Saturday, April 18, 2009
PRESIDENT OF SOEKARNO AND MAOTSE TUNG
H.R.H KING ALLEN W.W NEOH AND THE UNITED NATIONS
ADITYO BAMBANG MATARAM AND H.R.H KING ALLEN W.W NEOH
PRESIDENT SOEKARNO AND GENERAL A.M HANAFI FAMALY
GENERAL A.M HANAFI AND FIDEL CASTRO
ADITYO BAMBANG MATARAM AS GRAND MASTER , MARTIA ART OF MILITARY
The Kings of the East--A New Nation in Borneo
Toward the end of last December I wrote an article about "The Kings of the East" and how this is at least part of the fulfillment of Bible prophecy. In the days of Daniel, the kings of the east were Cyrus and Darius, who conquered Babylon. Today, it is a bit different, but yet we are seeing the formation of a new nation called The Royal Kingdom of Borneo.
Many people do not even know where Borneo is located, nor do they understand its importance in the financial arena. But the United Nations has decided to set up a new Kingdom, made up of Borneo itself, and adding to it the southern part of the Philippines including the Sulu islands and Mindanao itself.
As many of you may know I spent many years of my early life on Mindanao, and I have been on quite a number of the southern islands of the Sulu Sea that stretch all the way to Borneo. So I have always maintained an interest in the area and have studied its history with the wars with the Dutch and the Spanish a few centuries ago.
There has been an insurgency group in that area for decades, attempting to obtain independence from Manila. It has always been rumored that the insurgents wanted to join with Borneo. Well, now we are actually seeing this happen. So far it has only appeared on news in China.
http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/bvwiDJwjjIA/
If you listen to this news footage for a few minutes, you will see the U.N. representative in his official red robes giving a short speech (in English) supporting the establishment of this new monarchy. The sign in the background reads,
"The Ceremony of the Official Declaration of His Royal Majesty, Allen Neoh Weng Wah, King of Borneo, Sulu, and Mindanao."
The King being honored is Allen Neoh Weng Wah, a descendant of the old Chinese Emperors, who trace their ancestry back to Genghis Khan.
He is actually only one of three Kings who will rule this Kingdom of Borneo. I do not know why they need three kings. Perhaps each will rule a semi-autonomous region of the new Kingdom. Perhaps one of them will preside over the other two as regional kings. We will see.
But is it not interesting that Daniel 6:1 and 2 tells us that King Darius the Mede divided the kingdom into 120 provinces (the number associated with the outpouring of the Spirit) and then established three governors to rule them? Daniel was the chief of those governors.
We are seeing history in the making. This change will be somewhat traumatic for the Christians living on Mindanao. They may wish to emigrate to the North. But God has a bigger plan that most people cannot see or understand, because they know only how world events effect them personally. Most people do not see the bigger picture.
In recent years, largely because of "Free Trade," a great shift of wealth and power has been taking place. The shift is from West to East. Borneo has assets that are generally unknown to the public but which may soon become a very important factor in the world. The Kings of the East are being raised up to overthrow the system of Mystery Babylon that has kept the people of the West oppressed for many years. This new system is not necessarily a better system, but it is a power shift that will affect all of us for an unknown period of time.
We must know the story of Daniel 6 to understand the purposes of God. I am very glad that Darius divided up the kingdom into 120 provinces, because this is a revelation of prophecy that shows the divine fingerprint of the Kingdom. If there are three kings of Borneo, look for a "Daniel" among them to emerge in due time.
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JFK, Indonesia,CIA & Freeport Sulphur by Lisa Pease
What is Past is Prologue. Inscribed on the National Archives, Washington, D.C.
In Part One of this article (Probe, March-April, 1996) we talked about the early years of Freeport up through the Cuban takeover of their potentially lucrative mine at Moa Bay, as well as their run-in with President Kennedy over the issue of stockpiling.
But the biggest conflict that Freeport Sulphur would face was over the country housing the world's single largest gold reserve and third largest copper reserve: Indonesia. To understand the recent (March, 1996) riots at the Freeport plant, we need to go to the roots of this venture to show how things might have been very different had Kennedy lived to implement his plans for Indonesia.
Indonesia Backstory
Indonesia had been discovered by the Dutch at the end of the 1500s. During the early 1600s they were dominated by the Dutch East Indies Company, a private concern, for nearly 200 years.
In 1798, authority over Indonesia was transferred to the Netherlands, which retained dominion over this fifth largest country in the world until 1941, at which time the Japanese moved in during the course of World War II. By 1945 Japan was defeated in Indonesia and Achmed Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta rose to become President and Vice President of the newly independent Indonesia. But within a month of the Sukarno/Hatta proclamation of independence, British army units began landing in Jakarta to help the Dutch restore colonial rule.
Four years of fighting ensued. In 1949, the Dutch officially ceded sovereignty back to Indonesia, with the exception of one key area - that of a hotspot which is now known as Irian Jaya or, depending on who you talk to, West Papua.
Authors Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, in their book Thy Will Be Done, explain the situation in what was then called Dutch New Guinea:
To Westerners, New Guinea was like a gifted child pulled in opposite directions by covetous guardians. The Dutch clung to the western half as the sole remnant of their once-vast East Indies empire. Their longtime British allies, acting through Australia, controlled the eastern half. Neighboring Indonesians, on the other hand, thought that all New Guinea was part of their national territory, even if it was still colonized by Europeans.
Dutch New Guinea, or West Irian as the Indonesians called it, was populated by native tribes not far removed from a stone age culture, such as the Danis and the Amungme. When Indonesia fought to claim independence from the Dutch, West Irian became a symbol for both sides that neither wanted to relinquish. It would take the efforts of President Kennedy to eventually pass control of this area to the newly independent Indonesians, removing the last vestiges of Dutch colonialism.
Indonesia experienced various types of government. When Sukarno first rose to power in 1945, foreigners pointed out that Sukarno's rule appeared "fascistic," since he held sole control over so much of the government. Bowing to foreign pressure to appear more democratic, Indonesia instituted a parliamentary system of rule and opened the government to a multiparty system. Sukarno related what followed to his biographer (now cable gossip show host) Cindy Adams:
In a nation previously denied political activities, the results were immediate. Over 40 dissimilar parties sprang up. So terrified were we of being labeled "a Japanese-sponsored Fascistic dictatorship" that single individuals forming splinter organizations were tolerated as "mouthpieces of democracy." Political parties grew like weeds with shallow roots and interests top-heavy with petty selfishness and vote-catching.
Internal strife grew. We faced disaster, endless conflicts, hair-raising confusion. Indonesians previously pulling together now pulled apart. They were sectioned into religious and geographical boxes, just what I'd sweated all my life to get them out of.
Sukarno related that nearly every six months, a cabinet fell, and a new government would start up, only to repeat the cycle. On October 17, 1952 things came to a head.
Thousands of soldiers from the Indonesian army stormed the gates with signs saying "Dissolve Parliament." Sukarno faced the troops directly, firmly refusing to dissolve parliament due to military pressure, and the soldiers backed down. The result of this was a factionalized army. There were the "pro-17 October 1952 military" and the "anti-17 October 1952 military." In 1955, elections were held and parliamentary rule was ended by vote.
The Communists, who had done the most for the people suffering the aftereffects of converting from colonial rule to independence, won many victories in 1955 and 1956. In 1955, Sukarno organized the Bandung Conference at which the famous Chinese Communist Chou En Lai was a featured guest.
During the 1955 elections, the CIA had given a million dollars to the Masjumi party-an opposition party to both Sukarno's Nationalist party and the Communist party in Indonesia (called the PKI)-in an attempt to gain political control of the country. But the Masjumi party failed to win the hearts and minds of the people.
In 1957, an assassination attempt was made against Sukarno. Although the actual perpetrators were unknown at the time, both Sukarno and the CIA jumped to use this for propaganda purposes. The CIA was quick to blame the PKI. Sukarno, however, blamed the Dutch, and used this as the excuse to seize all former Dutch holdings, including shipping and flying lines.
Sukarno vowed to drive the Dutch out of West Irian. He had already tried settling the long-standing dispute over that territory through the United Nations, but the vote fell shy of the needed two-thirds majority to set up a commission to force the Dutch to sit down with the Indonesians. The assassination attempt provided a much needed excuse for action.
The victories of the Communists, infighting in the army, and the 1957 nationalization of former Dutch holdings, led to a situation of grave concern to American business interests, notably the oil and rubber industries. The CIA eagerly pitched in, helping to foment rebellion between the outer, resource rich, islands, and the central government based in Jakarta, Java.
Rockefeller Interests in Indonesia
Two prominent American-based oil companies doing business in Indonesia at this time were of the Rockefeller-controlled Standard Oil family: Stanvac (jointly held by Standard Oil of New Jersey and Socony Mobil-Socony being Standard Oil of New York), and Caltex, (jointly held by Standard Oil of California and Texaco.) In Part I of this article we showed how heavily loaded the Freeport Sulphur board was with Rockefeller family and allies. Recall that Augustus C. Long was a board member of Freeport while serving as Chairman of Texaco for many years. Long becomes more and more interesting as the story develops.
1958: CIA vs. Sukarno
"I think its time we held Sukarno's feet to the fire," said Frank Wisner, then Deputy Director of Plans for the CIA, in 1956. By 1958, having failed to buy the government through the election process, the CIA was fomenting a full-fledged operation in Indonesia. Operation Hike, as it was called, involved the arming and training of tens of thousands of Indonesians as well as "mercenaries" to launch attacks in the hope of bringing down Sukarno.
Joseph Burkholder Smith was a former CIA officer involved with the Indonesian operations during this period. In his book, Portrait of a Cold Warrior, he described how the CIA took it upon themselves to make, not just to enact, policy in this area:
before any direct action against Sukarno's position could be taken, we would have to have the approval of the Special Group-the small group of top National Security Council officials who approved covert action plans. Premature mention of such an idea might get it shot down ...
So we began to feed the State Department and Defense departments intelligence ... When they had read enough alarming reports, we planned to spring the suggestion we should support the colonels' plan to reduce Sukarno's power. This was a method of operation which became the basis of many of the political action adventures of the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, the statement is false that CIA undertook to intervene in the affairs of countries like Chile only after being ordered to do so ... In many instances, we made the action programs up ourselves after we had collected enough intelligence to make them appear required by the circumstance. Our activity in Indonesia in 1957-1958 was one such instance.
When the Ambassador to Indonesia wrote Washington of his explicit disagreements with the CIA's handling of the situation, Allen Dulles had his brother John Foster appoint a different Ambassador to Indonesia, one more accepting of the CIA's activities.
In addition to the paramilitary activities, the CIA tried psychological warfare tricks to discredit Sukarno, such as passing rumors that he had been seduced by a Soviet stewardess. To that end, Sheffield Edwards, head of the CIA's Office of Security, enlisted the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department to help with a porno movie project the CIA was making to use against Sukarno, ostensibly showing Sukarno in the act. Others involved in these efforts were Robert Maheu, and Bing Crosby and his brother.
The Agency tried to keep its coup participation covert, but one "mercenary" met misfortune early. Shot down and captured during a bombing run, Allen Lawrence Pope was carrying all kinds of ID on his person to indicate that he was an employee of the CIA. The U.S. Government, right up to President Eisenhower, tried to deny that the CIA was involved at all, but the Pope revelations made a mockery of this. Not cowed by the foment, as Arbenz had been in Guatemala, Sukarno marshalled those forces loyal to him and crushed the CIA-aided rebellion. Prior to the Bay of Pigs, this was the Agency's single largest failed operation.
1959: Copper Mountain
At this point, Freeport Sulphur entered the Indonesian picture. In July, 1959, Charles Wight, then President of Freeport-and reported to be fomenting anti-Castro plots and flying to Canada and/or Cuba with Clay Shaw (see Part I of this article)-was busy defending his company against House Committee accusations of overcharging the Government for the nickel ore processed at the Government-owned plant in Nicaro, Cuba.
