3 Weakening the Warriors

 3

Weakening the Warriors

With a single stroke the Revolution has lightened the long dark night of this reactionary and decadent regime, which was no more than ahotbed of extortion, faction, treachery and treason.1

Muammar Gaddafi

Papa Faal had made it. Well, not quite – but at least he was safe. Before dawn broke the previous day, he had been in a wooded area ofBanjul, putting on military gear and getting ready to launch a coup against the Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh.2 Now he was at theUnited States Embassy in neighbouring Senegal, eating pizza and telling an FBI agent what had just happened. ‘You know this is a crime,right?’ the agent asked. Papa Faal and his co-conspirators had become some of the most unlikely instigators of a coup in modernhistory.3

The Gambia is a tiny country in West Africa. Geographically it appears as little more than a river, with narrow banks on either side. Senegalengulfs it to the north, east and south. To the west lies the Atlantic Ocean. When the attempt at a coup occurred on New Year’s Eve 2014,Yahya Jammeh had been the country’s dictator for two decades, based in the capital, Banjul. In this time, he had pledged to rule for abillion years and claimed the ability to cure AIDS with his hands. He also turned the Gambia into a state of fear. Gambians, whether theyhad stepped out of line or not, had to worry about the National Intelligence Agency, the Gambian Police Force and Jammeh’s‘Jungulers’. Recruited mostly from his Presidential Guard, the unit was responsible for many of the regime’s worst crimes. SomeGambians had to endure mock executions or being beaten with metal pipes. ‘Sometimes,’ a former Junguler told Human RightsWatch, ‘they burn plastic bags and drop the burning plastic on the bodies.’4 Jammeh was a brutal megalomaniac and, like all brutalmegalomaniacs, he had created enemies within.

The plot to unseat him began when Banka Manneh, an American-Gambian activist, met Colonel Lamin Sanneh in Dakar. ‘There issomething I have in mind,’ Sanneh told Manneh before they exchanged numbers. Before the regime had expelled him after he refusedto fire subordinates without cause, Sanneh had been a high-ranking soldier in Jammeh’s guard. The two of them regularly spent timetogether, sometimes joking over green tea.5 Now that he was banished from the country, Sanneh told Manneh, he was determined totopple Jammeh – through force, if need be.

Coups pose a serious threat to many dictators because the men with guns have an advantage when it comes to violence. Palace elites maybe masters of intrigue, but soldiers have the skills to topple tyrants in the blink of an eye. When it comes to preventing that, tyrants face aCatch-22. To protect the regime from foreign threats and rebels, they need a strong military. But if they empower the military, then thegenerals and soldiers may become powerful enough to topple the dictator. A weak military can create threats from the outside; a strongmilitary can create threats from within. Some small countries deal with this dilemma by abolishing their military, but that’s not a viableoption for most countries. And it certainly was not for Yahya Jammeh.

Banka was at a crossroads. He had been a peaceful human rights activist, organising protests and raising money for the opposition in theGambia. The idea had always been that the dictatorship could be toppled peacefully. Did he still believe that was a possibility? If not, wherewould he go from here? Would he be willing to compromise his core values and support violence? It was a big decision. Sanneh tried topersuade him that a coup was the right move. ‘This is not a joke. You know you are talking about people getting killed, right?’ Mannehasked him. ‘Yeah,’ Sanneh replied. ‘Some people will die.’6

When I talked to Banka Manneh, he told me that he had changed his mind when things in the Gambia went from bad to worse. ‘Everydayyou are getting a report of somebody getting tortured or killed,’ he said.7

Indeed, the situation in the country was dire. Opponents of the regime were arrested arbitrarily, and dissent was repressed at all levels. Inone particularly disturbing episode in 2012, the regime had nine death row prisoners executed shortly after the end of Ramadan.8 Whenan imam spoke out against it, he was tortured. And he wasn’t the only one: according to Amnesty International, the human rightsorganisation, torture had become routine.9

Eventually, Manneh came to justify the coup to himself with reference to John F. Kennedy, who had once said that you make violentrevolution inevitable when you make peaceful revolution impossible.10 In his mind, the violent revolution meant a coup. Manneh knew hewouldn’t be able to take part in the coup itself because he was already known in the Gambia for his activism, but having made his choice,he now became a major part in organising it.11

In some ways, the planning was detailed and thorough; in other ways, totally chaotic. To coordinate it, there were regular telephoneconferences for which the participants had to find excuses because they clearly couldn’t tell their families that they were working out howexactly they would overthrow a government.12 The conspiracy was serious, but the plotters were amateurs. Many of them had trained inthe military forces of the Gambia or the United States, but they were now mostly middle-aged men leading ordinary lives; they hadfamilies, normal jobs. Banka Manneh, for example, planned part of the overthrow while on breaks from his job in construction.13Obviously, they had never overthrown a government before. Some of them had started to conspire together after they grew close whileplaying the online Scrabble game ‘Words with Friends’.14

One of the conspirators had a manila folder with the words ‘Top Secret’ on it with annotated satellite images of the presidentialcompound.15 To keep track of the budget ($220,798), there was a detailed spreadsheet, noting every detail down to the unit costs ofvehicle rentals. Every item had explanatory notes. For two Barrett .50-calibre sniper rifles, it reads ‘NOT really necessary but could bevery useful’.16 Many of the guns were bought by Manneh – peaceful activist now turned international arms smuggler – who sent assaultrifles hidden in barrels across the Atlantic.

