8 And it’s clear that many of those at court did, or at least they preferred her to Peter III. One of theircourtiers commented: ‘Sympathy for the empress grew in proportion to contempt for her husband.’9

Clothed in black, Catherine made her way to the barracks of the Izmailovsky Guards, who were tasked with protecting the royal family. Atthe barracks, the soldiers kissed her hands, feet and the hem of her dress.10 After arriving at the Winter Palace, priests, senators and palaceguards made it clear that they would support Catherine rather than her husband in the struggle for power.11 But even with their support,the problem of what to do about her husband remained. Peter might be away from the capital, but he had access to thousands of troops.

When his wife’s betrayal had first become apparent, Peter was distraught and confused. Should he try to negotiate? One of his generalsadvised him to march on St Petersburg.12 With the military force he had at his command, he could crush his wife and her co-conspirators;he could then reclaim the throne that was rightfully his. But unlike his wife Catherine, Peter didn’t have what it took. Instead of making thedecisive move as counselled by his general, he dithered.

In St Petersburg, Catherine made the boldest move possible. After changing into the green uniform of the Imperial Guards, she mounted awhite stallion and herself led her army to dispose of Peter.13 In the end, the only thing she was willing to accept was unconditionalabdication – in writing. It was the greatest possible humiliation for her husband.

Less than six months after being crowned emperor of Russia, Peter III was imprisoned at Ropsha, a castle some thirty kilometres southwestof St Petersburg. Less than a week after losing power, he died.

Power is relational. You can’t be a leader if you don’t have followers. But for tyrants, the number of people they must keep happy tostay in charge is small. At the same time, these are also the people most likely to bring them down. The data bear this out: between 1950and 2012, 473 authoritarian leaders lost power. According to one analysis, 65 per cent of them were removed by regime insiders.14Often, the real danger isn’t those who openly oppose the leader, but those who see him regularly, smiling while they plot their nextmove.

To understand how tyrants survive (and fall), think of people in the three groups outlined by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smithin their Dictator’s Handbook.15 First, there are the people who matter in theory – the group the leaders are supposed to win over to getcontrol. Second, there are the people who actually matter – the group that leaders need to gain control. And third, there’s an inner core,the smallest group that tyrants cannot rule without.

The people who matter in theory (called the ‘nominal selectorate’ by de Mesquita and Smith) have some say in whether a given leader,tyrant or not, gets to stay in power. In a liberal democracy such as the United States, it can be tens of millions of people since most peopleabove the age of eighteen can vote in presidential elections.

The second group of people is the ‘real selectorate’. The real selectorate consists of the group that actually determines who stays inpower. In the United States, that group technically consists of the 538 electors of the Electoral College. Once the people have voted, theirrepresentatives choose the president. In modern practice, however, these electors take their mandate from the popular election and voteaccordingly. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

This means that the de facto real selectorate consists of the much larger number of voters in a small number of ‘swing states’ (stateswhere the voting could go either way) that regularly decide the outcome of presidential elections. In addition, there are the lobbyists,donors and other political players who can give you the resources you need to get a meaningful chance of trying to persuade the voters inswing states. To make this more concrete: a voter in Kansas, who is part of the nominal selectorate, is much less important than a voter inWisconsin because Kansas always goes red (votes Republican) whereas Wisconsin does not. Votes in Wisconsin can make a realdifference, whereas votes in Kansas only make a difference in theory. John from Kansas is part of the nominal selectorate, Joanna fromWisconsin is part of the real selectorate.

Then, you have the winning coalition. The winning coalition consists of the smallest number of people from the real selectorate that youneed to assemble in order to take or maintain power. In the case of America, this would be the smallest number of voters in swing statesneeded to win the Electoral College.

The size of all these groups varies hugely depending on the system of government. Most dictators don’t need to worry about electoralcolleges; some don’t even have to worry about voters. The more authoritarian the regime, the smaller these three groups tend to be. AtPeter’s court in eighteenth-century Russia, the real selectorate was tiny and so was the winning coalition. All it took for Catherine totopple her husband and get him thrown into jail were a small number of the Imperial Guard. Even back in 1762, the Russian Empire had anestimated population of more than 17 million.16 And yet, losing the support of his wife and a few key military figures made all thedifference between sitting on a throne and dying in a grimy dungeon.