The Committee recommended that the Justice Department pursue an investigation. Freeport's Moa Bay Mining Company had only just opened, and already the future in Cuba looked bleak. In August, 1959, Freeport Director and top engineer Forbes Wilson met with Jan van Gruisen, managing director of the East Borneo Company, a mining concern.
Gruisen had just stumbled upon a dusty report first made in 1936 regarding a mountain called the "Ertsberg" ("Copper Mountain") in Dutch New Guinea, by Jean Jacques Dozy. Hidden away for years in a Netherlands library during Nazi attacks, the report had only recently resurfaced. Dozy reported a mountain heavy with copper ore.
If true, this could justify a new Freeport diversification effort into copper. Wilson cabled Freeport's New York headquarters asking for permission and money to make a joint exploration effort with the East Borneo Company. The contract was signed February 1, 1960.
With the aid of a native guide, Wilson spent the next several months amidst the near-stone age natives as he forged through near impassable places on his way to the Ertsberg. Wilson wrote a book about this journey, called The Conquest of Copper Mountain. When he finally arrived, he was excited at what he found:
an unusually high degree of mineralization ... The Ertsberg turned out to be 40% to 50% iron ... and 3% copper ... Three percent is quite rich for a deposit of copper ... The Ertsberg also contains certain amounts of even more rare silver and gold.
He cabled back a message in prearranged code to the soon-to-be President of Freeport, Bob Hills in New York:
... thirteen acres rock above ground additional 14 acres each 100 meter depth sampling progressive color appears dark access egress formidable all hands well advise Sextant regards.
"Thirteen acres" meant 13 million tons of ore above ground. "Color appears dark" meant that the grade of ore was good. "Sextant" was code for the East Borneo Company. The expedition was over in July of 1960. Freeport's board was not eager to go ahead with a new and predictably costly venture on the heels of the expropriation of their mining facilities in Cuba. But the board decided to at least press ahead with the next phase of exploration: a more detailed investigation of the ore samples and commercial potential. Wilson described the results of this effort:
Mining consultants confirmed our estimates of 13 million tons of ore above ground and another 14 million below ground for each 100 meters of depth. Other consultants estimated that the cost of a plant to process 5,000 tons of ore a day would be around $60 million and that the cost of producing copper would be 16¢ a pound after credit for small amounts of gold and silver associated with the copper.
At the time, copper was selling in world markets for around 35¢ a pound. From these data, Freeport's financial department calculated that the company could recover its investment in three years and then begin earning an attractive profit.
The operation proved technically difficult, involving newly invented helicopters and diamond drills. Complicating the situation was the outbreak of a near-war between the Dutch-who were still occupying West Irian-and Sukarno's forces which landed there to reclaim the land as their own.
Fighting even broke out near the access road to Freeport's venture. By mid-1961, Freeport's engineers strongly felt that the project should be pursued. But by that time, John F. Kennedy had taken over the office of President. And he was pursuing a far different course than the previous administration.
Kennedy and Sukarno
"No wonder Sukarno doesn't like us very much. He has to sit down with people who tried to overthrow him." - President Kennedy, 1961
Up until Kennedy's time, the aid predominantly offered to Indonesia from this country came mostly in the form of military support. Kennedy had other ideas. After a positive 1961 meeting with Sukarno in the United States, Kennedy appointed a team of economists to study ways that economic aid could help Indonesia develop in constructive ways.
Kennedy understood that Sukarno took aid and arms from the Soviets and the Chinese because he needed the help, not because he was eager to fall under communist rule. American aid would prevent Sukarno from becoming dependent on Communist supplies. And Sukarno had already put down a communist rebellion in 1948. Even the State Department in the United States conceded that Sukarno was more nationalist than Communist.
But the pressing problem during Kennedy's short term was the issue of West Irian. The Dutch had taken an ever more aggressive stance, and Sukarno was assuming a military posture. America, as allies to both, was caught in the middle.
Kennedy asked Ellsworth Bunker to attempt to mediate an agreement between the Dutch and Indonesian governments. "The role of the mediator," said Kennedy, "is not a happy one; we are prepared to have everybody mad if it makes some progress."
It did make everybody mad. But it did make progress. Ultimately, the U.S. pressured the Dutch behind the scenes to yield to Indonesia. Bobby Kennedy was enlisted in this effort, visiting both Sukarno in Indonesia and the Dutch at the Hague. Said Roger Hilsman in To Move a Nation:
Sukarno came to recognize in Robert Kennedy the same tough integrity and loyalty that he had seen in his brother, the President, combined with a true understanding of what the new nationalisms were really all about.
So with preliminary overtures having been made to Sukarno and the Hague, Bunker took over the nitty gritty of getting each side to talk to each other. The Dutch, unwilling to concede the last vestige of their once-great empire to their foe, pressed instead for West Irian to become an independent country.
But Sukarno knew it was a symbol to his people of final independence from the Dutch. And all knew that the Papuan natives there had no hope of forming any kind of functioning government, having only just recently been pushed from a primitive existence into the modern world.
The United Nations voted to cede West Irian fully to Indonesia, with the provision that, by 1969, the people of West Irian would be granted an opportunity to vote whether to remain with or secede from Indonesia. Kennedy seized the moment, issuing National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 179, dated August 16, 1962:
With the peaceful settlement of the West Irian dispute now in prospect, I would like to see us capitalize on the U.S. role in promoting this settlement to move toward a new and better relationship with Indonesia. I gather that with this issue resolved the Indonesians too would like to move in this direction and will be presenting us with numerous requests.
To seize this opportunity, will all agencies concerned please review their programs for Indonesia and assess what further measures might be useful. I have in mind the possibility of expanded civic action, military aid, and economic stabilization and development programs as well as diplomatic initiatives.
Roger Hilsman elaborated on what Kennedy meant by civic action: "rehabilitating canals, draining swampland to create new rice paddies, building bridges and roads, and so on."
Freeport and West Irian
Kennedy's aid in brokering Indonesian sovereignty over West Irian could only have come as a blow to Freeport Sulphur's board. Freeport already had a positive relationship with the Dutch, who had authorized the initial exploratory missions there.
During the negotiation period, Freeport approached the U.N., but the U.N. said Freeport would have to discuss their plans with the Indonesian officials. When Freeport went to the Indonesian embassy in Washington, they received no response.
Lamented Forbes Wilson:
Not long after Indonesia obtained control over Western New Guinea in 1963, then-President Sukarno, who had consolidated his executive power, made a series of moves which would have discouraged even the most eager prospective Western investor. He expropriated nearly all foreign investments in Indonesia. He ordered American agencies, including the Agency for International Development, to leave the country. He cultivated close ties with Communist China and with Indonesia's Communist Party, known as the PKI.
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1962 had been a difficult year for Freeport. They were under attack on the stockpiling issue. Freeport was still reeling from having their lucrative facilities expropriated in Cuba. And now they sat, staring at a potential fortune in Indonesia. But with Kennedy giving tacit support to Sukarno, their hopes looked bleak indeed.
Reversal of Fortunes
Kennedy stepped up the aid package to Indonesia, offering $11 million. In addition, he planned a personal visit there in early 1964. While Kennedy was trying to support Sukarno, other forces were countering their efforts.
Public dissent in the Senate brewed over continuing to aid Indonesia while the Communist party there remained strong. Kennedy persisted. He approved this particular aid package on November 19, 1963. Three days later, Sukarno lost his best ally in the west. Shortly, he would lose the aid package too.
Sukarno was much shaken by the news of Kennedy's death. Bobby made the trip the President had originally planned to take, in January, 1964. Cindy Adams asked Sukarno what he thought of Bobby, and got more than she asked for:
Sukarno's face lit up. "Bob is very warm. He is like his brother. I loved his brother. He understood me. I designed and built a special guest house on the palace grounds for John F. Kennedy, who promised me he'd come here and be the first American President ever to pay a state visit to this country." He fell silent. "Now he'll never come."
Sukarno was perspiring freely. He repeatedly mopped his brow and chest. "Tell me, why did they kill Kennedy?"
Sukarno noted with irony that the very day Kennedy was assassinated, his Chief of Bodyguards was in Washington to study how to protect a president. Looking to the future, he was not optimistic:
I know Johnson ... I met him when I was with President Kennedy in Washington. But I wonder if he is as warm as John. I wonder if he will like Sukarno as John Kennedy, my friend, did.
LBJ and Indonesia
As others have noted, foreign policy changed rapidly after Kennedy's death. Donald Gibson says in his book Battling Wall Street, "In foreign policy the changes came quickly, and they were dramatic." Gibson outlines five short term changes and several long term changes that went into effect after Kennedy's death. One of the short term changes was the instant reversal of the Indonesian aid package Kennedy had already approved.
Hilsman makes this point as well:
One of the first pieces of paper to come across President Johnson's desk was the presidential determination ... by which the President had to certify that continuing even economic aid [to Indonesia] was essential to the national interest. Since everyone down the line had known that President Kennedy would have signed the determination routinely, we were all surprised when President Johnson refused.
Someone at Freeport was so pleased with Johnson's behavior that he supported his presidential run in 1964: Augustus C. "Gus" Long.
Long had been Chairman at Texas Company (Texaco) for many years. In 1964, he and a bunch of other conservative, largely Republican business moguls, joined together to support Johnson over Goldwater.
The group, calling themselves the National Independent Committee for Johnson, included such people as Thomas Lamont, Edgar Kaiser of Kaiser Aluminum, Robert Lehman of Lehman Brothers, Thomas Cabot of Cabot Corporation of Boston, and many other luminaries of the business world.
Long had two toes in the Indonesian fray-one for Freeport, one for Texaco. In 1961, Caltex-jointly owned by Standard Oil of California (Socal) and Texas Company (Texaco)-was one of the three major oil companies in Indonesia forced to operate under a new contract with Sukarno's government.
Under the new terms, 60% of all profits had to be given to the Indonesian government. So he had two reasons to be concerned by Kennedy's support of Sukarno's brand of nationalism, which threatened the interests of both companies in which he had a substantial stake.
In Part I, we mentioned that Long had done "prodigious volunteer work" for Presbyterian Hospital in New York, said by a former employee of their PR firm, the Mullen Company, to be a "hotbed of CIA activity."
Now we add that Long was elected President of Presbyterian Hospital two years running-1961 and 1962. In 1964, Long retired his role as Chairman of Texaco. He would be reinstated as Chairman in 1970. What did he do in the interim?
In March of 1965, Long was elected a director of Chemical Bank-another Rockefeller-controlled company.
In August of 1965, Long was appointed to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, where he would approve and suggest covert activities.
In October of 1965, covert activities sealed Sukarno's fate.
1965: The Year of Living Dangerously
After Kennedy's death, Sukarno had grown ever more belligerent towards the West. The British were busy forming a new country out of Indonesia's former trading partners Malaya and Singapore, called "Malaysia." Since the area included territory from which the CIA had launched some of its 1958 activities, Sukarno was justifiably concerned by what he felt was an ever tightening noose.
On January 1, 1965, Sukarno threatened to pull Indonesia out of the United Nations if Malaysia was admitted. It was and he did, making Indonesia the first nation ever to pull out of the U.N. In response to U.S. pressure on Sukarno to support Malaysia, he cried, "to hell with your aid." He built up his troops along the borders of Malaysia. Malaysia, fearing invasion, appealed to the U.N. for support.
By February, Sukarno could see the writing on the wall:
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Feb. 23 (UPI)-President Sukarno declared today that Indonesia could no longer afford freedom of the press. He ordered the banning of anti-Communist newspapers. ...
"I have secret information that reveals that the C.I.A. was using the Body for the Promotion of Sukarnoism to kill Sukarnoism and Sukarno," he said. "That's why I banned it." (New York Times, 2/24/65)
The country was in disarray. Anti-American demonstrations were frequent. Indonesia quit the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The press reported that Sukarno was moving closer to the Chinese and Soviets. Sukarno threatened to nationalize remaining U.S. properties, having already taken over, for example, one of the biggest American operations in Indonesia, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. And then, in an unexpected move, Singapore seceded from Malaysia, weakening the newly formed state bordering Indonesia.