The group was confident. They didn’t just have the satellite images and the spreadsheets; they also had inside information. Because thegroup, now called the Gambia Freedom League, included someone who had guarded the dictator, they knew how Jammeh wasprotected.17 Certain of their success, they had even drafted a plan for the Gambia’s post-coup future, titled: ‘Gambia Reborn: ACharter for Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy and Development’.18

In the middle of the night of 30 December 2014, Lamin Sanneh, Papa Faal and six other men were standing in a graveyard near Gambia’sState House, the equivalent of the country’s presidential palace.19 There was a moon, but it was still dark. After putting on theirprotective vests and going over the plan one final time, they prayed together. In a low voice so as not to be heard, they all said: ‘Let’s gotake our country back.’20

The plan was simple. The men were divided into two groups, Team Alpha and Team Bravo. Team Alpha, headed by Sanneh, would crashthrough the front door of the compound and take control of the State House after disarming the guards. Team Bravo, headed by PapaFaal, would secure the rear of the compound.21 Once the attack started, insiders at the State House sympathetic to the coup would jointhe plot.

Sanneh and his team got into their hired car, driving towards the front of the compound with their headlights off.22 As soon as they gotclose to the first guard post, all but one of the men got out of the car. One of the group pointed his weapon towards two terrified guards.‘We’re not going to kill you,’ he said. ‘Drop your guns.’23 The guards did so. With the good news radioed to Team Bravo on theother side of the compound, the car set off again, ramming through multiple barriers. Thus far, they had succeeded.

But then, Team Alpha was spotted advancing towards the core of the compound by a guard watching from a tower. He fired. After anattempt to talk him down failed, another round was fired, hitting Sanneh. He dropped to the floor. Another member of Team Alpha triedto drag him into safety, but Sanneh was heavy and the bullets kept flying. To save himself, he had to abort, leaving Sanneh behind.

Alerted by the gunfire, the guards on the other side of the compound took aim at Team Bravo. Using one of the .50-calibre rifles that hadbeen deemed ‘optional but useful’, Papa Faal fired back, but in the darkness and without night-vision goggles, he wasn’t quite surewhere to aim. The operation was unravelling quickly. When a member of Team Bravo was killed, they tried to alert Team Alpha, but therewas no answer; just static.24

By the time the sun came up in Banjul, it was clear to everyone that Gambia wasn’t to be reborn. The coup had failed miserably. Despitetheir official-looking Top Secret folder and months of planning, the conspirators had failed to lay the basic groundwork for the coup. Theyhad fewer than a dozen fighters and insufficient equipment with which to attack a fortified compound in the dark. The insiders who it wasthought would join the coup never materialised. But most of all, the entire plan hinged on the idea that Jammeh’s protectors, sworn todefend him with their life, would switch sides and join the coup.

‘They didn’t stand a chance,’ Manneh told me. He explained that Jammeh’s defenders owed everything to the dictator because theywere ‘created’ by Jammeh.25 They had been nobody and now they were somebody. Those guards were not going to give up theircushy position when a ragtag group of unknown men arrived with guns.

For the conspirators, the consequences were severe. Out of the eight men who swore to take back their country in a Banjul graveyard,three were shot. And that was just the beginning: in the wave of repression that followed in the Gambia, Jammeh’s regime beganimprisoning the men’s family members who had nothing to do with the attack. Sanneh’s elderly mother was put in jail without so muchas a charge. The regime’s thugs showed up at the school of one of the plotter’s daughters. She was seven.

Banka Manneh was ‘lucky’. Shortly after the coup, Banka, his wife, two children, mother and mother-in-law were asleep in their housein Georgia.26 At around 4 o’clock in the morning, armed FBI agents stormed the house to take him into custody.

Manneh was sentenced to six months in a medium-security prison for his role in procuring and sending the weapons. He had also brokensomething called the Neutrality Act.27 The act, first passed in 1794, was originally intended to prevent Americans from attacking anyprince, state or people ‘with whom the United States is at peace’. It was now being used to punish Banka Manneh for trying tooverthrow a vicious dictator.28

American prison wasn’t great – but as punishments for planning a coup against a dictator go, it was comparatively mild.

Jammeh was lucky the coup wasn’t better organised. If it had been, he could have been in serious trouble. Other dictators can’t bank onincompetence, so they need a strategy to manage the threat. That strategy is divide and weaken. If the tyrant doesn’t become active, hecan easily fall the moment a general decides he’d rather be in charge. And, almost inevitably, that day will come.