It may seem as though the story of Peter and Catherine is a far cry from the dynamics of contemporary politics. The United States didn’texist then, industrialisation hadn’t occurred and there was a grand total of zero liberal democracies in the world – but that doesn’tmean the general mechanism of how a tyrant functions has ceased to apply. In highly authoritarian countries, the winning coalition can stillconsist of just a few hundred people. In these countries, the support of a core elite determines everything: if the tyrant can maintain thesupport of the winning coalition, he stays in power and stays alive. If he loses the winning coalition, he loses power – and perhaps morethan that. And for everyone else who lives under these brutal regimes, having a better life means climbing from powerless peasant tosomeone who actually counts as part of the selectorate.

If they didn’t already know this after decades of totalitarian rule, the North Korean regime taught this lesson to its people during the1990s.17

North Korea is mountainous, its winters harsh, its agriculture precarious. Starting in the late 1950s, when much of North Korea lay in ruinsas a result of the war with South Korea and its allies, farmers were forced to collectivise. This meant that instead of mostly farming forthemselves, people now mostly farmed for the state. As a result, millions of people became totally dependent on the government sincethey could no longer buy food or grow it in meaningful quantities for themselves. Instead, the government decided who got what. Thissystem only ‘worked’ to the extent that it did because both the Soviet Union and China provided significant support to North Koreaduring the Cold War. As the Soviet Union collapsed, China also reduced its support – partly because its own harvest didn’t go as planned.It was a massive external shock. The Kim family could have reacted by expanding foreign trade or liberalising the collective system athome; they did neither. When floods hit in 1995, North Koreans were already experiencing famine. The system hadn’t worked before thewater came rushing in, but now it was totally destroyed.

For many ordinary North Koreans, the situation became so desperate that they began to eat trees. Ji Hyun-ah, who was seventeen at thetime, describes what it was like.18 To start with you had to find the right tree. It had to be pine, and finding it could involve going upmountains or down valleys. Once found, Ji had to chop the tree down, which wasn’t an easy task for someone already weakened byhunger.

With the trees chopped, the children (or their parents) had to peel back the outer bark with a knife or a scythe. Beneath the outer bark laywhat they called songgi, a thin inner layer that separates the outer bark from the wood of the tree. Once enough of the songgi had beencollected (which was hard work), it then had to be boiled in lye, stretched out and soaked for a night. When all that was done, it had to bebeaten with a club and combined with a little bit of corn flour to make a sort of cake. As Ji put it: ‘It was barely edible, and having to dowith that kind of food was terrible.’19 For some Korean children, the situation was even more dire, because not even pinetree-bark cakewas available regularly. For them, getting to eat the trees was like Christmas.20 And yet, Ji recalls, ‘it never occurred to us to blame NorthKorea’s dictatorial government for our hardships.’21

But slowly, as the catastrophe unfolded and more North Koreans became malnourished before dying, the risk of that happeningincreased. To Kim Jong-il (the father of Kim Jong-un and son of North Korea’s first leader, Kim Il-sung), this wasn’t just a humanitarianproblem, it rapidly became a question of whether the regime would survive. Instead of distributing the little food that was left accordingto need, it was distributed, at least partly, based on a subject’s loyalty to the regime and the extent to which a person was needed to keepthe Kims in power. In Pyongyang, where people really mattered to the dictatorship, the rations were comparatively large. Outside thecapital, in less important areas of the countryside, countless people starved to death. That wasn’t a coincidence. At times during thefamine, the rations per person in Pyongyang were almost twice as high as those in some other provinces.22 As political scientists DanielByman and Jennifer Lind have concluded: ‘Kim Jong-il shielded his selectorate and concentrated the famine’s devastation on thepeople deemed the least loyal.’23 And for them, the effect was truly devastating. By some credible estimates, around 3 to 5 per cent ofNorth Korea’s pre-famine population died.24

Palace elites, whether they are high-ranking party officials, generals or oligarchs, can help or hinder the tyrant’s aspirations. In thebest-case scenario for the tyrant, a large segment of the elites believes that the continued rule of the dictator is in their own interest. Whenthat is the case, they may not just acquiesce in his rule but act as a crutch during moments of turmoil. But the more likely scenario, and theone that all tyrants must fear, is one in which a significant portion of the real selectorate wants to see the dictator overthrown – eitherbecause they want power themselves or because they believe their interests will be better served under different leadership.

