The Dictator's Voodoo Priests and the Forgotten Attack on the White House

In 1994, America nearly went to war because voodoo priests interpreted a failed attack on the White House as an auspicious sign. It's a true story of bags of cash, voodoo diplomacy, and secret deals.

Vodou characters in a Haitian art museum (photograph: Darmon Richter, via The Bohemian Blog)

Happy Halloween!

I’m working on a longer essay that will soon be in your inboxes. But today, in this special edition for paid subscribers only, I wanted to share three spooky items with you. In addition to the article below (about voodoo and a forgotten chapter of US foreign policy), I’d also direct your attention to:

• A podcast episode I produced about witchcraft, vampires, and warfare;

• An article I wrote for The Atlantic on why we need to take supernatural and uncanny belief more seriously to understand politics (gift link);

• And finally, onto the third bit: a forgotten story of voodoo, zombies, and a forgotten chapter of American political history:

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In the early 1990s, the United States nearly went to war because voodoo priests interpreted a failed attack on the White House as an auspicious sign. This is not hyperbole – it happened. Few people know about it, though, and even fewer have thought about what it means for understanding modern politics.

We like to think that politics is a rational game, in which wise people weigh up the risks of various courses of action and then pursue the best solution available. But the truth is that, very often, we’re at the mercy of irrational forces, the quirks of timing, and the general weirdness of a small subset of humans.

This is the true story of a bewildering, but little-known event in 1994 that involves CIA training, the threat of “invisible zombies,” bags of cash secretly changing hands, an attempt to weaponize HIV against US soldiers, one disgruntled American truck driver, diplomacy that relied on a “voodoo priest to the stars,” an airplane nearly hitting the White House on 9/11, and US taxpayers paying the monthly rent for a dictator’s Mom.

It’s also a story that will challenge your certainty that doing “the right thing” in politics is always the best course of action.  

The story begins in Haiti.