Coups are often defined as ‘illegal and overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sittingexecutive’.29 Whatever definition is used, the threat of coups is something all chieftains, kings, sultans and supreme leaders have had todeal with since humans agreed on rules to choose leaders. Even the Bible mentions a military coup of sorts. In the Old Testament, Elah, thefourth king of Israel, is toppled by Zimri, the commander of half of his own chariots. Not content with killing his king while he was drunk,Zimri then slaughtered Elah’s entire household. According to the First Book of Kings nobody survived – ‘neither of his kinsfolks, nor ofhis friends’.30 In the end, Zimri’s reign became the shortest ever on a biblical throne.31 It ended seven days after it started when Omri,another one of Elah’s old commanders, besieged the city from which Zimri had ruled, leading Zimri to commit suicide by burning downhis own palace.32

To get a broader picture, political scientists Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne analysed 457 coup attempts over six decades. Accordingto their research, around half of the coup attempts were successful. The distribution of the coup attempts was uneven. In all that time,Europe had only twelve coups, while Africa had 169, more than fourteen times as many. In terms of timing, the coups peaked in themid-1960s.33 That was no chance occurrence. During the Cold War, when both sides thought they were engaged in a mortal struggleover control of huge swathes of the world, they sometimes supported challengers to take out disliked incumbents. Coups are generallyfrowned upon, but that was not the case back then – at least not to the same degree. In addition, many newly independent post-colonialgovernments weren’t stable – in large part because colonial powers had deliberately designed them not to be.

But while fewer coups have occurred since the end of the Cold War, it hasn’t escaped the notice of the world’s most oppressive rulersthat it’s their own soldiers who usually present the strongest threat to an early ‘retirement’. The ‘success rate’ of coups even startedto increase in the early 2000s, after decreasing towards the end of the Cold War.34 Indeed, there were coups in Gabon, Niger, BurkinaFaso and Mali in the early 2020s. In the case of Mali, it was the third coup in less than a decade.

To understand why it’s so difficult to deal with the threat of coups, we must first understand how they work. Coups succeed by creatingan impression of inevitability – which is precisely the thing the Gambian conspirators in Banjul failed to do. When they arrived at thepresidential palace, they appeared weak.

The mechanisms around coups are easiest to understand if we imagine a simplified attempt involving three groups. The first group arethose who carry out the coup. These armed men have got together to overthrow the incumbent through force. Usually, they are a part ofthe military, but they can also be former soldiers or even mercenaries. Why they do what they do can vary hugely. Most perpetrators of acoup want to bring down a regime for one of three reasons: power, to right a perceived injustice, or money.

At the extreme end of this, there’s Simon Mann, an Eton-educated Brit who had spent time in the elite Special Air Service (SAS) aftercutting his teeth in counter-insurgency campaigns in Northern Ireland. Mann had a plan to take arms and fighters from Zimbabwe toEquatorial Guinea. There, they would be met by an advance party that had already been on the ground for a while. They would then try todraw out the country’s president, Teodoro Obiang, to arrest or kill him. With him out of the way, the country’s exiled opposition leader,Severo Moto, would become president.35 On the face of it, that was a pretty crazy plan. But if someone was going to try it, that someonewas Mann. Having founded and worked for his own private military company (PMC), he had relevant experience and the network neededto finance, plan and execute the overthrow of a government.

Teodoro Obiang took control of Equatorial Guinea when he overthrew his uncle Macías Nguema in 1979, creating a highly repressiveregime in this country of some 1.6 million people. Obiang is the world’s longest-serving, non-monarchical head of state (serving beingthe right word only insofar as he has served himself). He has managed to stay in power for so long by harassing, imprisoning, torturingand killing his opponents. There’s no free media, there are no free elections and while there is an ‘opposition’ party, it’s controlled bythe government. In 2002, two years before Mann’s attempted coup, President Obiang was ‘re-elected’ with more than 97 per cent ofthe vote.36

But, despite assurances to the contrary, that might not have been too interesting to Mann. What was definitely of interest was thediscovery of large oil reserves in Equatorial Guinea in 1996.37 In 1995, the size of the country’s economy divided by its population stoodat $1,578. In 2008, it was $35,689 – higher than that of South Korea and close to twice as high as Mexico’s.38 Thanks to that oil, thedictator and his thugs became fabulously rich and Mann hoped to follow in their footsteps. In return for overthrowing him, Mann and hisinternational ‘investors’ expected millions in cash and access to extremely lucrative oil concessions.

In his autobiography, Mann later wrote: ‘I knew I would either make billions or end up getting shot.’39 Before he could find out which itwould be, Mann and his co-conspirators had to recruit the type of men that could be used to overthrow a foreign dictator. Many of themwere veterans of the Buffalo Battalion, which meant they had experience of fighting a brutal counter-insurgency campaign in Angola onbehalf of apartheid South Africa.40

When the men flew from Polokwane in South Africa to Harare in Zimbabwe, the ‘official’ story would be that they were on their way toprovide mining security in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But when Mann and the sixty-seven other mercenaries were about todepart Harare International Airport in their Boeing 727 full of military equipment, there was a sense that something was wrong. ‘Be calm,it’s OK,’ Mann said to relax his men. Some believed him and fell asleep. They were woken by a loudspeaker outside the plane: ‘You’resurrounded.’41

All of them were arrested by the Zimbabwean authorities.42 After serving four years in a Harare jail, Mann was transferred (or kidnapped,as he put it) and incarcerated in Equatorial Guinea’s notorious Black Beach Prison.43 He was sentenced to thirty-four years.44 When hetalked to a British media outlet four years after the ill-fated coup attempt, his wrists and ankles were shackled.45 ‘You know, you go tigershooting and you sort of don’t expect the tiger to win,’ Mann said.

