The aim of this paper is to unearth the development and impact of coercive formations in Syria and Iraq in the 1960s and ‘70s. By adjusting Hazem Kandil’s “power triangle” framework, it seeks to explain authoritarian resilience through the nurturing of patrimonial affiliations in a series of inter-institutional elite encounters. It then advances an argument on the decisive role of intelligence agencies given the temporality of their growth, the precarious nature of the early Ba'th years, and the appropriation of party structures as additional layers of domestic control. To this end, it shall address the lack of emphasis regarding the role of the Soviets and KGB in shaping the security industries of these two states. Their technical and advisory backing came in critical years, inspiring a unique legacy of surveillance—organizational in the main—and expanding the mechanisms of punitive urbanism. The research will hence draw upon primary and secondary sources such as political memoirs, newspapers, NGO reports, intelligence reports, videos, GIS mapping, and (contingent on summer conditions) archives at Lebanese universities on the Syrian experience. Also worth considering is that the work of Christopher Andrew with Mitrokhin, although particularly revealing, have not been assimilated into the more recent accounts on the anatomy of Ba‘th. Finally, a three-fold conclusion looms: First, the security apparatus prevailed eventually, insofar the persistence of both Hafez al-Assad and Saddam Hussein's regimes hinged primarily on the chiefs of security networks and their clientele, as opposed to commanders of the armed forces; second, the crony political economy choices towards the end of the period were largely driven by this new balance of power vis-à-vis structural and patrimonial clusters; and third, the logic of incarceration stretched beyond the prisons—the sovereigntist violence of these police states manifested both materially and ideologically and gave way to the formation of new political subjectivities and the sectarianization of urban space. That is, the persistence of tribal and sectarian identification was not a default phenomenon in these two states, but rather reproduced and reinforced through the shape of their strongmen’s particular struggle for power.