Isaias Afwerki, the CIA, and Eritrea's Foundation: Why the Questions Still Matter

The core claim and why it is not new

The allegation that Isaias Afwerki received support from — or was co-opted by — external actors during the early years of the Eritrean liberation struggle has circulated for decades. It has been dismissed as ELF propaganda, as the grievance-driven testimony of political enemies, or as Cold War noise. What makes the current moment different is not the appearance of a single decisive document. No such document has emerged. What is different is the accumulation of corroborating accounts from sources that have no obvious common political interest in fabricating the same story.

The investigation by Mohamed Kheir Omer, published in Geeska, assembles this record with unusual care. It is worth engaging with seriously — not because it settles the question, but because it demonstrates that the question deserves serious engagement.

What the evidence actually shows

The central figure in the testimonial chain is Tesfamichael Giorgio, a local administrator who allegedly acted as a conduit between Afwerki's breakaway faction, Ethiopian imperial security apparatus, and American intelligence operating out of Kagnew Station — the US signals intelligence base in Asmara that was, at the time, one of Washington's most strategically significant installations on the continent.

Giorgio's account, which he gave to the ELF in 1974 and later made public after his defection, describes a series of facilitated meetings in which Afwerki's representatives engaged with American officials. The named CIA contact in these accounts is Richard Miles Copeland. Giorgio's testimony was long treated as politically motivated. But it has since received partial corroboration from multiple independent directions.

In 2016 and 2017, two sons of Asrate Kassa — the Ethiopian governor of Eritrea from 1964 to 1970 — separately confirmed to Omer that Isaias had visited their father, then receiving treatment in London, around 1970–71. One of them stated that their father had supported Isaias's faction, with instructions from the imperial crown, specifically to counter the ELF, which the Ethiopian state viewed as an Arab-aligned and predominantly Muslim organisation. Israeli support for this strategy was also mentioned.

Then in November 2025, something unusual happened. Awel Seid, a voice associated with the Eritrean ruling establishment, publicly disclosed that Afwerki had been summoned from the field to Kagnew Station, where American officials offered him support on the condition that he frame his struggle in explicitly sectarian, anti-Muslim terms. According to Seid, Afwerki refused. The intention behind this controlled disclosure from within the system is unclear. What is clear is that it represents the first time a regime-affiliated source has acknowledged the meeting happened at all — reversing decades of categorical denial.

The Cold War logic that made contact plausible

To understand why Washington would have been interested in Afwerki's faction, Eritrea in 1970 needs to be understood as an element in a global contest rather than merely a regional insurgency. Kagnew Station was not peripheral to US strategic interests — it sat at the centre of American signals intelligence and communications infrastructure for the entire African and Indian Ocean theatre. Protecting that asset was a high priority in Washington.

The ELF, by contrast, had developed links with Arab governments, Palestinian movements, and left-leaning liberation organisations across the region. In the context of Cold War counterinsurgency doctrine, a faction that presented itself as Christian, politically distinct from socialist Arab nationalism, and hostile to the ELF would have represented a natural object of interest for US intelligence. This does not mean contact was arranged, funded, or sustained. It means the strategic logic for exploring it was straightforwardly present.

What it would mean if true — and what it would not mean

The instinct to either fully embrace or fully dismiss these allegations reflects a recurring problem in how liberation history gets written. Movements that win tend to produce heroic founding narratives. Inconvenient episodes get suppressed or reframed. The EPLF's official history presents a story of principled self-reliance against impossible odds. That story is not false. But it may be incomplete.

Acknowledging that Afwerki may have had early contact with Ethiopian imperial authorities and American intelligence does not invalidate Eritrea's war of independence, which was fought at enormous cost and with genuine popular support. It does, however, complicate the official account in ways that matter for understanding the state that emerged from that struggle.

Afwerki's entire political career has been marked by an acute, almost pathological suspicion of external actors — the United Nations, Western governments, international NGOs, the African Union. A leader who had early experience of how external actors operate covertly, who knew at first hand the gap between public positioning and private dealing, would have internalised a particular worldview. The opacity, the institutional hostility to transparency, the elimination of any independent centre of power within Eritrea — these traits are usually explained as personality or ideology. They might also be, in part, formation.

The problem of the closed archive

The honest conclusion from the existing evidence is this: contact of some kind almost certainly occurred. The convergence of testimony across different political actors, different decades, and different national contexts is too consistent to be entirely fabricated. What that contact consisted of — whether it amounted to recruitment, tactical support, intelligence sharing, or something more episodic — remains genuinely unknown. The CIA files from Kagnew Station, the Ethiopian imperial security archives, and whatever records Asmara holds are not open. The people who could speak with direct knowledge are mostly dead.

This is why Omer's work matters even without a smoking-gun document. The standard of proof for historical reckoning does not require a signed agreement. It requires that the question be taken seriously, the available evidence assembled honestly, and the conclusions held at a level of certainty proportional to what the evidence actually supports. On all three counts, the investigation meets that standard. The official denial no longer does.

Why this resurfaces now

Eritrea is, by most assessments, approaching some kind of transition. Isaias is in his late seventies. The generation that fought the liberation war and built the EPLF state is aging. No formal succession mechanism exists. As that transition draws closer, the question of what kind of state Eritrea actually is — and how it came to be that way — acquires a practical urgency it did not have when it was purely historical.

Societies that have been denied their own history do not become stable when that history resurfaces; they become contested. The controlled disclosure by Awel Seid in November 2025 suggests that factions within the Eritrean establishment are already beginning to position themselves around competing narratives of legitimacy. The version of history that prevails during a transition shapes the political settlement that follows. That is why questions that have been treated as settled for fifty years are suddenly being asked again.