But when you go hunting tiger, the world’s intelligence agencies usually don’t pay attention. It’s different when you plan a coup,certainly if the government you’re targeting controls vast oil deposits. And since the whole plot was reportedly discussed in restaurantsand bars in both London and Cape Town, more than one interested party knew what was planned. The Mugabe regime in Zimbabweobviously knew. But the British government also knew of the plot – including timelines, arms shipments and who was involved – monthsbefore it took place.46 It’s impossible to know whether the attack could have succeeded had the mercenaries made it to EquatorialGuinea undetected, but as it was the coup was doomed before it even began.

Whether the motivation is deposing an unjust ruler or making money, those plotting a coup need to believe that they can succeed. If theydon’t, they won’t take the risk because a failed attempt at overthrowing tyrants will almost certainly have severe consequences. As oneAmerican study found recently, more than 60 per cent of such conspirators get executed or imprisoned.47 They get shot, they gettortured. Mann was eventually released from prison before his sentence was up, but his experience probably wasn’t pleasant.

At the other end of the coup, there’s the incumbent and his closest allies. Naturally, they want to remain in power – not just because beingin power brings all sorts of perks in authoritarian regimes, but also because they have a long way to fall should the coup-plotters succeed.

Both of these groups tend to be small: the former, because recruiting a large group of co-conspirators to participate in a coup is risky.Finding ten people to keep their mouths shut about overthrowing a government might be possible, but finding a hundred? Good luck.

And the latter are small, because authoritarian regimes tend towards a concentration of power at the top. They are like a pyramid, withvery few people reaping most of the benefits at the apex.

The biggest relevant group are the men with guns who aren’t allied with any political group or faction. During coups, they can bekingmakers if they split the ‘right’ way. But from their perspective, coups can be terrifying. Put yourself in the boots of an ordinarysoldier for a moment. Let’s say you’re a twenty-seven-year-old infantry officer in the army named John. You have learned how to cleana rifle, throw a grenade and use a tourniquet. Depending on the country you serve, you might have commanded soldiers in battle.

But what you are probably not prepared for is a coup. With a coup underway, you stand in front of the company of men and women youcommand, trying to make a decision. You can either join the conspirators and try to overthrow the government or join the regime todefend the status quo. What are you going to do? If you pick the losing side, the consequences for you and the hundred or so men andwomen you command will probably be severe. What’s more, the information you have is incomplete; you only see a fraction of thewhole picture. In such dynamic situations, it’s difficult to tell how strong either faction really is.

The safest bet is often to do nothing. For officers like John, the rational course of action is to wait as long as possible amid all the chaos andconfusion to see who is winning. Once that has come into focus, John and his company can side with the winners. If the plotters look asthough they will win, soldiers like John join the coup. If they look as though they won’t, John and his troops will help to put it down. That iswhy perceived strength is so important to the tyrant. Perception doesn’t just beat reality, it becomes reality.

Savvy coup leaders are aware of this and when a coup is attempted, they will try their best to use their limited power to capture points ofhigh symbolic value to project control. Political scientist Brian Klaas calls this a ‘bandwagon effect’.48 When the rank-and-file soldiersand the military brass believe the coup is going to be successful, they rally around the conspirators. Those carrying out the coup use this totheir advantage, aiming to topple the tyrant by making ordinary soldiers believe that they will win – thereby making victory all the morelikely.

To make this more concrete, let’s imagine overthrowing His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom. The first shift in perspectiveis to ignore everything outside London. Coups take place in capital cities. Everything else you can worry about later.

The key to a successful coup would be a quick takeover of key assets: airports, Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament, the Ministry ofDefence, the Cabinet Office, key broadcasters such as the BBC, and the country’s intelligence headquarters. While your troops arrestanyone who doesn’t comply, you force the shocked staff at the BBC’s headquarters to tell the country’s bewildered citizens that a newgovernment has been formed. Once that announcement is out there, you then make it as hard as possible for people to gain access toother sources of information. Shut down mobile phone networks and make it impossible for people to access social media. Curfew beginsat 6 p.m. sharp.

But even if all this works out, which is much easier said than done, what have you achieved? The whole of inner London is only 319 squarekilometres and you only control a fraction of that – some roads, some buildings, a few bridges. Even if you managed to arrive in Londonwith 1,000 men (or women) at arms, that would still leave approximately 151,000 personnel of the British Armed Forces who aren’tinvolved in the attempt to overthrow the government.49 As well as them and their tanks and artillery and helicopters, there are policeofficers to contend with. In reality, you don’t control all that much. But what you do have is an impression of inevitability. When ordinarypeople turn on the television, they see your troops. When they listen to the radio, they hear the voice of the king telling them to support themilitary forces that have taken power to restore order. The previous prime minister is nowhere to be seen because he’s been hiddenaway in some basement. The new regime looks strong, the previous government looks weak.