With American money interests threatened, all the usual carrots of foreign aid shunted, no leverage via the IMF or World Bank, and Freeport's Gus Long on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, it was only a matter of time, and not much, at that.
October 1, 1965: Coup or Counter-Coup?
I. 1. 10 INDONESIA SAYS PLOT TO DEPOSE SUKARNO IS FOILED BY ARMY CHIEF; POWER FIGHT BELIEVED CONTINUING
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia. Oct. 1-An attempt to overthrow President Sukarno was foiled tonight by army units loyal to Gen. Abdul Haris Nasution, the Indonesian radio announced. ...
In Washington, a State Department spokesman said Friday the situation in Indonesia was "extremely confused." Robert J. McCloskey told a news conference the State Department was getting reports from the American Embassy at Jakarta, but "it is not presently possible to attempt any evaluation, explanation, or comment."
Late yesterday, a mysterious group calling itself the 30th of September Movement seized control of Jakarta.
Colonel Untung, who had announced over the Indonesian radio that he was the leader of the movement, said the group had seized control of the Government to prevent a "counterrevolutionary" coup by the Generals' Council. (New York Times, 10/2-3/65, International Edition)
In a strange, convoluted move, a group of young military leaders killed a bunch of older, centrist leaders who, they claimed, were going to-with the help of the CIA-stage a coup against Sukarno. But what happened in the aftermath of this turned Indonesia into one of the bloodiest nightmares the world has ever seen. This original counter-coup was branded a coup attempt instead, and painted as brightly Red as possible. Then, in the disguise of outrage that Sukarno's authority had been imperiled, Nasution joined with General Suharto to overthrow the "rebels." What started ostensibly to protect Sukarno's authority ended up stripping him of it wholly.
The aftermath is too horrible to describe in a few words. The numbers vary, but the consensus lies in the range of 200,000 to over 500,000 people killed in the wake of this "counter-coup." Anyone who had ever had an association with the Communist PKI was targeted for elimination. Even Time magazine gave one token accurate description of what was happening:
According to accounts brought out of Indonesia by Western diplomats and independent travelers, Communists, Red sympathizers and their families are being massacred by the thousands.
Backlands army units are reported to have executed thousands of Communists after interrogation in remote rural jails. ... Armed with wide-bladed knives called parangs, Moslem bands crept at night into the homes of Communists, killing entire families and burying the bodies in shallow graves. ... The murder campaign became so brazen in parts of rural East Java that Moslem bands placed the heads of victims on poles and paraded them through villages.
The killings have been on such a scale that the disposal of the corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in East Java and northern Sumatra, where the humid air bears the reek of decaying flesh. Travelers from those areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies; river transportation has at places been impeded.
Latter day thumbnail histories frequently depict the actions like this: "An abortive Communist coup in 1965 led to an anti-Communist takeover by the military, under Gen. Suharto." (Source: The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia.) But the truth is far more complex. A persuasive indicator for this lies in the following item, cited in a remarkable article by Peter Dale Scott published in the British journal Lobster (Fall, 1990).
Scott quotes an author citing a researcher who, having been given access to files of the foreign ministry in Pakistan, ran across a letter from a former ambassador who reported a conversation with a Dutch intelligence officer with NATO, which said, according to the researcher's notes,
"Indonesia was going to fall into the Western lap like a rotten apple." Western intelligence agencies, he said, would organize a "premature communist coup ... [which would be] foredoomed to fail, providing a legitimate and welcome opportunity to the army to crush the communists and make Soekarno a prisoner of the army's goodwill." The ambassador's report was dated December 1964.
Later in this article, Scott quotes from the book The CIA File:
"All I know," said one former intelligence officer of the Indonesia events, "is that the Agency rolled in some of its top people and that things broke big and very favorable, as far as we were concerned."
Ralph McGehee, a 25-year veteran of the CIA, also implicated the agency in an article, still partially censored by the CIA, published in The Nation (April 11, 1981):
To conceal its role in the massacre of those innocent people the C.I.A., in 1968, concocted a false account of what happened (later published by the Agency as a book, Indonesia-1965: The Coup That Backfired). That book is the only study of Indonesia politics ever released to the public on the Agency's own initiative. At the same time that the Agency wrote the book, it also composed a secret study of what really happened. [one sentence deleted.] The Agency was extremely proud of its successful [one word deleted] and recommended it as a model for future operations [one-half sentence deleted].
Freeport After Sukarno
According to Forbes Wilson, Freeport had all but given up hope of developing its fabulous find in West Irian. But while the rest of the world's press was still trying to unravel the convoluted information as to who was really in power, Freeport apparently had an inside track. In the essay mentioned earlier, Scott cites a cable (U.S. delegation to the U.N.) which stated that Freeport Sulphur had reached a preliminary "arrangement" with Indonesian officials over the Ertsberg in April of 1965, before there could legitimately have been any hope in sight.
Officially, Freeport had no such plans until after the October 1965 events. But even the official story seemed odd to Wilson. As early as November, a mere month after the October events, longtime Chairman of Freeport, Langbourne Williams, called Director Wilson at home, asking if the time had now come to pursue their project in West Irian. Wilson's reaction to this call is interesting:
I was so startled I didn't know what to say.
How did Williams know, so soon, that a new regime was coming to power? Sukarno was still President, and would remain so formally until 1967. Only deep insiders knew from the beginning that Sukarno's days were numbered, and his power feeble. Wilson explains that Williams got some "encouraging private information" from "two executives of Texaco." Long's company had managed to maintain close ties to a high official of the Sukarno regime, Julius Tahija. It was Tahija who brokered a meeting between Freeport and Ibnu Sutowo, Minister of Mines and Petroleum. Fortune magazine had this to say about Sutowo (July 1973):
As president-director of Pertamina [the Government's state-owned oil company], Lieutenant General Ibnu Sutowo receives a salary of just $250 a month, but lives on a princely scale. He moves around Jakarta in his personal Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. He has built a family compound of several mansions, which are so large that guests at his daughter's wedding party could follow the whole show only on closed-circuit television.
... The line between Sutowo's public and private activities will seem hazy to Western eyes. The Ramayan Restaurant in New York [in Rockefeller Center-author's note], for example, was bankrolled by various U.S. oil-company executives, who put up $500,000 to get into a notoriously risky sort of business. Presumably its backers were motivated at least in part by a desire to be on amiable terms with the general.
But beyond these dubious accolades, a hint of something else, as well was revealed:
Sutowo's still small oil company played a key part in bankrolling those crucial operations [during the October 1965 events.]
Given the wealth of evidence that the CIA was deeply involved in this operation, it seems equally likely that Sutowo was acting as a conduit for their funds.
After Sukarno's fall from power, Sutowo constructed a new agreement that allowed oil companies to keep a substantially larger percent of their profits. In an article entitled "Oil and Nationalism Mix Beautifully in Indonesia" (July, 1973), Fortune labeled the post-Sukarno deal "exceptionally favorable to the oil companies."
In 1967, when Indonesia's Foreign Investment Law was passed, Freeport's contract was the first to be signed. With Kennedy, Sukarno, and any viable support for Indonesian nationalism out of the way, Freeport began operations.
In 1969, the vote mandated by the Kennedy brokered U.N. agreement on the question of West Irian independence was due. Under heavy intimidation and the visceral presence of the military, Irian "voted" to remain part of Indonesia. Freeport was in the clear.
The Bechtel Connection
Gus Long was a frequent dinner partner of Steve Bechtel, Sr., owner with CIA Director John McCone, of Bechtel-McCone in Los Angeles in the thirties. McCone and Bechtel, Sr. made a bundle off of World War II, split, and went their not so separate ways. Writes author Laton McCartney in Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story,
[I]n 1964 and 1965, CIA director John McCone and U.S. ambassador to Indonesia Howard Jones briefed Steve Bechtel Sr. on the rapidly deteriorating situation in Indonesia. Bechtel, Socal, Texaco ... had extensive dealings in that part of the world and were concerned because Indonesia's President Sukarno was nationalizing U.S. business interests there. ... In October 1965, in what a number of CIA alumni have since charged was an Agency-backed coup, Sukarno was ousted and replaced by President Suharto, who proved far more receptive to U.S. business interests than his predecessor.
Bechtel was no stranger to the CIA. Bechtel Sr. had been a charter member of the CIA conduit Asia Foundation from its inception as Allen Dulles' brainchild. Former CIA Director Richard Helms himself joined Bechtel, as an "international consultant" in 1978. Said a former executive, Bechtel was:
loaded with the CIA ... The agency didn't have to ask them to place its agents ... Bechtel was delighted to take them on and give them whatever assistance they needed.
Bechtel Sr.'s "oldest and closest friend in the oil industry," Gus Long, had a problem. Freeport's project was far more difficult than they had foreseen, and they needed outside help. The mountainous path to the "copper mountain" made extraction nearly impossible. Freeport hired Bechtel to help them construct the appropriate infrastructure to turn their dreams into reality.
Bechtel came with extras. Freeport needed additional financing for their costly Indonesian project. Bechtel Sr. had gotten himself appointed to the advisory committee of the Export-Import (Exim) bank after a long period of cozying up to Exim bank president Henry Kearns. Freeport was not happy with the lack of progress and costs of Bechtel's operation. Forbes Wilson threatened to drop them from the project. Bechtel Sr. jumped in, saying he would make the project Bechtel's top priority. He also guaranteed them $20 million in loans from the Exim bank. When the Exim bank's engineer didn't think that Freeport's project seemed commercially viable and wouldn't approve their loan, Bechtel Sr. called Kearns, and the loan went through over the objections of the bank's engineer.
Three years later, Kearns would resign from the bank when it revealed the bank had made generous loans to several projects in which Kearns was personally invested. Although Senator Proxmire called it "the worst conflict of interest" he had ever seen in seventeen years in the Senate, the Justice Department declined to prosecute. Said Proxmire:
It will appear to millions of American citizens that there is a double standard in the law, one for the ordinary citizen and quite another for those who hold high positions in government and make thousands of dollars in personal profit as a result of official actions.
Bechtel denies allegations from former employees that it spread over $3 million in cash around Indonesia in the early '70s.
Unhappily Ever After
The tragedy of the Kennedy assassination lies in the legacy left in the wake of his absence. Without his support, Indonesia's baby steps toward a real, economic independence were shattered. Sukarno, hardly a saint and with plenty of problems, nonetheless was trying to assure that business deals with foreigners left some benefit for the Indonesians. Suharto, in dire contrast, allowed foreigners to rape and pillage Indonesia for private gain, at the price of lives and the precious, irreplaceable resources of the Indonesians. Cindy Adams wrote a book about her experiences with Sukarno, called My Friend the Dictator. If Sukarno was a dictator, what term exists for Suharto?
Freeport's Grasberg mine in Indonesia is one of the largest copper and gold reserves in the world. But the American based company owns 82% of the venture, while the Indonesian government and a privately held concern in Indonesia split the remaining percent.
How much influence does Freeport carry in Indonesia? Can they really say they have Indonesia's best interests at heart?
Kissinger and East Timor
In 1975, Freeport's mine was well into production and highly profitable. Future Freeport Director and lobbyist Henry Kissinger and President and ex-Warren Commission member Gerald Ford flew out of Jakarta having given the Indonesian Government under Suharto what State Department officials later described as "the big wink." Suharto used the Indonesian military to take over the Portuguese territory of East Timor, followed by a mass slaughter that rivaled the 1965 bloodbath.
Says a former CIA operations officer who was stationed there at the time, C. Philip Liechty:
Suharto was given the green light [by the U.S.] to do what he did. There was discussion in the embassy and in traffic with the State Department about the problems that would be created for us if the public and Congress became aware of the level and type of military assistance that was going to Indonesia at that time. ... Without continued heavy U.S. logistical military support the Indonesians might not have been able to pull if off.
In 1980, Freeport merged with McMoRan-an oil exploration and development company headed by James "Jim Bob" Moffett. The two become one, and Moffett (the "Mo" in McMoRan) eventually became President of Freeport McMoRan.