To the despot, managing the real selectorate and the country at large is so difficult because these regimes are notoriously opaque, not justto outsiders, but also to the dictator himself. This is known as the ‘dictator’s dilemma’.25 To stay in power, the dictator creates aclimate of perpetual fear. That fear silences critics, who don’t dare to speak their minds. But because most keep silent, the dictator neverknows what people – even his advisers – actually think. Is this person genuinely loyal or are they only pretending? Does he or she reallysupport the government’s ideology, or is it all theatre designed to buy time until they can stab the tyrant in the back? The tyrant cannotpossibly know. He may be the most powerful person in the country, but he can never trust his subordinates to tell him the truth. Everydecision a dictator makes, then, is made with information that has been filtered through a fog of fear.

These dynamics feel alien to most of us because we are able to speak our minds without worrying that it’ll lead to our untimely deaths, orour families being tortured. An office worker telling their boss an unpleasant truth might lower their chances of promotion. They couldeven get fired. But who wouldn’t lie to a dictator if the truth meant jail or death? In dictatorships, the truth can be deadly.

Most tyrants aren’t stupid, so they understand that they don’t receive the full picture. Under those circumstances, it’s rational fortyrants to assume the worst about the people surrounding them.

But not all tyrants have the same difficulty in dealing with the enemy within because the coalition upon which leaders depend varieshugely. Political scientists Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith have written:

If a small bloc of backers is needed and it can be drawn from a large pool of potential supporters (as in the small coalition needed in placeslike Zimbabwe, North Korea, or Afghanistan), then the incumbent doesn’t need to spend a huge proportion of the regime’s revenue tobuy the coalition’s loyalty.26

Under those conditions, the price of elite ‘loyalty’ to the incumbent is low because there is plenty of supply. If the minister of the interiordemands a larger cut of the money the regime steals from its people, the minister won’t get a raise – instead, he will be replaced by one ofthe many other people who are ‘qualified’ and willing to do his job. But what de Mesquita and Smith described for Zimbabwe, NorthKorea and Afghanistan isn’t true for all tyrannical regimes. Some incumbents need to work much harder to keep the money-makingmachine running because the pool from which they can recruit is significantly smaller.

Let’s imagine the new head of a military junta. A year ago, he was a colonel worrying about his military role, but now he has seized powerand needs to worry about his new role as dictator. He’s done his first television broadcast to project authority and calm the nerves of theinternational community, and now has to get on with his new job. To a large extent, that will mean keeping fellow colonels happy becausethey are needed for him to stay in office. If the colonels feel as though they could improve their lot with someone else in charge, they willsee to it that someone else will take charge. And once that person is in charge, their predecessor will be in immediate danger.

The problem with this situation, from the coup leader’s perspective, is that it is difficult to replace people. There are plenty of soldiers, butnot a lot of colonels – and he needs to surround himself with high-ranking military officers because privates don’t have the experience orstature to help him lead the new government.

In democracies, voters are replaceable; you lose one, you can win back another. But in authoritarian regimes, the supply of elites that makeup the real selectorate is finite. In monarchies, for example, there are only so many princes. Alienate one, and there may not be another totake his place. The same is true for many dictatorships. There are only so many generals and so many spy chiefs, and tyrants can’t alwaysreplace the ones who turn against them. The result of this more limited replacement pool in military regimes or monarchies is that rulersneed to work harder to keep the elites on their side. Their price, if you will, goes up. And as annoying as that might be from the tyrant’sperspective, not paying is not really an option.

To pay this price, despots need money – lots of it, and that is quite apart from their own private funds, of course. In an ideal situation,tyrants want access to a source of wealth that doesn’t depend on skilled labour. If it does, the tyrant depends on the goodwill of largenumbers of people and that is a situation they generally want to avoid because it makes them vulnerable. In addition, having themoney-machine depend on skilled labour means that money needs to be spent on educating people, which is a waste of money if thesame money could also be spent on the things that really matter – such as buying off opponents or building golden statues of yourself thatrotate with the sun.