That’s the key to persuade officers like John to join the coup or at least not stand in its way. And just like that, a government can betoppled by a small force of soldiers even if they don’t have all that much support among elites or the population. That’s precisely whatmakes the military such a potent threat to every tyrant.

In the United Kingdom, of course, a scenario like this is hard to imagine. That’s not because military officers don’t have any grievancesor because they wouldn’t be powerful enough to attempt a coup, but because the political system has for centuries promoted normsaccording to which the military should stay out of politics. The last time that England experienced something that could be called a coupwas when Oliver Cromwell took control of Parliament with the help of forty musketeers. That was in 1653. To put that in context: by thetime fifty-six of America’s Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, English rulers had already managed to avoidcoups for more than 120 years. That acts as a powerful deterrent. When the first sea lord or His Majesty’s minister of defence have anissue with the prime minister of the day, they won’t even contemplate a coup. In countries that have a history of coups, civil–militaryrelations are much more complicated. If a country has recent experience of even one coup, new coups become more likely because coupslegitimise further coups.50 The impact of this is so significant that countries can become caught up in a ‘coup trap’ – one coup begetsanother, and so on.

What can tyrants do? This is a massive threat that needs to be dealt with as soon as possible. It isn’t optional; they have to get to work.

A ruler’s first instinct might be to throw money at the problem, since that is often a good way to bind people to the regime. That can be atemporary solution, but simply giving the generals more money or more weapons won’t do the trick because every time money istransferred, the generals become more powerful. Just as importantly, money flowing to the generals might make the generals happy, butmilitary coups can also be launched by much more junior figures, who don’t benefit from corruption to the same extent. Research fromthe US Naval War College shows that a great many coups are carried out by soldiers at the lower end of the hierarchy, people like John(captain and below).51 And whilst they have a lower success rate than coups orchestrated from the middle (48 per cent) or the top (68 percent), almost a third of them have succeeded. Money alone can’t solve the tyrant’s problem.

Since there’s always the possibility that the military will turn on the dictator, the key is to develop a strategy – an insurance plan. There arethree main ways to ‘coup-proof’ a regime: splitting the military, reducing trust and making sure everyone is in the right place.

Dividing the military into smaller factions that compete with each other is called ‘counter-balancing’. Assuming the tyrant isn’t rulinga country in which the last coup-like event was carried out using muskets, the military will – at some point or other – consider assumingpower. For the military, the best way to overthrow the government is to act together. If the soldiers cooperate, they are overwhelminglypowerful and all they have to worry about is the public (which can be subdued) and perhaps the police (which can be outgunned). To thetyrant, that’s the nightmare scenario.

By splitting the military into smaller factions, the palace can create counter-weights to each of the forces. As well as a regular military,there’s now a regular military, a parallel military and perhaps also a militarised palace guard. The same goes for intelligenceorganisations. Instead of having a single intelligence organisation responsible for monitoring domestic threats, split it into three – each ofthem with separate tasks, but which also overlap. That way, the agents keep an eye on each other and it becomes much more difficult foragents to plot an overthrow of the regime in the shadows.

The aim of all these measures is to influence the calculus of potential plotters. When the officers sit down to think about overthrowing thegovernment, they need to believe that they will encounter stiff resistance. That, in turn, is more believable if the military forces are split andnone of its individual parts is so dominant that it can outmanoeuvre the others.

The political scientist James Quinlivan aptly summarised how it works:

The parallel military does not have to be as large as the regular armed forces, nor does it need to be able to defeat the regular army in afull-scale civil war. But it must be large enough, loyal enough, and deployed so that it can engage and perhaps defeat any disloyal forces inthe immediate vicinity of the critical points of the regime.52

That’s the theory. So how does it work in practice? Let’s look at the way Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein dealt with the military. He oncesaid: ‘The Iraqi army was the only force capable of conspiring against me. The only power we fear is this army will take over the party’sleadership. The army is like a pet tiger.’ Clearly, he considered the tiger to be a major threat. Once he came to power, he set out to pull‘out its eyes, teeth, and claws’.53

Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime’s drive to reduce the threat of the military had multiple pillars. The military was purged of suspectelements, which were replaced by party members who passed the loyalty test. In the words of the Baathists themselves: ‘Who does nottake our path stays at home with his wife.’54 They also established the Popular Army and the Republican Guard. The Popular Army was a‘party-based, party-led mass alternative to the regular army’55 – a militia, in other words. Its members didn’t get the best training orthe best weapons, but there were a lot of them. The Republican Guard started out as a much smaller organisation specifically designed toprotect the regime. With all these structural changes to the security forces, Saddam no longer faced the threat of a unified opponent.Instead, all the smaller factions of the security forces had to consider the strong possibility that they would have to fight each other as wellas the dictator if they ever attempted to overthrow Hussein.