Friends in High Places
In 1995, Freeport McMoRan managed to spin off it's Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. subsidiary into a separate entity. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) wrote Freeport McMoRan Copper and Gold that they planned to cancel their investment insurance based on their poor environmental record at their Irian project, stating Freeport has "posed an unreasonable or major environmental, health, or safety hazard in Irian Jaya."
Freeport didn't sit still over this cancellation. Kissinger executed a major lobbying effort (for which he is paid $400,000 a year), meeting with officials at the State Department and working the halls of Capitol Hill. Sources close to the matter, according to Robert Bryce in a recent issue of the Texas Observer, say Freeport hired former CIA director James Woolsey in the fight against OPIC.
Freeport, now headquartered in New Orleans, manages to keep friends in high places. In 1993, the head of the pro-Suharto congressional lobby was the Senator from Louisiana, Bennett Johnson. Representative Robert Livingston, of Louisiana, invested in Freeport Copper and Gold while the House debated and voted on H.R. 322-the Mineral Exploration and Development Act. And when Jeffery Shafer, one of the directors of OPIC, recently was nominated for an appointment to Undersecretary of National Affairs, it was another Louisiana pol, this time Senator John Breaux, who voted to block the appointment until Shafer provided an explanation of OPIC's cancellation of Freeport's insurance. Jim Bob Moffett, head of Freeport McMoRan, is listed in Mother Jones' online "MoJo Wire Coin-Op Congress" survey of the top 400 people who gave the most money in campaign contributions.
Freeport's actions abroad are not the only one's worth tracking. In Louisiana itself, Freeport and three other companies (two of which Freeport later acquired) petitioned for a special exemption to the Clean Water Act in order to legally dump 25 billion pounds of toxic waste into the Mississippi river. Citizens protested, and Freeport's petition was denied. Freeport then lobbied for the weakening of Clean Water Act restrictions.
The citizens of Austin, Texas, have fought to block a Freeport plan for a real estate development that will foul Barton Springs, a popular outdoor water park there.
According to a recent article in The Nation (July 31/August 7, 1995), Freeport is part of the National Wetlands Coalition, a group which wrote much of the language of a bill designed to eliminate E.P.A. oversight of wetlands areas, freeing them for exploitation. The same coalition has also lobbied to weaken the Endangered Species Act. The Nation revealed that Freeport's political action committee since 1983 has paid members of congress over $730,000.
Scandal at UT
Freeport's record caused an uproar at the University of Texas at Austin recently. The university's geology department, which has done research under contract for Freeport, was recently given $2 million dollars by Jim Bob Moffett for a new building. The school's Chancellor, William Cunningham, wanted to name the building after his friend and co-worker (Cunningham is also a Freeport Director) Moffett. Many on campus protested this development. Anthropology professor Stephen Feld resigned his position with the university over this issue, saying UT was "no longer a morally acceptable place of employment." The protests about Cunningham's conflict of interest-serving UT and Freeport-led to Cunningham's resignation last December. He resigned a day after Freeport threatened to sue three professors at the University who had been loudest in protest.
Poised on the Brink
While moral victories are lauded in Texas, the real terror continues at Freeport's plant in Indonesia.
In March of 1996, just as our last issue went to press, riots broke out at the Freeport plant in Irian Jaya (the current name for West Irian). Thousands were marching in the streets around the Freeport plant, where the military had as recently as December held and tortured in Freeport mining containers the people who lived and protested in that region. The protests are deeply rooted in the desire for the independence of the Papuans, the Amungme, and the many native inhabitants of Irian Jaya who were never Dutch, and never really Indonesian.
As we go to print, Indonesian sources report that the military has taken over the numerous Freeport Security stations around the mine. "Military Exercises" are intimidating the people who in March rioted at Freeport, causing the plant to lose two days of work and millions of dollars. Although no curfew has been called, people report a fear of being out at night.
The native Amungme tribes, the Papuans, and others are still hoping to retain independence from what they see as only a new form of colonialism: subservience to Freeport's interests. According to a New York Times article (4/4/96), Freeport is the largest single investor in Indonesia.
With Kennedy's support, Indonesia had a chance for real economic independence. The peoples of Irian were promised a real vote for self-government. But when Kennedy was killed, a military dictatorship was installed and paid off so that the interests of businesses like Freeport have been given higher priority than any demands of the natives whose resources are still being pillaged.
Sometimes, what we don't understand about today's news is what we don't know about the Kennedy assassination.
I. 1. 11 The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967 Peter Dale Scott
In this short paper on a huge and vexed subject, I discuss the U.S. involvement in the bloody overthrow of Indonesia's President Sukarno, 1965-67. The whole story of that ill-understood period would transcend even the fullest possible written analysis. Much of what happened can never be documented; and of the documentation that survives, much is both controversial and unverifiable.
The slaughter of Sukarno's left-wing allies was a product of widespread paranoia as well as of conspiratorial policy, and represents a tragedy beyond the intentions of any single group or coalition.
Nor is it suggested that in 1965 the only provocations and violence came from the right-wing Indonesian military, their contacts in the United States, or (also important, but barely touched on here) their mutual contacts in British, German and Japanese intelligence.
And yet, after all this has been said, the complex and ambiguous story of the Indonesian bloodbath is also in essence simpler and easier to believe than the public version inspired by President Suharto and U.S. government sources.
Their problematic claim is that in the so-called Gestapu (Gerakan September Tigahpuluh) coup attempt of September 30, 1965 (when six senior army generals were murdered), the left attacked the right, leading to a restoration of power, and punitive purge of the left, by the center.
1. This article argues instead that, by inducing, or at a minimum helping to induce, the Gestapu "coup," the right in the Indonesian Army eliminated its rivals at the army's center, thus paving the way to a long-planned elimination of the civilian left, and eventually to the establishment of a military dictatorship.
2 Gestapu, in other words, was only the first phase of a three-phase right-wing coup -- one which had been both publicly encouraged and secretly assisted by U.S. spokesmen and officials.
3. Before turning to U.S. involvement in what the CIA itself has called "one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century,"
4. let us recall what actually led up to it.
According to the Australian scholar Harold Crouch, by 1965 the Indonesian Army General Staff was split into two camps. At the center were the general staff officers appointed with, and loyal to, the army ommander General Yani, who in turn was reluctant to challenge President Sukarno's policy of national unity in alliance with the Indonesian Communist party, or PKI.
The second group, including the right-wing generals Nasution and Suharto, comprised those opposed to Yani and his Sukarnoist policies.
5. All of these generals were anti-PKI, but by 1965 the divisive issue was Sukarno. The simple (yet untold) story of Sukarno's overthrow is that in the fall of 1965 Yani and his inner circle of generals were murdered, paving the way for a seizure of power by right-wing anti-Yani forces allied to Suharto.
The key to this was the so-called Gestapu coup attempt which, in the name of supporting Sukarno, in fact targeted very precisely the leading members of the army's most loyal faction, the Yani group.
6. An army unity meeting in January 1965, between "Yani's inner circle" and those (including Suharto) who "had grievances of one sort or another against Yani," lined up the victims of September 30 against those who came to power after their murder.
7. Not one anti-Sukarno general was targeted by Gestapu, with the obvious exception of General Nasution.
8. But by 1961 the CIA operatives had become disillusioned with Nasution as a reliable asset, because of his "consistent record of yielding to Sukarno on several major counts."
9. Relations between Suharto and Nasution were also cool, since Nasution, after investigating Suharto on corruption charges in 1959, had transferred him from his command.
10. The duplicitous distortions of reality, first by Lt. Colonel Untung's statements for Gestapu, and then by Suharto in "putting down" Gestapu, are mutually supporting lies.
11. Untung, on October 1, announced ambiguously that Sukarno was under Gestapu's "protection" (he was not); also, that a CIA-backed Council of Generals had planned a coup for before October 5, and had for this purpose brought "troops from East, Central, and West Java" to Jakarta.
12. Troops from these areas had indeed been brought to Jakarta for an Armed Forces Day parade on October 5th.
Untung did not mention, however, that "he himself had been involved in the planning for the Armed Forces Day parade and in selecting the units to participate in it;"
13. nor that these units (which included his own former battalion, the 454th) supplied most of the allies for his new battalion's Gestapu activities in Jakarta.
Suharto's first two broadcasts reaffirmed the army's constant loyalty to "Bung Karno the Great Leader," and also blamed the deaths of six generals on PKI youth and women, plus "elements of the Air Force" -- on no other evidence than the site of the well where the corpses were found.
14. At this time he knew very well that the killings had in fact been carried out by the very army elements Untung referred to, elements under Suharto's own command.
15. Thus, whatever the motivation of individuals such as Untung in the Gestapu putsch, Gestapu as such was duplicitous. Both its rhetoric and above all its actions were not simply inept; they were carefully designed to prepare for Suharto's equally duplicitous response.
For example, Gestapu's decision to guard all sides of the downtown Merdeka Square in Jakarta, except that on which Suharto's KOSTRAD [Army Strategic Reserve Command] headquarters were situated, is consistent with Gestapu's decision to target the only army generals who might have challenged Suharto's assumption of power.
Again, Gestapu's announced transfer of power to a totally fictitious "Revolutionary Council," from which Sukarno had been excluded, allowed Suharto in turn to masquerade as Sukarno's defender while in fact preventing him from resuming control.
More importantly, Gestapu's gratuitous murder of the generals near the air force base where PKI youth had been trained allowed Suharto, in a Goebbels-like manoeuvre, to transfer the blame for the killings from the troops under his own command (whom he knew had carried out the kidnappings) to air force and PKI personnel who where ignorant of them.
16. From the pro-Suharto sources -- notably the CIA study of Gestapu published in 1968 -- we learn how few troops were involved in the alleged Gestapu rebellion, and, more importantly, that in Jakarta as in Central Java the same battalions that supplied the "rebellious" companies were also used to "put the rebellion down."
Two thirds of one paratroop brigade (which Suharto had inspected the previous day) plus one company and one platoon constituted the whole of Gestapu forces in Jakarta; all but one of these units were commanded by present or former Diponegoro Division officers close to Suharto; and the last was under an officer who obeyed Suharto's close political ally, Basuki Rachmat.
17. Two of these companies, from the 454th and 530th battalions, were elite raiders, and from 1962 these units had been among the main Indonesian recipients of U.S. assistance.
18. This fact, which in itself proves nothing, increases our curiosity about the many Gestapu leaders who had been U.S.-trained.
The Gestapu leader in Central Java, Saherman, had returned from training at Fort Leavenworth and Okinawa, shortly before meeting with Untung and Major Sukirno of the 454th Battalion in mid-August 1965.
19. As Ruth McVey has observed, Saherman's acceptance for training at Fort Leavenworth "would mean that he had passed review by CIA observers."
20. Thus there is continuity between the achievements of both Gestapu and the response to it by Suharto, who in the name of defending Sukarno and attacking Gestapu continued its task of eliminating the pro-Yani members of the Army General Staff, along with such other residual elements of support for first Yani and then Sukarno as remained.
21. The biggest part of this task was of course the elimination of the PKI and its supporters, in a bloodbath which, as some Suharto allies now concede, may have taken more than a half-million lives.
These three events -- Gestapu, Suharto's response, and the bloodbath -- have nearly always been presented in this country as separately motivated: Gestapu being described as a plot by leftists, and the bloodbath as for the most part an irrational act of popular frenzy.
U.S. officials, journalists and scholars, some with rather prominent CIA connections, are perhaps principally responsible for the myth that the bloodbath was a spontaneous, popular revulsion to what U.S. Ambassador Jones later called PKI "carnage."
22. Although the PKI certainly contributed its share to the political hysteria of 1965, Crouch has shown that subsequent claims of a PKI terror campaign were grossly exaggerated.
23. In fact systematic killing occurred under army instigation in staggered stages, the worst occurring as Colonel Sarwo Edhie's RPKAD [Army Paracommando Regiment] moved from Jakarta to Central and East Java, and finally to Bali.