It’s no coincidence that many of the world’s most vicious regimes have had access to oil, gas or diamonds. Not only is the extraction ofthese natural resources incredibly lucrative, it can still be done even if just about everybody surrounding the leader is incompetent.Extracting oil is an arduous, difficult process. To get it done, governments need to secure massive investments, besides having access tohighly sophisticated technology and a whole lot of expertise. But – and here is the advantage for tyrants – large numbers of people are notrequired for this process and those who are come ready trained. The reason for this is that oil is such a lucrative commodity that leaderscan simply sell an oil field to a foreign major which will take care of everything for them. The drilling? They’ll get it done. The refining?They’ve got it. The shipping? Worry not. Because they know they’ll make millions or billions, they’ll be happy to take care ofeverything. In fact, the corporate CEO writing the cheque might even be happy that he’s dealing with a tyrant rather than having theannoyance of legislatures, environmental groups or investigative journalists poking around. For tyrants it’s the perfect set-up. Oil anddictatorship go hand in hand.

If the incompetence has gone too far or there is no oil to pay off the elites, the dictator has another tool to manage the selectorate:repression. Managing the selectorate is like sitting on top of a pit of ten-foot snakes – every wrong move could be the tyrant’s last. Thosemonsters either have to be fed or they have to be kept down.

But purging, as it were, is as much an art as a science. It is a tough path to take. Tyrants want to move decisively and finish off their enemiesinstead of just weakening them a little, thereby leaving them in a position where they remain a danger and become radicalised. NiccolòMachiavelli, the Italian diplomat who wrote The Prince at the beginning of the sixteenth century, put it as follows:

You must either pamper people or destroy them; harm them just a little and they’ll hit back; harm them seriously and they won’t be ableto. So if you’re going to do people harm, make sure you needn’t worry about their reaction.27

So why even pay the elites at all, why not just eliminate everyone who presents a minor threat and beat them into submission instead oftrying to keep them happy?

Not every despot can go straight to killing because the elites provide a restraint. A purge is, according to one definition, the removal of amember from the ruling coalition.28 That can mean any number of things. It could be a demotion, it could be imprisonment, it could beforced exile, or execution. Clearly, none of these things are in the interest of the purge’s victims but, crucially, such outcomes can be in theinterest of the remaining elites.29 However much money a dictatorship might generate through thievery and extortion, resources arefinite. When some members of the elite are banished or killed, the same cake can be distributed differently, leading to others having abigger slice – or at least, that’s what they will expect. The result of this is that elites might not just accept purges but will actively push forthem because it’s a way for them to advance their position while taking out competitors. Same cake, fewer people.

But there’s a tipping point due to what I call the ‘Icarus Effect’. According to Greek mythology, Icarus escaped from his unfortunatesituation by constructing wings. He was warned not to fly too close to the sea or to the sun, but his hubris led him astray. In the end, hecame too close to the sun and his wings began to melt – leading him to fall and die. The situation of palace elites is similar. Initially, theremight be excitement about getting a bigger slice of the cake. But at some point, hope for a bigger slice of the cake is outweighed by fearamong the elites that they could also be purged. It’s one thing if a few high-ranking officials disappear after they’ve been implicated inan assassination attempt. It’s another if person after person is shot for no discernible reason at all. As the seats of the cabinet empty ornew faces appear, panic will gradually rise. Sweaty ministers, scared of death, will switch from being supporters of the purge to becomingenemies of the tyrant. As it dawns on more of them that they could be victims of the killings, elites may recognise that they are coming tooclose to the sun.

As a result, they may try to move against the tyrant before it’s too late. If they have an opportunity to coordinate with each other, the rulerruns the risk of creating a further attack on his rule through measures that he implemented in order to strengthen it. But even if despotsfind the right balance between the carrot and stick, the dictator’s dilemma never really disappears. He simply cannot know for certainwhere his underlings stand.

There is one exception: moments of crisis. When the leader is under attack, for example during an attempted coup, he is able to seethrough the fog clearly for a brief moment. He sees not just who is genuinely loyal, but also who was merely pretending to be. What’smore, he now knows how powerful he is in relation to his enemies. If he survives, he’s stronger than them. If not, it’s too late to do muchabout it, but at least he has some certainty.30 This brief window of transparency is so attractive to leaders that some rulers havedeliberately let plots against their regime unfold. Legend has it that Ranavalona I, the Merina queen of Madagascar, did just that. To theextent that Europeans cared about Madagascar at all, Ranavalona was at times portrayed as a savage who mistreated Christians whilereversing the more ‘enlightened’ policies of her predecessor.31

That this story was put about was to be expected. The Merina queen’s main objectives were the preservation of her power and thesafeguarding of Madagascar’s independence. Commentators from London or Paris wanted exactly the opposite. The island’sneighbours were already under the control of colonisers, and with Madagascar’s strategic location, there was money to be made bywhoever was able to control it.