This brings us to the second measure despots can use to ‘coup-proof’ their regime: reducing trust between generals and their soldiersas well as among the generals. Saddam Hussein was constantly shuffling the security agencies around.56 That’s not an anomaly, it’sstandard practice for despots.

In addition to reducing trust, shuffling people around has the advantage of making it harder for people to talk to, and cooperate with,each other. Dictators definitely don’t want the minister of defence, minister of the interior and the head of intelligence to spend a lot oftime with one another. If they did, they could sound one another out and begin to make plans. It’s best if they are suspicious of eachother, always vying for attention from the palace. Divide so you don’t get conquered.

Relatedly, coup-proofing works best when there’s no single actor (aside from the tyrant) who knows too much or can bring peopletogether. So in place of having a chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who has regular meetings with everyone in charge of the people withguns, have everyone report straight to the dictator’s study. That way, they don’t trust each other, they don’t talk to each other, theydon’t act behind the tyrant’s back. Yasser Arafat was infamous for this: every part of the Palestinian security apparatus reported to him.57 Arafat’s micromanagement was so intense that he would sometimes sign the cheques made out to paramilitary units for amounts assmall as $300.58

Now that security forces are structured in a way to make coups less likely, it’s all about making sure that the right forces are in the rightplace. Most obviously, tyrants want some loyal forces in the capital near the presidential palace and the other key installations that need tobe protected. But since having a force too large in the capital brings risks as well, some tyrants have gone the other way, and moved theregular troops further out. No more manoeuvres anywhere near the capital. Regular military bases in the vicinity? No. When regulartroops are no longer near the capital, it’s sufficient to place the parallel forces between the tyrant and the main threat (which is their ownmilitary).

As a hereditary monarchy with at least one adversarial nation-state nearby, Saudi Arabia has a regular military (the Saudi Arabian ArmedForces), a counter-balancing force (the Saudi Arabian National Guard) and a dedicated force to protect the House of Saud (the SaudiRoyal Regiment). In the 1970s, the royal family decided that the existence of a counter-balancing force wasn’t sufficient. With the regularmilitary primarily deployed to military cities that the Saudis had built (at great cost) at key trouble spots and invasion routes on thecountry’s periphery, the National Guard were physically placed between the Armed Forces and the royal household.59 The Saudi RoyalRegiment, then, acted as a last-resort guarantor in the event that intending-perpetrators of a coup happened to make it to anywhere nearthe royal palace in Riyadh.

These structural measures are a way to decrease the ability of conspirators to coordinate, work together and execute a successful coup.It’s also a way for tyrants to exploit a paradox: the men with guns, trained to kill, don’t actually want to use violence.

There’s a public misconception that coups are always intensely violent. Some of them most definitely are. But if you witness a coup inwhich soldiers clash with other soldiers, or soldiers direct fire at civilians, something isn’t going according to plan. After analysing closeon four hundred coup attempts, political scientist Erica de Bruin found that under half of them involved fatalities. There’s a reluctance toshoot at comrades.60 In part, this is cultural: soldiers, who are trained to fight external enemies, often resist the use of violence at homeand this can lead to a split within the army. On a personal level, it’s also about the loss of legitimacy. Defending the country against threatsfrom abroad can be respectable; in some societies, it’s seen as heroic. But shooting at their own people – the military or civilians, inparticular women and children – to take power? Few will call you a hero. And in the end, that helps cruel governments to stay in power. Ifleaders can credibly signal that either will be necessary to overthrow them, their chances of staying in power increase considerably.

But there’s a catch: this deterrent only works if those plotting to overthrow the regime believe that the parallel security forces will put up ameaningful fight when the coup is carried out. That means they need to be loyal to the dictatorship and effective enough to inflict seriouspain on the regular forces. If they’re obviously a paper tiger, the real one will simply tear them to pieces.

For dictators, the effectiveness of parallel military forces can be achieved through training, equipment and positioning. If tyrants havedone all that, they’ve taken the first steps towards staying in power. But there’s more that needs to be done to prevent unplannedretirement. With the military split and weakened, now is the time to give it a reason to support the status quo. The most straightforwardway to achieve the loyalty of the parallel security forces is to spoil them rotten. Give them money, give them toys, increase theiropportunities for personal enrichment through corruption. It’s no coincidence that parallel security forces tend to be better equippedthan their regular counterparts.

Another option is to select soldiers based on a certain identity.

In her excellent book When Soldiers Rebel, Kristen Harkness outlines how governments have sought to bind soldiers to the regime. Sheexplains how, during the Middle Ages, European armies were ‘rooted in reciprocal feudal ties’.61 Later on, France and Germany wouldtransform their officer corps in a way that made it possible for aristocrats without significant land holdings to become officers. In fact,even some non-aristocrats were allowed to become officers – but only in engineering roles and artillery. In Britain, promotions within themilitary had to be bought. None of these systems was based on merit. But the advantage that they did have was that they bound militaryelites to the state.