24. Civilians involved in the massacre were either recruited and trained by the army on the spot, or were drawn from groups (such as the army- and CIA-sponsored SOKSI trade unions [Central Organization of Indonesian Socialist Employees], and allied student organizations) which had collaborated for years with the army on political matters.
It is clear from Sundhaussen's account that in most of the first areas of organized massacre (North Sumatra, Aceh, Cirebon, the whole of Central and East Java), there were local army commanders with especially strong and proven anti-PKI sentiments.
Many of these had for years cooperated with civilians, through so-called "civic action" programs sponsored by the United States, in operations directed against the PKI and sometimes Sukarno.
Thus one can legitimately suspect conspiracy in the fact that anti-PKI "civilian responses" began on October 1, when the army began handing out arms to Muslim students and unionists, before there was any publicly available evidence linking Gestapu to the PKI.
25. Even Sundhaussen, who downplays the army's role in arming and inciting the civilian murder bands, concludes that, whatever the strength of popular anti-PKI hatred and fear, "without the Army's anti-PKI propaganda the massacre might not have happened."
26. The present article goes further and argues that Gestapu, Suharto's response, and the bloodbath were part of a single coherent scenario for a military takeover, a scenario which was again followed closely in Chile in the years 1970-73 (and to some extent in Cambodia in 1970).
Suharto, of course, would be a principal conspirator in this scenario: his duplicitous role of posing as a defender of the constitutional status quo, while in fact moving deliberately to overthrow it, is analogous to that of General Pinochet in Chile.
But a more direct role in organizing the bloodbath was played by civilians and officers close to the cadres of the CIA's failed rebellion of 1958, now working in so-called "civic action" programs funded and trained by the United States.
Necessary ingredients of the scenario had to be, and clearly were, supplied by other nations in support of Suharto. Many such countries appear to have played such a supporting role: Japan, Britain, Germany, possibly Australia.
27. But I wish to focus on the encouragement and support for military "putschism" and mass murder which came from the U.S., from the CIA, the military, RAND, the Ford Foundation, and individuals.
28. The United States and the Indonesian Army's "Mission"It seems clear that from as early as 1953 the U.S. was interested in helping to foment the regional crisis in Indonesia, usually recognized as the "immediate cause" that induced Sukarno, on March 14, 1957, to proclaim martial law, and bring "the officer corps legitimately into politics."
29. By 1953 (if not earlier) the U.S. National Security Council had already adopted one of a series of policy documents calling for "appropriate action, in collaboration with other friendly countries, to prevent permanent communist control" of Indonesia.
30. Already NSC 171/1 of that year envisaged military training as a means of increasing U.S. influence, even though the CIA's primary efforts were directed towards right-wing political parties ("moderates ... on the right," as NSC 171 called them): notably the Masjumi Muslim and the PSI "Socialist" parties.
The millions of dollars which the CIA poured into the Masjumi and the PSI in the mid-1950s were a factor influencing the events of 1965, when a former PSI member -- Sjam -- was the alleged mastermind of Gestapu,
31. and PSI-leaning officers -- notably Suwarto and Sarwo Edhie -- were prominent in planning and carrying out the anti-PKI response to Gestapu.
32. In 1957-58, the CIA infiltrated arms and personnel in support of the regional rebellions against Sukarno. These operations were nominally covert, even though an American plane and pilot were captured, and the CIA efforts were accompanied by an offshore task force of the U.S. Seventh Fleet.
33. In 1975 a Senate Select Committee studying the CIA discovered what it called "some evidence of CIA involvement in plans to assassinate President Sukarno"; but, after an initial investigation of the November 1957 assassination attempt in the Cikini district of Jakarta, the committee did not pursue the matter.
34. On August 1, 1958, after the failure of the CIA-sponsored PRRI-Permesta regional rebellions against Sukarno, the U.S. began an upgraded military assistance program to Indonesia in the order of twenty million dollars a year.
35. A U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff memo of 1958 makes it clear this aid was given to the Indonesian Army ("the only non-Communist force ... with the capability of obstructing the ... PKI") as "encouragement" to Nasution to "carry out his 'plan' for the control of Communism."
36. The JCS had no need to spell out Nasution's "plan," to which other documents at this time made reference.
37. It could only imply the tactics for which Nasution had distinguished himself (in American eyes) during the crushing of the PKI in the Madiun Affair of 1948: mass murders and mass arrests, at a minimum of the party's cadres, possibly after an army provocation.
38. Nasution confirmed this in November 1965, after the Gestapu slaughter, when he called for the total extinction of the PKI, "down to its very roots so there will be no third Madiun."
39. By 1958, however, the PKI had emerged as the largest mass movement in the country. It is in this period that a small group of U.S. academic researchers in U.S. Air Force- and CIA-subsidized "think-tanks" began pressuring their contacts in the Indonesian military publicly, often through U.S. scholarly journals and presses, to seize power and liquidate the PKI opposition.
40. The most prominent example is Guy Pauker, who in 1958 both taught at the University of California at Berkeley and served as a consultant at the RAND Corporation. In the latter capacity he maintained frequent contact with what he himself called "a very small group" of PSI intellectuals and their friends in the army.
41. In a RAND Corporation book published by the Princeton University Press, Pauker urged his contacts in the Indonesian military to assume "full responsibility" for their nation's leadership, "fulfill a mission," and hence "to strike, sweep their house clean."
42. Although Pauker may not have intended anything like the scale of bloodbath which eventually ensued, there is no escaping the fact that "mission" and "sweep clean" were buzz-words for counterinsurgency and massacre, and as such were used frequently before and during the coup. The first murder order, by military officers to Muslim students in early october, was the word sikat, meaning "sweep," "clean out," "wipe out," or "massacre."
43. Pauker's closest friend in the Indonesian army was a U.S.-trained General Suwarto, who played an important part in the conversion of the army from a revolutionary to a counterinsurgency function. In the years after 1958, Suwarto built the Indonesian Army Staff and Command School in Bandung (SESKOAD) into a training-ground for the takeover of political power. SESKOAD in this period became a focal-point of attention from the Pentagon, the CIA, RAND, and (indirectly) the Ford Foundation.
44. Under the guidance of Nasution and Suwarto, SESKOAD developed a new strategic doctrine, that of Territorial Warfare (in a document translated into English by Pauker), which gave priority to counterinsurgency as the army's role.
Especially after 1962, when the Kennedy administration aided the Indonesian Army in developing Civic Mission or "civic action" programs, this meant the organization of its own political infrastructure, or "Territorial Organization," reaching in some cases down to the village level.
45. As the result of an official U.S. State Department recommendation in 1962, which Pauker helped write, a special U.S. MILTAG (Military Training Advisory Group) was set up in Jakarta, to assist in the implementation of SESKOAD's Civic Mission programs.
46. SESKOAD also trained the army officers in economics and administration, and thus to operate virtually as a para-state, independent of Sukarno's government. So the army began to collaborate, and even sign contracts, with U.S. and other foreign corporations in areas which were now under its control. This training program was entrusted to officers and civilians close to the PSI.
47. U.S. officials have confirmed that the civilians, who themselves were in a training program funded by the Ford Foundation, became involved in what the (then) U.S. military attache called "contingency planning" to prevent a PKI takeover.
48. But the most significant focus of U.S. training and aid was the Territorial Organization's increasing liaison with "the civilian administration, religious and cultural organizations, youth groups, veterans, trade unions, peasant organizations, political parties and groups at regional and local levels."
49. These political liaisons with civilian groups provided the structure for the ruthless suppression of the PKI in 1965, including the bloodbath.
50. Soon these army and civilian cadres were together plotting disruptive activities, such as the Bandung anti-Chinese riots of May 1963, which embarrassed not just the PKI, but Sukarno himself.
Chomsky and Herman report that "Army-inspired anti-Chinese programs that took place in West Java in 1959 were financed by U.S. contributions to the local army commander"; apparently CIA funds were used by the commander (Colonel Kosasih) to pay local thugs in what Mozingo calls "the army's (and probably the Americans') campaign to rupture relations with China."
51. The 1963 riot, which took place in the very shadow of SESKOAD, is linked by Sundhaussen to an army "civic action" organization; and shows conspiratorial contact between elements (an underground PSI cell, PSI- and Masjumi-affiliated student groups, and General Ishak Djuarsa of the Siliwangi Division's "civic action" organization) that would all be prominent in the very first phase of Suharto's so-called "response" to the Gestapu.
52. The May 1963 student riots were repeated in October 1965 and (especially in Bandung) January 1966, at which time the liaison between students and the army was largely in the hands of PSI-leaning officers like Sarwo Edhie and Kemal Idris.
53. The CIA Plans Directorate was sympathetic to the increasing deflection of a nominally anti-PKI operation into one embarrassing Sukarno. This turn would have come as no surprise: Suwarto, Kemal Idris and the PSI had been prominent in a near-coup (the so-called "Lubis affair") in 1956.
54. But increasingly Suwarto cultivated a new student, Colonel Suharto, who arrived at SESKOAD in October 1959. According to Sundhaussen, a relatively pro-Suharto scholar: "In the early 1960s Soeharto was involved in the formation of the Doctrine of Territorial Warfare and the Army's policy on Civic Mission (that is, penetration of army officers into all fields of government activities and responsibilities).
55. Central to the public image of Gestapu and Suharto's response is the much-publicized fact that Suharto, unlike his sometime teacher Suwarto, and his long-time chief of staff Achmad Wiranatakusuma, had never studied in the United States.
But his involvement in Civic Mission (or what Americans called "civic action") programs located him along with PSI-leaning officers at the focal point of U.S. training activities in Indonesia, in a program which was nakedly political.
56. The refinement of Territorial Warfare and Civic Mission Doctrine into a new strategic doctrine for army political intervention became by 1965 the ideological process consolidating the army for political takeover. After Gestapu, when Suwarto was an important political advisor to his former SESKOAD pupil Suharto, his strategic doctrine was the justification for Suharto's announcement on August 15, 1966, in fulfillment of Pauker's public and private urgings, that the army had to assume a leading role in all fields.
57. Hence the army unity meeting of January 1965, arranged after Suharto had duplicitously urged Nasution to take "a more accommodating line"
58. towards Sukarno, was in fact a necessary step in the process whereby Suharto effectively took over from his rivals Yani and Nasution. It led to the April 1965 seminar at SESKOAD for a compromise army strategic doctrine, the Tri Ubaya Cakti, which "reaffirmed the army's claim to an independent political role."
59. On August 15, 1966, Suharto, speaking to the nation, justified his increasing prominence in terms of the "Revolutionary Mission" of the Tri Ubaya Cakti doctrine. Two weeks later at SESKOAD the doctrine was revised, at Suharto's instigation but in a setting "carefully orchestrated by Brigadier Suwarto," to embody still more clearly Pauker's emphasis on the army's "Civic Mission" or counterrevolutionary role.
60. This "Civic Mission," so important to Suharto, was also the principal goal and fruit of U.S. military aid to Indonesia.
By August 1964, moreover, Suharto had initiated political contacts with Malaysia, and hence eventually with Japan, Britain, and the United States.
61. Although the initial purpose of these contacts may have been to head off war with Malaysia, Sundhaussen suggests that Suharto's motive was his concern, buttressed in mid-1964 by a KOSTRAD intelligence report, about PKI political advances.
62. Mrazek links the peace feelers to the withdrawal of "some of the best army units" back to Java in the summer of 1965.63 These movements, together with earlier deployment of a politically insecure Diponegoro battalion in the other direction, can also be seen as preparations for the seizure of power.
64. In Nishihara's informed Japanese account, former PRRI / Permesta personnel with intelligence connections in Japan were prominent in these negotiations, along with Japanese officials.
65. Nishihara also heard that an intimate ally of these personnel, Jan Walandouw, who may have acted as a CIA contact for the 1958 rebellion, later again "visited Washington and advocated Suharto as a leader."66 I am reliably informed that Walandouw's visit to Washington on behalf of Suharto was made some months before Gestapu.