That said, there was no denying that Ranavalona I was an exceedingly cruel tyrant – and not just to outsiders but also the indigenouspopulation too. Most infamously, she forced scores of people into a trial by ordeal which involved eating the poisonous seeds of thetangena tree. People were at liberty to accuse each other of being guilty of something – as the queen often did. To prove their‘innocence’, the accused had to eat the tree’s seeds and stay alive. Those that died were, by definition, guilty. The ‘sea mangos’, asthey are also called, contain cerberin, a type of cardiac glycoside. When a doctor prescribes a cardiac glycoside to a patient with a weakheart, their heart beats slower but stronger. Eating the nuts of the tangena tree initially does the same. But at some point, the poisonoverwhelms the heart, causing it to beat erratically and way too fast. If left untreated, the heart stops pumping blood altogether. QueenRanavalona didn’t invent the trial by ordeal, but under her reign it peaked. Hundreds of thousands of Malagasies might have died from itwhile she was on the throne.32

In 1855, the queen’s place on Madagascar’s throne was in danger when a Frenchman named Joseph-François Lambert did a deal withPrince Rakoto, Queen Ranavalona’s son and heir. Upon Rakoto’s accession to the throne, Lambert would get the right to exploitMadagascar’s ample untapped natural resources.33 Although that was obviously fantastic for the Frenchman, it was terrible forMadagascar, and most of all  for the reigning sovereign, particularly so since the deal was only going to come to fruition in the event ofQueen Ranavalona being deposed. Initially, Lambert hoped that the French government would take care of this problem for him and getrid of her.34 It didn’t, so Lambert set out to plan a coup.

What happened next is subject to debate. According to one version, the coup ultimately failed because the commander in charge ofprotecting the palace failed to ensure that the palace guard on the night it was supposed to happen were (dis)loyal to the cause.35 Inanother version, the whole thing was a masterclass in deception that involved not just Queen Ranavalona but also Rakoto.36 According tothis version, the queen found out that her power and the nation’s independence were endangered, but instead of striking at the firstopportunity, she let the plot unfold as long as she could in order to obtain more information on those who had betrayed her.

It goes without saying that this is a high-risk strategy that most rulers don’t want to attempt. As a result, they remain in the dark, notknowing who at court stands with them and who is just waiting to attack. That leaves them with a choice: do they prioritise competence orloyalty? Given the stakes, it’s rational to surround oneself with sycophants – even if they’re stupid or incompetent. In dictatorships,loyalty is paramount. After all, competence can be dangerous. If advisors and officials are too good at their jobs, they might tire of beingtold what to do and start plotting to take power for themselves. That’s why most dictators pick loyalists who don’t have any otheroptions. Being dependent on the tyrant breeds loyalty, and loyalty breeds trust.

But, as with all decisions related to regime survival, there is a trade-off. As dictators promote incompetent officials because they seemloyal, the top ranks of government become staffed by people who really shouldn’t be anywhere near power. Over time, this becomes aserious problem because even the rulers of highly centralised systems of government must create some positive outcomes for enoughpeople in order to maintain power. Have you ever heard someone say that you should always aim not to be the cleverest person in theroom because that allows you to learn? This is the opposite of that. Surrounding himself with incompetent sycophants because theypresent less of a danger results in a tyrant being the cleverest person in every room by his own design.

Such sycophants are likely to tell the dictator what he wants to hear because, over time, dictators purge the people who tell themunpleasant truths while rewarding those who lie to please. The result of this is a trap that tyrants set for themselves: as their view of realitybecomes more distorted due to their own decisions, they become more likely to make catastrophic mistakes based on a version of eventsthat was never real.37

There can also be a structural element to this. If the number one priority is security (for the regime, not the population at large), the tyrant isgoing to spend much of the day surrounded by the people that live in that world: intelligence operatives, military officers, police. Thesepeople, in turn, are trained and paid to think about threats all day every day. If you look at Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example,there’s a clear trajectory. Initially, he surrounded himself with technocrats who took a serious interest in the well-being of the economy.Before advising the president, they might have been bankers or managers.

Over time, the influence of this group waned while the influence of the siloviki increased.38 The siloviki are the men of force. They arepeople such as Sergei Naryshkin, head of the country’s foreign intelligence service;39 or Alexander Bortnikov, in charge of one of thesuccessors to the infamous Soviet KGB. Naryshkin and Bortnikov have a way of looking at the world that is influenced by their profession.Having spent decades in the world of shadows where everyone and everything is a potential threat, they have a certain way of thinkingthat rubs off on the man that listens to them.