Within Europe, those systems eventually changed as the military was opened up to larger groups of citizens. But long after this happenedat home, colonial empires maintained a military recruitment system based on identity in their colonies. In colonial India, the British Empirehad an explicit ‘martial race doctrine’ according to which it differentiated between those ethnicities it saw as capable of warfare andthose that were unsuitable or unreliable. In Africa, the colonisers were constantly wary about finding themselves in a situation where thecolonised would stand up and fight back. To mitigate that risk, the British Empire ensured that no ethnic group ever gained control of thetwo core institutions of the colonial state – the civil service and the military. If one was promoted heavily to the administrative class,soldiers were recruited primarily from the other.62

Moreover, many colonial units were regional and not based on the territory of future independent states. The King’s African Rifles, aBritish colonial unit, for example, drew soldiers from British East Africa (Kenya), Nyasaland (Malawi) and British Tanganyika (Tanzania).63The purpose of this was, once again, to prevent the emergence of unified opposition.

Lastly, all colonial empires in Africa were reluctant to allow local populations into the officer corps. In a military with 25,000 men, theBelgian Congo had not a single African officer.64 The colonised, in other words, were wanted to make the administration of the coloniescheaper, but they were not required in any leadership role. Even in the case of the British Empire, which was comparatively more inclinedto promote from the local population, the numbers were small. By 1960, the entire Nigerian Army had just eighty-two Nigerian officers –and 243 seconded from the British military.65 As one might imagine, this practice made it difficult for independence leaders to tie theirsoldiers to their regime. They simply couldn’t trust them.

One solution that many post-independence leaders pursued was ‘ethnic stacking’ of security forces. The idea here is that, due to theirethnic identity, these groups have an advantage in the current system; if the leader who put them in power were to fall, they might lose theprivileges afforded to them. And who would want that? Tyrants speculate that few do.

In a study of Africa since independence, Harkness found evidence for the remarkable extent to which autocratic leaders have engaged inethnic stacking: around 50 per cent of them implemented stacking methods. (For democratic leaders, it was around 24 per cent.) What’smore, the process was clearly advantageous for them. Leaders who didn’t engage in ethnic stacking stayed in power for an average ofaround six years. Those that ‘create and personally control coethnic paramilitary units’ stayed in power for more than twice as long.66

Ethnic stacking is a way to make the status quo appealing to soldiers. They benefit because of their identity, giving them a reason tosupport the regime. But if the carrot doesn’t do the trick, there’s also the stick – making all other alternatives so dire that the men incamouflage have no other option but to support the status quo. Back in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, security services regularly committedgross human rights violations on behalf of the regime. One of their frequent targets were the Kurds.

The Kurds, an ethnic group spread primarily across Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq, were the victims of brutal violence at the hands of theregime for decades. They were harassed, tortured and killed.

The men that committed those crimes? They were hated. And when an opportunity to fight back against them came along, there was nohesitation. In March 1991, Kurdish forces took Sulaimaniya’s Central Security Prison, where countless inmates had had to endurebeatings, torture and hunger while Hussein and the Baathist regime were in charge.67 In that small corner of northern Iraq, the tables hadnow turned. The security forces that did the torturing and killing were weaker, and those they had tormented had the upper hand.

According to Kurdish sources, not one of the 300 secret policemen who defended the prison survived. After the complex was liberatedand all of them were dead, a forty-five-year-old headmaster who was tortured in a soundproof chamber at the prison said he wished all ofthem would come back to life ‘so we could kill them again’.68 Under those circumstances, the loyalty of soldiers and intelligenceofficers to the regime has to be ‘to the death’ because they cannot switch sides or lay down arms.69

Implementing some combination of these measures can help tyrants survive to fight another day. If they don’t tackle the problem, theywill almost certainly fall because there will be a day when the generals decide that they, rather than the despot, should be in power. Andwhen they do and are united, they will be very hard to beat because violence is their specialty.

In both Saudi Arabia and Iraq, coup-proofing ‘worked’ in the sense that there were no successful coups. Saddam Hussein’s regimeonly fell once the United States, an overwhelmingly strong outside power, decided to remove him. Before that, he held onto power evenafter a series of hugely embarrassing military defeats. South of the border, the House of Saud continued to rule the country named aftertheir family from Riyadh.

But if coup-proofing is the key to avoiding coups, why doesn’t everybody simply reorganise the military and intelligence services oncethey rise to power? One of the challenges, as Erica de Bruin demonstrates in her book How to Prevent Coups d’État, derives from theprocess itself.70 Having a coup-proofed military increases the chances of a regime’s survival, but once the tyrant starts the process, andbefore he’s finished, his situation is perilous.