67. The U.S. Moves Against Sukarno, Many people in Washington, especially in the CIA Plans Directorate, had long desired the "removal" of Sukarno as well as of the PKI.
68. By 1961 key policy hard-liners, notably Guy Pauker, had also turned against Nasution.
69. Nevertheless, despite last-minute memoranda from the outgoing Eisenhower administration which would have opposed "whatever regime" in Indonesia was "increasingly friendly toward the Sino-Soviet bloc," the Kennedy administration stepped up aid to both Sukarno and the army.
70. However, Lyndon Johnson's accession to the presidency was followed almost immediately by a shift to a more anti-Sukarno policy. This is clear from Johnson's decision in December 1963 to withhold economic aid which (according to Ambassador Jones) Kennedy would have supplied "almost as a matter of routine."
71. This refusal suggests that the U.S. aggravation of Indonesia's economic woes in 1963-65 was a matter of policy rather than inadvertence. Indeed, if the CIA's overthrow of Allende is a relevant analogy, then one would expect someday to learn that the CIA, through currency speculations and other hostile acts, contributed actively to the radical destabilization of the Indonesian economy in the weeks just before the coup, when "the price of rice quadrupled between June 30 and October 1, and the black market price of the dollar skyrocketed, particularly in September."
72. As was the case in Chile, the gradual cutoff of all economic aid to Indonesia in the years 1962-65 was accompanied by a shift in military aid to friendly elements in the Indonesian Army: U.S. military aid amounted to $39.5 million in the four years 1962-65 (with a peak of $16.3 million in 1962) as opposed to $28.3 million for the thirteen years 1949-61.
73. After March 1964, when Sukarno told the U.S., "go to hell with your aid," it became increasingly difficult to extract any aid from the U.S. congress: those persons not aware of what was developing found it hard to understand why the U.S. should help arm a country which was nationalizing U.S. economic interests, and using immense aid subsidies from the Soviet Union to confront the British in Malaysia.
Thus a public image was created that under Johnson "all United States aid to Indonesia was stopped," a claim so buttressed by misleading documentation that competent scholars have repeated it.
74. In fact, Congress had agreed to treat U.S. funding of the Indonesian military (unlike aid to any other country) as a covert matter, restricting congressional review of the president's determinations on Indonesian aid to two Senate committees, and the House Speaker, who were concurrently involved in oversight of the CIA.
75. Ambassador Jones' more candid account admits that "suspension" meant "the U.S. government undertook no new commitments of assistance, although it continued with ongoing programs.... By maintaining our modest assistance to [the Indonesian Army and the police brigade], we fortified them for a virtually inevitable showdown with the burgeoning PKI."
76. Only from recently released documents do we learn that new military aid was en route as late as July 1965, in the form of a secret contract to deliver two hundred Aero-Commanders to the Indonesian Army: these were light aircraft suitable for use in "civic action" or counterinsurgency operations, presumably by the Army Flying Corps whose senior officers were virtually all trained in the U.S.
77. By this time, the publicly admitted U.S. aid was virtually limited to the completion of an army communications system and to "civic action" training. It was by using the army's new communications system, rather than the civilian system in the hands of Sukarno loyalists, that Suharto on October 1, 1965 was able to implement his swift purge of Sukarno-Yani loyalists and leftists, while "civic action" officers formed the hard core of lower-level Gestapu officers in Central Java.
78. Before turning to the more covert aspects of U.S. military aid to Indonesia in 1963-65, let us review the overall changes in U.S.-Indonesian relations. Economic aid was now in abeyance, and military aid tightly channeled so as to strengthen the army domestically. U.S. government funding had obviously shifted from the Indonesian state to one of its least loyal components.
As a result of agreements beginning with martial law in 1957, but accelerated by the U.S.-negotiated oil agreement of 1963, we see exactly the same shift in the flow of payments from U.S. oil companies.
Instead of token royalties to the Sukarno government, the two big U.S. oil companies in Indonesia, Stanvac and Caltex, now made much larger payments to the army's oil company, Permina, headed by an eventual political ally of Suharto, General Ibnu Sutowo; and to a second company, Pertamin, headed by the anti-PKI and pro-U.S. politician, Chaerul Saleh.
79. After Suharto's overthrow of Sukarno, Fortune wrote that "Sutowo's still small company played a key part in bankrolling those crucial operations, and the army has never forgotten it."
80. U.S. Support for the Suharto Faction Before Gestapu American officials commenting on the role of U.S. aid in this period have taken credit for assisting the anti-Communist seizure of power, without ever hinting at any degree of conspiratorial responsibility in the planning of the bloodbath. The impression created is that U.S. officials remained aloof from the actual planning of events, and we can see from recently declassified cable traffic how carefully the U.S. government fostered this image of detachment from what was happening in Indonesia.
81. In fact, however, the U.S. government was lying about its involvement. In Fiscal Year 1965, a period when The New York Times claimed "all United States aid to Indonesia was stopped," the number of MAP (Military Assistance Program) personnel in Jakarta actually increased, beyond what had been projected, to an unprecedented high.
82. According to figures released in 1966,
83. from FY 1963 to FY 1965 the value of MAP deliveries fell from about fourteen million dollars to just over two million dollars. Despite this decline, the number of MAP military personnel remained almost unchanged, approximately thirty, while in FY 1965 civilian personnel (fifteen) were present for the first time. Whether or not one doubts that aid deliveries fell off as sharply as the figures would suggest, the MILTAG personnel figures indicate that their "civic action" program was being escalated, not decreased.
84. We have seen that some months before Gestapu, a Suharto emissary with past CIA connections (Colonel Jan Walandouw) made contact with the U.S. government.
From as early as May 1965, U.S. military suppliers with CIA connections (principally Lockheed) were negotiating equipment sales with payoffs to middlemen, in such a way as to generate payoffs to backers of the hitherto little-known leader of a new third faction in the army, Major-General Suharto -- rather than to those backing Nasution or Yani, the titular leaders of the armed forces.
Only in the last year has it been confirmed that secret funds administered by the U.S. Air Force (possibly on behalf of the CIA) were laundered as "commissions" on sales of Lockheed equipment and services, in order to make political payoffs to the military personnel of foreign countries.
85. A 1976 Senate investigation into these payoffs revealed, almost inadvertently, that in May 1965, over the legal objections of Lockheed's counsel, Lockheed commissions in Indonesia had been redirected to a new contract and company set up by the firm's long-time local agent or middleman.
86. Its internal memos at the time show no reasons for the change, but in a later memo the economic counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta is reported as saying that there were "some political considerations behind it."
87. If this is true, it would suggest that in May 1965, five months before the coup, Lockheed had redirected its payoffs to a new political eminence, at the risk (as its assistant chief counsel pointed out) of being sued for default on its former contractual obligations.
The Indonesian middleman, August Munir Dasaad, was "known to have assisted Sukarno financially since the 1930's."
88. In 1965, however, Dasaad was building connections with the Suharto forces, via a family relative, General Alamsjah, who had served briefly under Suharto in 1960, after Suharto completed his term at SESKOAD. Via the new contract, Lockheed, Dasaad and Alamsjah were apparently hitching their wagons to Suharto's rising star:
When the coup was made during which Suharto replaced Sukarno, Alamsjah, who controlled certain considerable funds, at once made these available to Suharto, which obviously earned him the gratitude of the new President. In due course he was appointed to a position of trust and confidence and today Alamsjah is, one might say, the second important man after the President.
89. Thus in 1966 the U.S. Embassy advised Lockheed it should "continue to use" the Dasaad-Alamsjah-Suharto connection.
90. In July 1965, at the alleged nadir of U.S.-Indonesian aid relations, Rockwell-Standard had a contractual agreement to deliver two hundred light aircraft (Aero-Commanders) to the Indonesian Army (not the Air Force) in the next two months.
91. Once again the commission agent on the deal, Bob Hasan, was a political associate (and eventual business partner) of Suharto.
92. More specifically, Suharto and Bob Hasan established two shipping companies to be operated by the Central Java army division, Diponegoro. This division, as has long been noticed, supplied the bulk of the personnel on both sides of the Gestapu coup drama -- both those staging the coup attempt, and those putting it down. And one of the three leaders in the Central Java Gestapu movement was Lt. Col. Usman Sastrodibroto, chief of the Diponegoro Division's "section dealing with extramilitary functions."
93. Thus of the two known U.S. military sales contracts from the eve of the Gestapu Putsch, both involved political payoffs to persons who emerged after Gestapu as close Suharto allies.
The use of this traditional channel for CIA patronage suggests that the U.S. was not at arm's length from the ugly political developments of 1965, despite the public indications, from both government spokesmen and the U.S. business press, that Indonesia was now virtually lost to communism and nothing could be done about it.
The actions of some U.S. corporations, moreover, made it clear that by early 1965 they expected a significant boost to the U.S. standing in Indonesia. For example, a recently declassified cable reveals that Freeport Sulphur had by April 1965 reached a preliminary "arrangement" with Indonesian officials for what would become a $500 million investment in West Papua copper. This gives the lie to the public claim that the company did not initiate negotiations with Indonesians (the inevitable Ibnu Sutowo) until February 1966.
94. And in September 1965, shortly after World Oil reported that "indonesia's gas and oil industry appeared to be slipping deeper into the political morass,"
95. the president of a small oil company (Asamera) in a joint venture with Ibnu Sutowo's Permina purchased $50,000 worth of shares in his own ostensibly-threatened company. Ironically this double purchase (on September 9 and September 21) was reported in the Wall Street Journal of September 30, 1965, the day of Gestapu.
The CIA's "[One Word Deleted] Operation" in 1965 Less than a year after Gestapu and the bloodbath, James Reston wrote appreciatively about them as "A Gleam of Light in Asia":
Washington is being careful not to claim any credit for this change in the sixth most populous and one of the richest nations in the world, but this does not mean that Washington had nothing to do with it. There was a great deal more contact between the anti-Communist forces in that country and at least one very high official in Washington before and during the Indonesian massacre than is generally realized.
96. As for the CIA in 1965, we have the testimony of former CIA officer Ralph McGehee, curiously corroborated by the selective censorship of his former CIA employers:
Where the necessary circumstances or proofs are lacking to support U.S. intervention, the C.I.A. creates the appropriate situations or else invents them and disseminates its distortions worldwide via its media operations. A prominent example would be Chile.... Disturbed at the Chilean military's unwillingness to take action against Allende, the C.I.A. forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders. The discovery of this "plot" was headlined in the media and Allende was deposed and murdered.
There is a similarity between events that precipitated the overthrow of Allende and what happened in Indonesia in 1965. Estimates of the number of deaths that occurred as a result of the latter C.I.A. [one word deleted] operation run from one-half million to more than one million people.
97. McGehee claims to have once seen, while reviewing CIA documents in Washington, a highly classified report on the agency's role in provoking the destruction of the PKI after Gestapu.
It seems appropriate to ask for congressional review and publication of any such report. If, as is alleged, it recommended such murderous techniques as a model for future operations, it would appear to document a major turning-point in the agency's operation history: towards the systematic exploitation of the death squad operations which, absent during the Brazilian coup of 1964, made the Vietnam Phoenix counterinsurgency program notorious after 1967, and after 1968 spread from Guatemala to the rest of Latin America.
98. McGehee's claims of a CIA psychological warfare operation against Allende are corroborated by Tad Szulc: CIA agents in Santiago assisted Chilean military intelligence in drafting bogus Z-plan documents alleging that Allende and his supporters were planning to behead Chilean military commanders. These were issued by the junta to justify the coup.
99. Indeed the CIA deception operations against Allende appear to have gone even farther, terrifying both the left and the right with the fear of incipient slaughter by their enemies.
Thus militant trade-unionists as well as conservative generals in Chile received small cards printed with the ominous words Djakarta se acerca (Jakarta is approaching).
100. This is a model destabilization plan -- to persuade all concerned that they no longer can hope to be protected by the status quo, and hence weaken the center, while inducing both right and left towards more violent provocation of each other.