In 2014, for example, when President Viktor Yanukovych wanted to flee Ukraine, Putin had a decision to make. Would he help? Or wouldhe let Yanukovych face justice in Ukraine, where his government had been responsible for the death of scores of protestors? Whateverpath the Russian government took could have massive repercussions for Russia’s foreign policy. It was a political, economic and militaryproblem. To make a decision, President Putin convened an all-night meeting that was to last until 7 the following morning. But instead oftrying to understand the problem from multiple angles, the people he listened to were soldiers and spies – siloviki. As the meeting came toan end, Putin declared: ‘We must start working on returning Crimea to Russia.’40

The result of this over-reliance on the siloviki is a feedback loop that the political scientists Seva Gunitsky and Adam Casey have describedas follows:

The President’s advisers uniformly see the West as a grave security threat to Russia, which encourages Putin to adopt an increasinglyhostile stance. This in turn provokes the United States and Europe to confront Russia, which only increases the influence of Putin’s hawksby justifying their pessimistic and often paranoid outlook. Partly as a result, Russian foreign policy has grown more belligerent over time.41

Broken people become tyrants, and then tyranny can break them further. Many dictators come to office with experiences that profoundlydistort their view of reality. Take Kim Jong-un. He lived his childhood like a character in The Truman Show, where the entire world wasconstructed for him.

The estate of the supreme leader was so large that the children would regularly move around on a golf cart.42 There were private chefs,gardeners and tutors who catered for every need. One thing that the young Kim really enjoyed was playing with toy planes and ships.43He would spend hours at it. And if he had a problem, whatever the time of day or night, he would summon a nautical engineer to help himout. And that nautical engineer would have no choice but to come.44

When he was just eight years old, the heir ‘wore a general’s uniform with stars, and the real generals with real stars bowed to him andpaid their respects to the boy’. If the family’s then private chef is to be believed, Kim also started to carry a Colt .45 pistol when he waseleven.45 One journalist remarked in a magazine feature on Kim that it’s true of most of us that, as children, we are at the centre of theuniverse but this changes as we get older. For Kim, it never did. Everything in his surroundings continued to revolve around him.46

It doesn’t take a psychologist to see that dictatorships aren’t conducive to a healthy mind. Most obviously, that’s true for the dictatorhimself – but it’s also the case for the average person in the street.

Living under tyranny is inherently stressful. Ordinary people have to watch what they say because saying the wrong thing could havesevere consequences. Even if they themselves aren’t subject to repression, people around them might be. And when the situationbecomes so overwhelming that it requires medical treatment, those unlucky enough to live in non-democratic systems of governmentmight not even be able to trust doctors. Throughout the last century, more than one tyrannical regime used the psychiatric care system todeal with its enemies.

Unlike most (although not all) other forms of medical treatment, psychiatric intervention can be ordered against a patient’s will in liberaldemocracies. But in democracies, drastic measures, such as committing a patient to a psychiatric hospital, are only administered undertightly defined conditions – usually when a patient is a danger to himself or others. In the Soviet Union, in contrast, psychiatrists –themselves afraid or a part of the regime – regularly committed healthy people to mental hospitals.

At the top, where elites and the tyrant dance for power and enrichment opportunities, there’s no tranquillity either. The dictator’sdilemma means that everyone around the dictator is a potential source of danger.

Psychologically, that can be immensely taxing and as a result, many have attempted to diagnose the mental state of tyrants. Doing so isdifficult because few of them are willing to sit down with healthcare professionals – but that hasn’t stopped psychologists from trying.Given the extent to which some individual dictators have shaped the world, that’s unsurprising. How do you understand what happenedin Gaddafi’s Libya, for example, without an understanding of Gaddafi’s brain? It’s impossible. But also, understanding the mentalstate of a tyrant can help to predict their behaviour. How does he react under pressure? If cornered, is he likely to lash out or makeconcessions? Does he suffer from any mental illnesses that shape how he governs?