Kwame Nkrumah’s story shows why that moment can be so dangerous. When Nkrumah first went into Ghanian politics in the late 1940s,Ghana was a British crown colony known as the Gold Coast. Once Ghanaians achieved independence, Nkrumah became the country’sfirst leader. He quickly became worried for his own security. As a result, he began to put some specialised intelligence and security unitsunder his personal command. Since that wasn’t enough to make him feel safe, he then started to turn the presidential bodyguards, thePresident’s Own Guard Regiment (POGR), into a fully-fledged fighting force capable of deterring those who might try to destroy him.The size of the force grew rapidly and the benefits the men received were vastly better than those of the regular troops.71 Nkrumah wasinitially reluctant to focus on ethnicity as a recruitment tool because he saw ‘tribalism’ as a ‘canker-worm which, unless removed, maydestroy the solidity of the body politic, the stability of the government, the efficiency of the bureaucracy and the judiciary, and theeffectiveness of the army and police’.72 But although he did not particularly favour ethnic stacking, officers from some ethnic groups,including his own, were frequently promoted while others were seemingly overlooked. Crucially, Nkrumah didn’t stop there but wentafter the police as well.73

The intelligence and security services aside, Nkrumah consolidated his political power by other means also. By 1964, a constitutionalamendment had turned Ghana into a one-party state with Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party on top.74 Nkrumah was declaredpresident for life, and many of his political opponents found themselves imprisoned in a fort that had once been used to hold slaves enroute for the United States. What’s more, soldiers were used in an internal security role to suppress strikes.75 At this point, all warningsigns should have flashed bright red.

In early 1966, the president for life left for a trip to Vietnam and China. With Nkrumah and many of the key defence officials out of thecountry, it was the perfect time to make a move. At around midnight, Colonel Emmanuel Kotoka, stationed some two hundred kilometresnorthwest of Ghana’s capital Accra, started to move his troops. When they came close to Accra’s airport, they were joined by acompany of paratroopers who had been training for a few days near the capital. After this, things moved rapidly. By around 2.30 a.m., theconspirators arrived at Flagstaff House, the president’s compound. The Ministry of Defence, the radio station and the post office weresurrounded. At 6 a.m., Ghanaians heard Colonel Kotoka on the radio declaring that the ‘National Liberation Council’ had taken power.The President’s Own Guard, the force that was intended to fight back in the event of a coup, did put up a fight. But by noon that day, the‘commander of the Presidential Guard marched out with his troops and surrendered’.76

Those who orchestrated the coup were undoubtedly unhappy with the overall political and economic situation in the country, but whatreally motivated them to overthrow President Nkrumah (who subsequently lived out his days in Guinea) were Nkrumah’s moves tocounter-balance the military and diminish the role of the police.77 J. W. K. Harlley, the police commissioner who took part in the coup,explicitly justified his role by saying that Nkrumah had created a ‘private army of his own at an annual cost of over half a million pounds inflagrant violation of a constitution which he himself had foisted on the country to serve as a counterpose to the Ghana Armed Forces’.78

Nkrumah’s attempt at coup-proofing failed because it created an incentive for the regular security forces to strike while the parallelforces were too weak to resist.

The overall problem, then, is that the very things tyrants do to reduce the threat of the military can lead the military to act against them.

In theory, there’s a way out of this. If the tyrant can persuade another state to guarantee the security of the regime with its military, theregime can concentrate on coup-proofing without worrying about military effectiveness. It can then reduce its military force to one soweak that it becomes manageable. During the Cold War, for example, the French military sometimes stepped in to save dictators fromtheir own soldiers. In some cases, as with an operation to reinstall Gabonese president Léon M’ba in 1964, French troops were flown in toreverse a coup.79

The foreign guarantor is an attractive option for tyrants but it’s rarely on offer. Even if it is, it comes at a price: every time a leaderbecomes so dependent on a foreign power that he cannot survive without it, his room for manoeuvre is severely reduced.

Most difficult is finding another state to provide that service. Not only does another state need to have a motive for intervening, they needto be able to do so. The list of potential security suppliers is short. Coups happen quickly and to have any effect, foreign troops alreadyneed to be in the area.80 It’s no good if they are in the Caribbean or a training ground overlooking the Pyrenees. They need to be in theregion, or better still, already in the country, in order to make a meaningful difference.

Then tyrants need to find a state with troops that are not just nearby but also strong enough to deter or at least overwhelm thecoup-plotters. In Gabon, it was only possible to reverse the coup because the French paratroopers were strong whilst the Gabonese wereweak. According to one estimate, the Gabonese security forces at the time, military and police combined, numbered a mere six hundredmen.81 Nowadays, the list of militaries that could theoretically pull off something like this is not long. If there’s a coup in Egypt and aEuropean power sends paratroopers to try to reverse it, those paratroopers will probably come home in coffins – if they come home at all.

As can be seen, convincing a foreign power to defend the regime against potential coups d’état is a challenging task. They are beingasked to risk the lives of their own troops to defend an unstable dictatorship at huge reputational cost. As a result, most tyrants are on theirown when dealing with the military.

The military, as we have now learned, are a potent threat to every despot. Unlike court elites, soldiers have the capacity to use brute force.Tyrants understand this, which is why they work to divide and weaken. And with the military successfully fragmented, a new problemopens up: it becomes plain for all to see that the military isn’t built to fight and the situation invites challengers from the hinterland. Andbefore the tyrant knows it, a rebel commander from the regions may be on his way towards the capital.

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