Such a plan appears to have been followed in Laos in 1959-61, where a CIA officer explained to a reporter that the aim "was to polarize Laos."
101. It appears to have been followed in Indonesia in 1965. Observers like Sundhaussen confirm that to understand the coup story of October 1965 we must look first of all at the "rumour market" which in 1965 ... turned out the wildest stories."
102. On September 14, two weeks before the coup, the army was warned that there was a plot to assassinate army leaders four days later; a second such report was discussed at army headquarters on September 30.
103. But a year earlier an alleged PKI document, which the PKI denounced as a forgery, had purported to describe a plan to overthrow "Nasutionists" through infiltration of the army. This "document," which was reported in a Malaysian newspaper after being publicized by the pro-U.S. politician Chaerul Saleh.
104. in mid-December 1964, must have lent credence to Suharto's call for an army unity meeting the next month.
105. The army's anxiety was increased by rumors, throughout 1965, that mainland China was smuggling arms to the PKI for an imminent revolt. Two weeks before Gestapu, a story to this effect also appeared in a Malaysian newspaper, citing Bangkok sources which relied in turn on Hong Kong sources.
106. Such international untraceability is the stylistic hallmark of stories emanating in this period from what CIA insiders called their "mighty Wurlitzer," the world-wide network of press "assets" through which the CIA, or sister agencies such as Britain's MI-6, could plant unattributable disinformation.
107. PKI demands for a popular militia or "fifth force," and the training of PKI youth at Lubang Buaja, seemed much more sinister to the Indonesian army in the light of the Chinese arms stories.
But for months before the coup, the paranoia of the PKI had also been played on, by recurring reports that a CIA-backed "Council of Generals" was plotting to suppress the PKI.
It was this mythical council, of course, that Untung announced as the target of his allegedly anti-CIA Gestapu coup. But such rumors did not just originate from anti-American sources; on the contrary, the first authoritative published reference to such a council was in a column of the Washington journalists Evans and Novak:
As far back as March, General Ibrahim Adjie, commander of the Siliwangi Division, had been quoted by two American journalists as saying of the Communists: "we knocked them out before [at Madiun]. We check them and check them again." The same journalists claimed to have information that "...the Army has quietly established an advisory commission of five general officers to report to General Jani ... and General Nasution ... on PKI activities."
108. Mortimer sees the coincidence that five generals besides Yani were killed by Gestapu as possibly significant. But we should also be struck by the revival in the United States of the image of Yani and Nasution as anti-PKI planners, long after the CIA and U.S. press stories had in fact written them off as unwilling to act against Sukarno.
109. If the elimination by Gestapu of Suharto's political competitors in the army was to be blamed on the left, then the scenario required just such a revival of the generals' forgotten anti-Communist image in opposition to Sukarno.
An anomalous unsigned August 1965 profile of Nasution in The New York Times, based on an 1963 interview but published only after a verbal attack by Nasution on British bases in Singapore, does just this: it claims (quite incongruously, given the context) that Nasution is "considered the strongest opponent of Communism in Indonesia"; and adds that Sukarno, backed by the PKI, "has been pursuing a campaign to neutralize the ... army as an anti-Communist force."
110. In the same month of August 1965, fear of an imminent showdown between "the PKI and the Nasution group" was fomented in Indonesia by an underground pamphlet; this was distributed by the CIA's long-time asset, the PSI, whose cadres were by now deeply involved:
The PKI is combat ready. The Nasution group hope the PKI will be the first to draw the trigger, but this the PKI will not do. The PKI will not allow itself to be provoked as in the Madiun Incident. In the end, however, there will be only two forces left: the PKI and the Nasution group. The middle will have no alternative but to choose and get protection from the stronger force.
111. One could hardly hope to find a better epitome of the propaganda necessary for the CIA's program of engineering paranoia.
McGehee's article, after censorship by the CIA, focuses more narrowly on the CIA's role in anti-PKI propaganda alone:
The Agency seized upon this opportunity [Suharto's response to Gestapu] and set out to destroy the P.K.I.... [eight sentences deleted].... Media fabrications played a key role in stirring up popular resentment against the P.K.I. Photographs of the bodies of the dead generals -- badly decomposed -- were featured in all the newspapers and on television.
Stories accompanying the pictures falsely claimed that the generals had been castrated and their eyes gouged out by Communist women. This cynically manufactured campaign was designed to foment public anger against the Communists and set the stage for a massacre.
112. McGehee might have added that the propaganda stories of torture by hysterical women with razor blades, which serious scholars dismiss as groundless, were revived in a more sophisticated version by a U.S. journalist, John Hughes, who is now the chief spokesman for the State Department.
113. Suharto's forces, particularly Col. Sarwo Edhie of the RPKAD commandos, were overtly involved in the cynical exploitation of the victims' bodies.
114. But some aspects of the massive propaganda campaign appear to have been orchestrated by non-Indonesians. A case in point is the disputed editorial in support of Gestapu which appeared in the October 2 issue of the PKI newspaper Harian Rakjat.
Professors Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey, who have questioned the authenticity of this issue, have also ruled out the possibility that the newspaper was "an Army falsification," on the grounds that the army's "competence ... at falsifying party documents has always been abysmally low."
115. The questions raised by Anderson and McVey have not yet been adequately answered. Why did the PKI show no support for the Gestapu coup while it was in progress, then rashly editorialize in support of Gestapu after it had been crushed?
Why did the PKI, whose editorial gave support to Gestapu, fail to mobilize its followers to act on Gestapu's behalf? Why did Suharto, by then in control of Jakarta, close down all newspapers except this one, and one other left-leaning newspaper which also served his propaganda ends?
116. Why, in other words, did Suharto on October 2 allow the publication of only two Jakarta newspapers, two which were on the point of being closed down forever?
As was stated at the outset, it would be foolish to suggest that in 1965 the only violence came from the U.S. government, the Indonesian military, and their mutual contacts in British and Japanese intelligence. A longer paper could also discuss the provocative actions of the PKI, and of Sukarno himself, in this tragedy of social breakdown. Assuredly, from one point of view, no one was securely in control of events in this troubled period.
117. And yet for two reasons such a fashionably objective summation of events seems inappropriate. In the first place, as the CIA's own study concedes, we are talking about "one of the ghastliest and most concentrated bloodlettings of current times," one whose scale of violence seems out of all proportion to such well-publicized left-wing acts as the murder of an army lieutenant at the Bandar Betsy plantation in May 1965,
118. And, in the second place, the scenario described by McGehee for 1965 can be seen as not merely responding to the provocations, paranoia, and sheer noise of events in that year, but as actively encouraging and channeling them.
It should be noted that former CIA Director William Colby has repeatedly denied that there was CIA or other U.S. involvement in the massacre of 1965. (In the absence of a special CIA Task Force, Colby, as head of the CIA's Far Eastern Division from 1962-66, would normally have been responsible for the CIA's operations in Indonesia.) Colby's denial is however linked to the discredited story of a PKI plot to seize political power, a story that he revived in 1978:
Indonesia exploded, with a bid for power by the largest Communist Party in the world outside the curtain, which killed the leadership of the army with Sukarno's tacit approval and then was decimated in reprisal. CIA provided a steady flow of reports on the process in Indonesia, although it did not have any role in the course of events themselves.
119. It is important to resolve the issue of U.S. involvement in this systematic murder operation, and particularly to learn more about the CIA account of this which McGehee claims to have seen. McGehee tells us: "The Agency was extremely proud of its successful [one word deleted] and recommended it as a model for future operations [one-half sentence deleted]."
120. Ambassador Green reports of an interview with Nixon in 1967:
The Indonesian experience had been one of particular interest to [Nixon] because things had gone well in Indonesia. I think he was very interested in that whole experience as pointing to the way we [!] should handle our relationships on a wider basis in Southeast Asia generally, and maybe in the world.
121. Such unchallenged assessments help explain the role of Indonesians in the Nixon-sponsored overthrow of Sihanouk in Cambodia in 1970, the use of the Jakarta scenario for the overthrow of Allende in Chile in 1973, and the U.S. sponsorship today of the death squad regimes in Central America.
122. University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A., December 1984
1. The difficulties of this analysis, based chiefly on the so-called "evidence" presented at the Mahmilub trials, will be obvious to anyone who has tried to reconcile the conflicting accounts of Gestapu in, e.g., the official Suharto account by Nugroho Notosusanto and Ismail Saleh, and the somewhat less fanciful CIA study of 1968, both referred to later.
I shall draw only on those parts of the Mahmilub evidence which limit or discredit their anti-PKI thesis. For interpretation of the Mahmilub data, cf. especially Coen Holtzappel, "The 30 September Movement," Journal of Contemporary Asia, IX, 2 (1979), pp. 216-40. The case for general skepticism is argued by Rex Mortimer, Indonesian Communism Under Sukarno (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 421-3; and more forcefully, by Julie Southwood and Patrick Flanagan, Indonesia: Law, Propaganda, and Terror (London: Zed Press, 1983), pp. 126-34.
2. At his long-delayed trial in 1978, Gestapu plotter Latief confirmed earlier revelations that he had visited his old commander Suharto on the eve of the Gestapu kidnappings.
He claimed that he raised with Suharto the existence of an alleged right-wing "Council of Generals" plotting to seize power, and informed him "of a movement which was intended to thwart the plan of the generals' council for a coup d'etat" (Anon., "The Latief Case: Suharto's Involvement Revealed," Journal of Contemporary Asia, IX, 2 [1979], pp. 248-50).
For a more comprehensive view of Suharto's involvement in Gestapu, cf. especially W.F. Wertheim, "Whose Plot? New Light on the 1965 Events," Journal of Contemporary Asia, IX, 2 (1979), pp. 197-215; Holtzappel, "The 30 September," in contrast, points more particularly to intelligence officers close to the banned Murba party of Chaerul Saleh and Adam Malik: cf. fn. 104.
3. The three phases are: (1) "Gestapu," the induced left-wing "coup"; (2) "KAP-Gestapu," or the anti-Gestapu "response," massacring the PKI; (3) the progressive erosion of Sukarno's remaining power. This paper will chiefly discuss Gestapu / KAP-Gestapu, the first two phases.
To call the first phase by itself a "coup" is in my view an abuse of terminology: there is no real evidence that in this phase political power changed hands or that this was the intention.
4. U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Research Study: Indonesia.
5. The Coup that Backfired, 1968 (cited hereafter as CIA Study), p. 71n. Harold Crouch, The Army and Politics in Indonesia (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 79-81.
6. In addition, one of the two Gestapu victims in Central Java (Colonel Katamso) was the only non-PKI official of rank to attend the PKI's nineteenth anniversary celebration in Jogjakarta in May 1964: Mortimer, Indonesian Communism, p. 432. Ironically, the belated "discovery" of his corpse was used to trigger off the purge of his PKI contacts.
7. Four of the six pro-Yani representatives in January were killed along with Yani on October 1. Of the five anti-Yani representatives in January, we shall see that at least three were prominent in "putting down" Gestapu and completing the elimination of the Yani-Sukarno loyalists (the three were Suharto, Basuki Rachmat, and Sudirman of SESKOAD, the Indonesian Army Staff and Command School): Crouch, The Army, p. 81n.
8. While Nasution's daughter and aide were murdered, he was able to escape without serious injury, and support the ensuing purge.
9. Indonesia, 22 (October 1976), p. 165 (CIA Memorandum of 22 March 1961 from Richard M. Bissell, Attachment B). By 1965 this disillusionment was heightened by Nasution's deep opposition to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
10. Crouch, The Army, p. 40; Brian May, The Indonesian Tragedy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 221-2.
11. I shall assume for this condensed argument that Untung was the author, or at least approved, of the statements issued in his name.
Scholars who see Untung as a dupe of Gestapu's controllers note that Untung was nowhere near the radio station broadcasting in his name, and that he appears to have had little or no influence over the task force which occupied it (under Captain Suradi of the intelligence service of Colonel Latief's Brigade):
Holtzappel, pp. 218, 231-2, 236-7. I have no reason to contradict those careful analysts of Gestapu -- such as Wertheim, "Whose Plot?" p. 212, and Holtzappel, "The 30 September," p. 231 -- who conclude that Untung personally was sincere, and manipulated by other dalangs such as Sjam.