Given the structure of these regimes, ‘suffer’ might not be the right word. To an extent, an abnormal mind can come in handy whenrunning a dictatorship or a kingdom. Dictators are faced with an abnormal environment in which they have to take abnormal decisionswith some frequency. If a healthy person from a normal environment were to wake up as a dictator, they probably wouldn’t last long.Staying in power in such a hostile environment for years or even decades requires an element of paranoia: some of those threats will bereal. And how does a ‘normal’ person sleep after ordering the death of a person they had a totally normal conversation with a day ortwo before?

Dr Jerrold Post, born in Connecticut in 1934, was a prominent psychologist who analysed the minds of dictators. He spent most of hisworking life advising the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and various other parts of the United States government, and one leader hestudied particularly closely was Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In his 1991 profile of Hussein, he wrote:

Saddam’s pursuit of power for himself and Iraq is boundless. In fact, in his mind, the destiny of Saddam and Iraq are one andindistinguishable . . . In pursuit of his messianic dreams, there is no evidence he is constrained by conscience; his only loyalty is to SaddamHussein. When there is an obstacle in his revolutionary path, Saddam eliminates it, whether it is a previously loyal subordinate or apreviously supportive country.47

Dr Post believed Saddam Hussein was a ‘malignant narcissist’. A severe form of narcissistic personality disorder, this state can bedescribed as follows:

Like classic narcissists, malignant narcissists are grandiose, self-centered, oversensitive to criticism and unable to feel empathy for others.They cover over deep insecurities with an inflated self-image. But malignant narcissists also tend to paranoia and aggression, and sharesome features of the antisocial personality, including the absence of moral or ethical judgement.48

In an ordinary job, all this could be a massive hindrance. But to ‘succeed’ as a tyrant, it can be of help.

But here’s the thing: there’s a limit. A certain amount of mental illness can be helpful, but it becomes dangerous to the tyrant’s rule if itbecomes so extreme that the dictator loses all touch with reality. With Saddam Hussein, that wasn’t the case. As Dr Post told the HouseArmed Services Committee:

Saddam has no wish to be a martyr, and survival is his number one priority. A self-proclaimed revolutionary pragmatist, he does not wisha conflict in which Iraq will be grievously damaged and his stature as a leader destroyed . . . Saddam will not go down to the last flamingbunker if he has a way out, but he can be extremely dangerous and will stop at nothing if he is backed into a corner.49

Saddam was not psychotic, and his ultimate aim of survival never changed. When either of these circumstances change for a tyrant, aspeedy fall becomes much more likely.

That becomes clear when considering the case of Francisco Macías Nguema. After coming to power in the newly independent EquatorialGuinea in 1968, Nguema got to work. The first person to feel his power was Ondu Edo.50 Edo, who had fled into exile after losing thepresidential elections against Nguema, was reluctant to come back, because he feared that he might not be safe if he did. Nguemapromised that nothing would happen to him. Edo made the mistake of believing him.51

As he consolidated control over the tiny country, almost the entire population began to suffer. Unlike in some neighbouring countries atthe time, Equatorial Guinea actually had functioning electricity lines, but utility companies now ceased to provide electricity.52 As migrantworkers from neighbouring Nigeria were increasingly mistreated, they left the country – leading Nguema to institute a system ofcompulsory labour.53 Feeling insecure about his lack of education, Nguema went as far as to ban the word ‘intellectual’.54 Thesituation became so dire that an estimated two-thirds of Equatorial Guinea’s population fled the country.

But nobody in the country was treated worse than Nguema’s political enemies. In the country’s notorious prisons, they were classified‘Category A’, the punishment for which came close to a death sentence.

One of those prisoners was Pedro Ekong Andeme, who became Equatorial Guinea’s health minister in 1968, when he was justtwenty-seven years old. Ordinarily, that would be a cause for celebration. A minister! At such a young age. But in the case of Ekong, itbecame a nightmare. In 1971, he was sent to prison in Malabo. Confined to a tiny cell, he wasn’t even allowed clothing. He was naked,forced to sleep on the barren concrete floor. Then there was the torture. ‘Each Saturday morning, every political prisoner includingmyself received 150 strokes with a metal rod,’ he recounted.55

When he wasn’t tortured himself, he could hear the other prisoners being beaten. It haunted him, but worst of all was when the painturned to silence. ‘Their screams stopped when their backs were broken.’ Whenever that happened and a prisoner had been killed,Ekong scratched a mark into the concrete of his cell. By the time he was released, broken but alive, the marks totalled 157.56

Nguema instinctively understood that those closest to him were the biggest threat to his impunity, and that made it extremely dangerousto be around him. Most of the forty-six persons who had been part of the independence negotiations with Spain were killed. OfNguema’s first cabinet of twelve ministers, only two survived. ‘In politics,’ the dictator reportedly used to say, ‘the victor wins andthe loser dies.’57

For a while, this ruthlessness allowed Nguema to stay in power, and more than that, consolidate it. But he had a weakness: his mentalhealth.

