His business card, if he ever had one, would read something like: Freedom Fighter. Documentary Filmmaker. Former POW. Trainer of Rebels. Now Guest of the NIA, Matthew Aaron VanDyke, 46, American, Baltimore-born, Georgetown-educated, has spent his entire adult life inserting himself into other people’s wars with the conviction of a man who genuinely believes his passport makes him a protagonist and not a problem.
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On March 13, India’s National Investigation Agency arrested seven foreign nationals (six Ukrainians and one American) in what it called a major counter-terrorism operation. That one American was VanDyke. While VanDyke was detained by the Bureau of Immigration at Kolkata airport, three Ukrainians each were detained at airports in Lucknow and Delhi. They had all entered India on tourist visas, reached Guwahati, then travelled to Mizoram and entered Restricted Area Permit zones without permission. A tourist with a restricted-area violation. Happens to the best of us. Except the NIA says they were there to train insurgent groups in Myanmar to carry out attacks in northeast India. Details, details.
VanDyke first gained fame during the Libyan Civil War as a foreign fighter on the side of the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi and as a prisoner of war. This is his origin story, the way Bruce Wayne has a dead mother and a bat. In 2011, he crossed into Libya illegally, joined rebel forces, got ambushed, was shot, and spent the next six months in solitary confinement in two of Gaddafi’s most notorious prisons. Most people would call this a sign from the universe to try a different career. VanDyke called it an internship.
Prisoners broke the lock off his cell on August 24, 2011, and he escaped prison. Free from prison, VanDyke stayed at the home of a fellow escapee for a few days before relocating to the Corinthia Hotel Tripoli as a guest of the National Transitional Council. From solitary confinement to hotel guest of the transitional government in 72 hours. That, in any language, is a resume.
IS MATTHEW VANDYKE A CIA ASSET?
The CIA angle is both the most interesting and least straightforward part of his story. VanDyke studied Security Studies at Georgetown University. Most of his classmates went on to work for the CIA, FBI, Department of Defence (now Department of War), State Department, or think tanks. He tried to join that club. He made it pretty far through the CIA hiring process: taking an analytical test, a drug test, a psychological exam, and even met with his future boss and co-workers at CIA headquarters in Langley. But he was too nervous on the polygraph, and it produced inconclusive results. He failed the lie detector. The CIA said, thanks, we’ll call. They didn’t. Or did they? The CIA works in mysterious ways. Anyway, he went to the beach for a year. Then he got on a motorcycle and rode across North Africa.
The pattern that emerged over the next decade is what intelligence analysts call a “useful idiot” profile, and what VanDyke would call a “freedom fighter”. It was the profile of a mercenary. VanDyke was arrested or detained 20 times by Iraqi security forces between 2008 and 2010. Twenty times. There is a point at which frequency stops being coincidence and starts being a methodology.
In one particularly grim episode, he and a colleague were hooded, beaten in the head, handcuffed, and accused of being al-Qaida terrorists. They were interrogated again in Baghdad and made to face a wall in a Baghdad prison while an Iraqi with an AK-47 stood behind them. The Iranian Fars News Agency reported this as the arrest of “Jewish Americans running espionage operations”. He was not Jewish. He was, arguably, running something. What exactly remains a matter of perspective.
After Libya came Syria, where he filmed a documentary while advising rebel groups on weaponry. He was branded a terrorist by the Assad regime for his trouble. After Syria came Iraq, where, in 2014, motivated by the beheading of his journalist friends James Foley and Steven Sotloff by ISIS, he founded Sons of Liberty International, a 501(c)(3) organisation that provides military training, advising, and supplies to forces fighting against authoritarian regimes and terrorists. A non-profit mercenary outfit. The American capacity for paperwork is truly boundless.
Sons of Liberty International describes itself as the first military contracting firm operating on non-profit principles, providing free security consulting and training services to vulnerable populations. Free, as in subsidised by donors who believe in the cause. The cause being, broadly, whatever Washington currently considers the wrong side of history. It is, to put it plainly, private foreign policy with better branding.
WHAT WAS VANDYKE AND HIS GROUP DOING IN INDIA?
VanDyke and his organisation have been working in Ukraine since March 2022, helping the Ukrainian military in their fight against Russia. In addition to SOLI’s mission, VanDyke enlisted in the Armed Forces of Ukraine to fight as a combatant. He didn’t merely advise; he signed up. By late 2025, observers noticed his rhetoric expanding beyond Ukraine toward what he described as confronting Russia’s global allies. Which brings us, inevitably, to Myanmar. Too close to our Burmese border.
The group allegedly entered India illegally through Mizoram’s protected border areas, then travelled to Myanmar to train with ethnic armed organisations linked to the Northeast insurgents. We have too many tiny to medium-sized insurgent groups in that sensitive region. These groups operate on both sides of the border. Most are ethnic group-linked. VanDyke and his mercenary team are also accused of carrying a large consignment of drones from Europe, raising concerns about proxy conflict networks. Drones from Europe, through India, into Myanmar. A tourist visa has never worked harder. We do know that the drones will be used by the groups, not just against the junta in Myanmar.
His experiences are the subject of the documentary film Point and Shoot, which won the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival Best Documentary Award. He has been covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, which called him a writer. He has appeared on the History Channel. He is, by every measure except geopolitical prudence, a celebrated figure.
The NIA arrest of VanDyke doesn’t make him a CIA asset because there is no public evidence of a formal operational relationship, and he himself has consistently denied it, even while acknowledging he nearly joined the agency. What it does suggest is something more mundane and more dangerous: a man whose personal ideology happens to align perfectly with American strategic interests in every conflict zone he enters, who operates just outside official sanction, and who provides Washington with plausible deniability in the same breath as he provides rebel armies with training.
The NIA’s arrest should send a shiver up our own security network’s spine. That VanDyke and his friends have been actively operating in areas even Indian citizens need permits to access. The arrest also sends an unambiguous message: India will not allow its sovereign territory to be used as a staging ground for foreign proxy conflicts, regardless of geopolitical motives.
VanDyke has spent 20 years telling the world he fights for freedom. India has just told him and Washington that freedom has a border. You cross it, you pay for it. He will most likely cool his heels in Tihar before the Americans get antsy and demand him. The NIA needs to dig deep into this affair: was he here to create trouble that Sheikh Hasina, then Bangladesh’s prime minister, had hinted at? Trump’s America doesn’t hide the fact that they would do everything in their power to stop India from being a challenger like China. Does that include weakening India from within? These are questions an ally deserves answers to.
– Ends
Published By:
Shounak Sanyal
Published On:
Mar 17, 2026 19:56 IST
