Benazir Bhutto to take the service's entrance exams later in the year. In July 1977, Zulfikar Bhutto—who had just been re-elected in a general election—was overthrown in a military coup led by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the Chief of Army Staff. Both Zulfikar and Benazir believed that Zia's coup had been assisted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); Zulfikar claimed that in a 1976 meeting, U.S. diplomat Henry Kissinger had told him that the U.S. would make "a horrible example" of him if he did not terminate Pakistan's efforts to built a nuclear bomb. Now in control of the country, Zia declared
Benazir Bhutto had reasons for wanting Bhutto dead; her killing was advantageous to both the military establishment and to the Islamic fundamentalists who despised her. Allen thought that Bhutto's "core political values... were hard to pin down". Bhatia described Bhutto as having "liberal convictions" and a "self-evidently progressive outlook", while biographer G. S. Bhargava thought that in the context of Pakistani politics, she could "pass" for a social democrat. Her friend Catherine Drucker, who knew her at Oxford, noted that at the time Bhutto's political views were akin to those "commonplace" within the "mild leftism of the day". Bhargava added that, through