It may well be that Nguema said ‘the only madness I have shown has been the madness for freedom,’ but he genuinely was a sick man.And having once seen a psychiatrist on a trip abroad, he probably knew as much.58 Unfortunately for his fellow Equatorial Guineans, hecouldn’t get his affliction treated while he was at home because there weren’t any suitable doctors: they had all either been killed or fledabroad.59

Health issues, of course, are always difficult to deal with, and for tyrants, who must project an image of invincibility in order to stay inpower, especially so. If they appear physically weak, opponents and regime supporters change their calculus. Enemies will think of it as anopening, a chance to step up. Supporters will stand back and ask themselves whether their ‘loyalty’ is still worth extending to theincumbent. If this particular leader is no longer going to be around in a few years’ time because the prognosis isn’t promising, shouldthey perhaps bet on a different horse? Or even stake a claim themselves?

As Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith have written, ‘no leader can commit to reward supporters from beyond the grave.’60The diagnosis of something serious such as heart disease can make the situation vastly more difficult for the dictator because it alerts elitesto the fact that the leader is operating on a clock – one perhaps that ticks faster every hour. There’s a decent chance that a tyrant will fallquicker than his heart will stop beating.

Nguema’s struggles with mental health weren’t of this order, because they weren’t going to kill him – at least not directly. His intenseparanoia became integral to the issue of survival (both of the regime and himself) because it meant he was disconnected from reality.

In the capital, a wall about four metres high was built around the old inner part of the city to protect the presidential palace. Houses that fellwithin the area were simply dislodged.61 But despite all these efforts, Malabo still wasn’t safe enough for Nguema. He no longer slept inthe palace and hadn’t done so for more than four years. Even daytime visits to the capital were rare.62 Instead, he spent most of his timeat a specially constructed compound in his home village where much of the national reserves of Equatorial Guinea were kept – in cash – in awooden hut.63

Theoretically, this should have made Nguema feel safer, but Nguema’s condition didn’t improve. At his compound, he would walkabout while crying out the names of the people he had killed.64 In one particularly disturbing episode, Nguema asked his servants to laythe table for eight guests.65 But nobody arrived. Nguema, clearly in urgent need of treatment, talked to his ‘guests’ as if they werethere – but he was all alone.66 It’s not just that Nguema saw threats where there were none, he literally saw people who weren’t evenalive. He was psychotic, having lost touch with reality. Under those circumstances, he lashed out, killing at random. With the killings nowunrelated to whether subjects were loyal to him or not, Guinea’s elites no longer had an incentive to stay by his side. It was the IcarusEffect at work, not because Nguema had miscalculated, but because he was no longer capable of doing any calculations at all.

The final straw came when a group of militia leaders travelled to his compound. Their request was mild: they simply wanted some moneyto pay their fighters. But since Nguema was unable to distinguish between friend and foe, he had all of them killed. Unfortunately forNguema, one of them was related to Teodoro Obiang, Nguema’s nephew and the country’s deputy minister of defence.67 With hisbrother killed, Obiang decided enough was enough. So many had been killed for no reason at all. What guarantee did he have that hewouldn’t be next? None.

Obiang decided to act, and his first move was to go to some of the country’s most notorious prisons to free men who had long sufferedunder Nguema’s rule. Then, with men eager for revenge, they fought Nguema loyalists – and won. Nguema himself was able to flee intothe jungle for a while, but he was eventually found. After a brief trial in an old cinema, he was shot dead.

The enemy within is the most immediate threat to every tyrant. To survive in power, the tyrant needs to take good care of it. That meanschannelling money to the rich and powerful to keep them on the tyrant’s side. When that doesn’t do the trick, the tyrant can try to resortto violence to keep court elites in line. That’s a dangerous game and finding the right combination of carrot and stick is exceedinglydifficult. While all elites matter insofar as they have an influence on the leader’s ability to maintain power, one group stands out amongthe rest: the men with guns. In the next chapter, we will discover why they matter so much and why they are even more difficult to controlthan everyone else.

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