About a month before Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003, an order came down from the minister of state security. It was verbal. We were to destroy everything we had on the opposition, above all on Mikheil Saakashvili’s National Movement.
Classified documents were torn out of the files by hand. The secret registry altered its logs and voided the registration numbers. A second verbal order followed: Stop all work on the opposition, including agent work. We waited for the protests.
I thought of those orders again this fall, when a researcher who posts as “DataRepublican” began publishing what she says are more than 400 recorded calls and thousands of documents from former officers of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s democracy office, retired national security officials, and protest coalitions. She says one of the groups, Renew to Thrive, put them online by accident. On those recordings, people whose job was to assess democracy abroad talk about the legitimacy of our own government.
I have seen this film. I watched it from inside the state.
On Nov. 2, 2003, Georgia held a parliamentary election that international observers said fell short of democratic standards. The protests came. My ministry was charged with protecting the constitutional order. Its inaction helped the crowd. The police, as far as I could see, knew nothing of our orders. Theirs were to stop the protests. That made it all look real. On Nov. 22, protesters walked into parliament. The next day, President Eduard Shevardnadze resigned.
Our minister, Valery Khaburdzania, later moved to Moscow. In 2013, he watched Georgia’s presidential inauguration from the honorary box. “I must confess,” he said, “I represented Russia.”
In April 2013, Moscow’s Moskovsky Komsomolets asked him whether Georgia’s security services had ever hunted for spies at the U.S. Embassy. “Why?” he answered. “When I came to the ministry, the Americans ran everything there.”
That July, he told the Georgian site Saqinform that during the revolution, CIA officers came to see him “practically every day.” “The intelligence service openly supported the United National Movement.” Its demand: no force against the protesters. When he tried to take away its officers’ passes to every unit of the ministry, he said, the station chief brought the U.S. ambassador himself “to sort out the matter.”
I saw Americans move through the ministry freely, treated with deference. None ever gave me an assignment. None introduced themself as CIA. But there was an order about them, too. It was verbal: hands off the Americans.
The West remembered all this as a spontaneous uprising. It was not spontaneous. The anger was real; I had watched the rot for seven years. But inside the state, the uprising was helped by orders that left no paper trail. Outside, it ran on an imported method, financed in part from abroad.
The method came of age in Serbia. In 2000, a student movement called Otpor helped bring down Slobodan Milosevic, and Washington helped Otpor. The New York Times magazine reported USAID’s figure: $25 million appropriated for Serbia that year alone.
In Georgia, George Soros’s Open Society Institute paid for young activists to travel abroad, where they met Otpor’s veterans. Democracy assistance, largely American-funded, paid for election monitoring and exit polls. When the official results diverged, the crowd had its argument. The method was cheap. That was its genius.
Back in Washington, the method became a profession. USAID’s office for democracy, human rights, and governance, known as DRG, packaged it into a portable tool kit. In 2025, the Trump administration shut USAID down. The tool kit did not disappear. Neither did the people who carried it.
According to DataRepublican, some of its former democracy officers regrouped as the Democracy Renewal Group, keeping the old initials. With Renew to Thrive, they drafted a plan called Renew American Democracy. Its strategy rests on four Bs: block, bridge, belong, and build.
The recordings explain the last word. “We can take that breakdown moment and leverage it for a big structural reform, you know, refounding moment,” Danielle Reiff, a former USAID democracy officer, says on one call. In March, she said: “I’m foreseeing a crisis of legitimacy around the November election.” A midterm “meltdown,” she added, “could be a real window of opportunity for us.”
The plan even has a name for the aftermath: “the day after tomorrow.” Mike Smith, a retired rear admiral, founded National Security Leaders for America, a network of more than 1,400 retired military and intelligence officials. In August, Reiff recounted his reaction, according to the “Know the Times” newsletter: “Oh, you guys have the day-after-tomorrow plan.” Smith, the Daily Caller reported, runs the “Insurrection Act Working Group” with Reiff.
The aftermath begins at a red line. According to DataRepublican, invoking the Insurrection Act against protesters would be one. In March, Reiff floated “an important convening, maybe like a third continental Congress,” to declare the red lines. There have been two. The second declared independence. “If these red lines in our democracy are crossed,” she said, “we will move into an extra constitutional process.”
Paul Zeitz, who co-coordinates Renew American Democracy, described “an options memo that we created for governors.” If Washington is “deemed to be illegitimate by whatever crossing of whatever red lines, and everyone agrees to that,” he said, “then the governors become the leading governing authority under the current republic framework of our Constitution.” Organizers speak of a “situation room” to watch the red lines. Nobody voted on those red lines.
They also sought advice abroad. “We used to be the ones, you know, with a lot of money and sharing our model,” Reiff told foreign advisers on a July 9 call. Now, she said, they were “stepping up to provide a similar level of guidance and support for us.” Raša Nedeljkov of CRTA, a Serbian NGO, said Americans had taught him “two decades ago” to be “present at every polling station.” In 2000, Washington paid for Serbian students to learn how to bring down their government. In 2026, Serbian activists are advising Americans about ours.
Caution was part of my old profession, so here is what the files do not show. No major independent outlet has authenticated the archive. A smaller one, Midpoint News, checked every quote in 11 of the recordings, frame by frame. The content, it found, “holds up,” though every clip is an excerpt. Critics will note that DataRepublican, whose name is Jennica Pounds, began working for the War Department as a special government employee in July. She has confirmed it. That tells us who released the tapes. It does not change a word on them.
DataRepublican says the network means to turn a disputed election into a crisis of legitimacy. That is her inference. No published recording shows anyone proposing to start unrest. Protests, lawsuits, and governors who refuse to cooperate with Washington are lawful. Even DataRepublican writes that most of the people involved “believe they’re saving democracy.” People can fear the White House and still be wrong to write, in private, the conditions under which they will stop recognizing it.
For two decades, the Kremlin has called every protest on its borders a “color revolution” made in Washington. Many of us dismissed it as propaganda. Much of it was. But a claim is not false because of who makes it. In 1943, the Nazis said the Soviets had shot thousands of Polish officers at Katyn. London and Washington went along with Moscow’s denial. In 1990, Moscow admitted the massacre.
Now Moscow has a gift. Americans who ran the programs are on tape describing them as a method for deciding when a government has lost its legitimacy, and planning for the day their own does. Russian television will play these recordings for years, with Georgian and Ukrainian subtitles.
That is the counterintelligence lesson. The method never really targeted governments. It targeted legitimacy. Whoever defines legitimacy decides when the crowd is right and the ballot is wrong. In Georgia, Western foundations helped define it in 2003.
TRUMP LET YOU HATE THE RUSSIAN DIESEL SO YOU WOULDN’T SEE WHAT COMES AFTER THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS
In Tbilisi, the method needed four things: an election that could be called stolen, a crowd ready to say so, an audience abroad ready to agree, and a security service told to look away. This is midterm week. Somewhere, a situation room is watching for a red line.
DataRepublican’s primer ends with a question: Who decides when your government is legitimate? Georgians learned the answer in 2003.
Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco–based geopolitical analyst and columnist who monitors Russian-language media. From 1996 to 2008, he held senior positions in Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work appears in Newsweek, the Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, RealClearWorld, and at emzargelashvili.substack.com.