The United States engineered the 2022 ouster of Pakistani PM Imran Khan through a secret diplomatic cable, the 'cypher'

What the cable actually shows

Give the claim its strongest, best-documented form, because at its core sits something genuinely uncomfortable. In August 2023 The Intercept published what it said was the full text of the cypher, and the text is not innocuous. According to that reporting, Donald Lu told the Pakistani ambassador that officials in Washington and Europe were concerned about Pakistan's “aggressively neutral” position on the war in Ukraine, a stance dramatized by Khan's arrival in Moscow on 24 February, the very day the invasion began.

Then came the line Khan's supporters have quoted ever since. In the published text, Lu says that “if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington,” because the Russia visit was seen as Khan's own decision, while warning that isolation would follow if he stayed. A carrot and a stick, tied explicitly to a domestic parliamentary vote, spoken by a U.S. official to a foreign envoy. On any honest reading, this is a foreign power expressing a clear preference about who should govern another country and signaling a reward for the outcome it wanted.

Pakistan's own government took it seriously enough to act. On 31 March 2022, the National Security Committee, then chaired by Khan, reviewed the cable and resolved to issue a “strong demarche” to an unnamed country over what it called “blatant interference” in Pakistan's internal affairs. That is not nothing. A theory that began as a paper waved at a rally turns out to rest on a real cable, real diplomatic language, and a real formal protest by the state of Pakistan.

The leap from displeasure to 'engineered ouster'

The gap the theory has to cross is the distance between two sentences: “a U.S. official signaled that relations would improve if Khan were removed” and “the United States removed Khan.” The first is documented. The second is a claim of orchestration, of an operation with levers and results, and the record does not carry it across that gap.

Start with the mechanics of the fall, which were domestic and out in the open. Khan did not lose to Washington; he lost his majority. Coalition partners abandoned him for the opposition, and he had publicly ruptured his relationship with Pakistan's army leadership under General Qamar Javed Bajwa, the institution that has made and unmade prime ministers throughout the country's history. The 174 votes recorded against him were cast by Pakistani legislators. Tellingly, Khan himself, in the years since, has directed much of his anger at Bajwa and the military rather than at the State Department, a shift that sits awkwardly with a pure American-plot account.

Then there is what Pakistan's own institutions concluded. The same National Security Committee that had protested “interference” met again on 22 April, under the new prime minister, and stated that it found no evidence of any foreign conspiracy behind the removal. Donald Lu, testifying before a U.S. House subcommittee in March 2024, called the allegation “a lie” and “a complete falsehood,” said the cable never accused the U.S. government or him of acting against Khan, and noted that the ambassador who wrote it had told his own government there was no conspiracy. None of these sources is neutral, and none can simply be waved away, but together they mean the engineered- ouster claim is contradicted by the very people and bodies closest to the events.

Why the story holds so firmly

Belief in the cypher plot is unusually durable because it is not built on nothing. Most conspiracy narratives ask the believer to supply the missing evidence on faith. This one hands them a real classified cable with a real, quotable line about a vote and forgiveness. That kernel of documented truth does enormous psychological work: once part of a story is verified, the mind extends its trust to the rest, and the leap from “the U.S. was pleased he fell” to “the U.S. made him fall” feels like a short one.

The history helps too. Washington has interfered in other countries' politics, in the region and beyond, and Pakistanis have long experienced the United States as a transactional and sometimes overbearing patron. A charge of American meddling lands on prepared ground. Add a charismatic, still-popular leader telling the story from a prison cell, and persecution itself starts to read as proof: if the cable were harmless, why jail him over it? Finally, the rebuttals arrive from exactly the parties a supporter is primed to distrust, the government that replaced Khan and the U.S. State Department, so each denial can be folded back in as part of the very cover-up it was meant to end. The result is a belief that is self-sealing precisely because its foundation is partly true.