12. Broadcast of 7:15 a.m. October 1; Indonesia 1 (April 1966), p. 134; Ulf Sundhaussen, The Road to Power: Indonesian Military Politics, 1945-1967 (Kuala Lumpur and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 196.
13. Ibid., p. 201.
14. Broadcasts of October 1 and 4, 1965; Indonesia 1 (April 1966), pp. 158-9.
15. CIA Study, p. 2; O.G. Roeder, The Smiling General: President Soeharto of Indonesia (Jakarta: Gunung Agung, 1970), p. 12, quoting Suharto himself: "On my way to KOSTRAD HQ [Suharto's HQ] I passed soldiers in green berets who were placed under KOSTRAD command but who did not salute me."
16. Anderson and McVey concluded that Sukarno, Air Force Chief Omar Dhani, PKI Chairman Aidit (the three principal political targets of Suharto's anti-Gestapu "response") were rounded up by the Gestapu plotters in the middle of the night, and taken to Halim air force base, about one mile from the well at Lubang Buaja where the generals' corpses were discovered. In 1966 they surmised that this was "to seal the conspirators' control of the bases," and to persuade Sukarno "to go along with" the conspirators' plans (Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey, A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965, Coup in Indonesia [Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1971], pp. 19-21).
An alternative hypothesis of course is that Gestapu, by bringing these men together against their will, created the semblance of a PKI-air force-Sukarno conspiracy which would later be exploited by Suharto. Sukarno's presence at Halim "was later to provide Sukarno's critics with some of their handiest ammunition" (John Hughes, The End of Sukarno [London: Angus and Robertson, 1978], p. 54).
17. CIA Study, p. 2; cf. p. 65: "At the height of the coup ... the troops of the rebels [in Central Java] were estimated to have the strength of only one battalion; during the next two days, these forces gradually melted away."
18. Rudolf Mrazek, The United States and the Indonesian Military, 1945-1966 (Prague: Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 1978), vol. II, p. 172. These battalions, comprising the bulk of the 3rd Paratroop Brigade, also supplied the bulk of the troops used to put down Gestapu in Jakarta.
The subordination of these two factions in this supposed civil war to a single close command structure under Suharto is cited to explain how Suharto was able to restore order in the city without gunfire. Meanwhile out at the Halim air force base an alleged gun battle between the 454th (Green Beret) and RPKAD (Red Beret) paratroops went off "without the loss of a single man" (CIA Study, p. 60). In Central Java, also, power "changed hands silently and peacefully," with "an astonishing lack of violence" (CIA Study, p. 66).
19. Ibid., p. 60n; Arthur J. Dommen, "The Attempted Coup in Indonesia," China Quarterly, January-March 1966, p. 147. The first "get-acquainted" meeting of the Gestapu plotters is placed in the Indonesian chronology of events from "sometimes before August 17, 1965"; cf. Nugroho Notosusanto and Ismail Saleh, The Coup Attempt of the "September 30 Movement" in Indonesia (Jakarta: [Pembimbing Masa, 1968], p. 13); in the CIA Study, this meeting is dated September 6 (p. 112). Neither account allows more than a few weeks to plot a coup in the world's fifth most populous country.
20. Mortimer, Indonesian Communism, p. 429.
21. Of the six General Staff officers appointed along with Yani, three (Suprapto, D.I. Pandjaitan, and S. Parman) were murdered. Of the three survivors, two (Mursjid and Pranoto) were removed by Suharto in the next eight months. The last member of Yani's staff, Djamin Gintings, was used by Suharto during the establishment of the New Order, and ignored thereafter.
22. Howard Palfrey Jones, Indonesia: The Possible Dream (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), p. 391; cf. Arnold Brackman, The Communist Collapse in Indonesia (New York: Norton, 1969), pp. 118-9.
23. Crouch, The Army, p. 150n.
24. Ibid., pp. 140-53; for the disputed case of Bali, even Robert Shaplen, a journalist close to U.S. official sources, concedes that "The Army began it" (Time Out of Hand [New York: Harper and Row, 1969], p. 125). The slaughter in East Java "also really got started when the RPKAD arrived, not just Central Java and Bali" (letter from Benedict Anderson).
25. Sundhaussen, The Road, pp. 171, 178-9, 210, 228; Donald Hindley, "Alirans and the Fall of the Older Order," Indonesia, 25 (April 1970), pp. 40-41.
26. Sundhaussen, The Road, p. 219.
27. "In 1965 it [the BND, or intelligence service of the Federal Republic of Germany] assisted Indonesia's military secret service to suppress a left-wing Putsch in Djakarta, delivering sub-machine guns, radio equipment and money to the value of 300,000 marks" (Heinz Hoehne and Hermann Zolling, The General Was a Spy [New York: Bantam, 1972], p. xxxiii).
28. We should not be misled by the CIA's support of the 1958 rebellion into assuming that all U.S. Government plotting against Sukarno and the PKI must have been CIA-based (cf. fn. 122).
29. Daniel Lev, The Transition to Guided Democracy: Indonesian Politics, 1957-1959 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University press, 1966), p. 12. For John Foster Dulles' hostility to Indonesian unity in 1953, cf. Leonard Mosley, Dulles (New York: The Dial Press / James Wade, 1978), p. 437.
30. Declassified Documents Quarterly Catalogue (Woodbridge, Connecticut: Research Publications, 1982), 001191.
31. As the head of the PKI's secret Special Bureau, responsible only to Aidit, Sjam by his own testimony provided leadership to the "progressive officers" of Gestapu. The issue of PKI involvement in Gestapu thus rests on the question of whether Sjam was manipulating the Gestapu leadership on behalf of the PKI, or the PKI leadership on behalf of the army. There seems to be no disagreement that Sjam was (according to the CIA Study, p. 107) a longtime "double agent" and professed "informer for the Djakarta Military Command." Wertheim (p. 203) notes that in the 1950s Sjam "was a cadre of the PSI," and "had also been in touch with Lt. Col. Suharto, today's President, who often came to stay in his house in Jogja."
This might help explain why in the 1970s, after having been sentenced to death, Sjam and his co-conspirator Supeno were reportedly "allowed out [of prison] from time to time and wrote reports for the army on the political situation" (May, The Indonesian, p. 114).
Additionally, the "Sjam" who actually testified and was convicted, after being "captured" on March 9, 1967, was the third individual to be identified by the army as the "Sjam" of whom Untung had spoken: Declassified Documents Retrospective Collection (Washington, D.C.: Carrollton Press, 1976), 613C; Hughes, p. 25.
32. Wertheim, "Whose Plot?" p. 203; Mortimer, Indonesian Communism, p. 431 (Sjam); Sundhaussen, The Road, p. 228 (Suwarto and Sarwo Edhie).
32. Wertheim, "Whose Plot?" p. 203; Mortimer, Indonesian Communism, p. 431 (Sjam); Sundhaussen, The Road, p. 228 (Suwarto and Sarwo Edhie).
33. Joseph B. Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior (New York: Putnam, 1976), p. 205; cf. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets (New York: Knopf, 1979), p. 89.
34. U.S., Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders," 94th Cong., 1st Sess., 1975 (Senate Report No. 94-465), p. 4n; personal communications.
35. Declassified Documents Quarterly Catalogue, 1982, 002386; 1981, 367A.
36. Ibid., 1982, 002386 (JCS Memo for SecDef, 22 September 1958).
37. Indonesia, 22 (October 1976), p. 164 (CIA Memorandum of 22 March 1961, Attachment A, p. 6).
38. Scholars are divided over interpretations of Madiun as they are over Gestapu. Few Americans have endorsed the conclusion of Wertheim that "the so-called communist revolt of Madiun ... was probably more or less provoked by anti-communist elements"; yet Kahin has suggested that the events leading to Madiun "may have been symptomatic of a general and widespread government drive aimed at cutting down the military strength of the PKI" (W.F. Wertheim, Indonesian Society in Transition [The Hague: W. van Hoeve, 1956], p. 82; George McT. Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia [Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1970], p. 288). Cf. Southwood and Flanagan, Indonesia: Law, pp. 26-30.
39. Southwood and Flanagan, Indonesia: Law, p. 68; cf. Nasution's statement to students on November 12, 1965, reprinted in Indonesia, 1 (April 1966), p. 183: "We are obliged and dutybound to wipe them [the PKI] from the soil of Indonesia."
40. Examples in Peter Dale Scott, "Exporting Military-Economic Development," in Malcolm Caldwell, ed., Ten Years' Military Terror in Indonesia (Nottingham, England: Spokesman Books, 1975), pp. 227-32.
41. David Ransom, "Ford Country: Building an Elite for Indonesia," in Steve Weissman, ed., The Trojan Horse (San Francisco, California: Ramparts Press, 1974), p. 97; cf. p. 101. Pauker brought Suwarto to RAND in 1962.
42. John H. Johnson, ed., The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 222-4. The foreword to the book is by Klaus Knorr, who worked for the CIA while teaching at Princeton.
43. Shaplen, Time, p. 118; Hughes, The End, p. 119; Southwood and Flanagan, Indonesia: Law, pp. 75-6; Scott, "Exporting," p. 231.
William Kintner, a CIA (OPC) senior staff officer from 1950-52, and later Nixon's ambassador to Thailand, also wrote in favor of "liquidating" the PKI while working at a CIA-subsidized think-tank, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, on the University of Pennsylvania campus (William Kintner and Joseph Kornfeder, The New Frontier of War [London: Frederick Muller, 1963], pp. 233, 237-8): "If the PKI is able to maintain its legal existence and Soviet influence continues to grow, it is possible that Indonesia may be the first Southeast Asia country to be taken over by a popularly based, legally elected communist government.... In the meantime, with Western help, free Asian political leaders -- together with the military -- must not only hold on and manage, but reform and advance while liquidating the enemy's political and guerrilla armies."
44. Ransom, "Ford Country," pp. 95-103; Southwood and Flanagan, Indonesia: Law, pp. 34-6; Scott, "Exporting," pp. 227-35.
45. Sundhaussen, The Road, pp. 141, 175.
46. Published U.S. accounts of the Civic Mission / "civic action" programs describe them as devoted to "civic projects -- rehabilitating canals, draining swampland to create new rice paddies, building bridges and roads, and so on (Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation [Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1967], p. 377). But a memo to President Johnson from Secretary of State Rusk, on July 17, 1964, makes it clear that at that time the chief importance of MILTAG was for its contact with anti-Communist elements in the Indonesian Army and its Territorial Organization: "Our aid to Indonesia ... we are satisfied ... is not helping Indonesia militarily.
It is however, permitting us to maintain some contact with key elements in Indonesia which are interested in and capable of resisting Communist takeover. We think this is of vital importance to the entire Free World" (Declassified Documents Quarterly Catalogue, 1982, 001786 [DOS Memo for President of July 17, 1964; italics in original]).
47. Southwood and Flanagan, Indonesia: Law, p. 35; Scott, "Exporting," p. 233.
48. Ransom, "Ford Country," pp. 101-2, quoting Willis G. Ethel; cited in Scott, "Exporting," p. 235.
49. Sundhaussen, The Road, p. 141. There was also the army's "own securely controlled paramilitary organization of students -- modelled on the U.S.R.O.T.C. and commanded by an army colonel [Djuhartono] fresh from the U.S. army intelligence course in Hawaii": Mrazek, The United States, vol. II, p. 139, citing interview of Nasution with George Kahin, July 8, 1963.
49. Sundhaussen, The Road, p. 141. There was also the army's "own securely controlled paramilitary organization of students -- modelled on the U.S.R.O.T.C. and commanded by an army colonel [Djuhartono] fresh from the U.S. army intelligence course in Hawaii": Mrazek, The United States, vol. II, p. 139, citing interview of Nasution with George Kahin, July 8, 1963.
50. Pauker, though modest in assessing his own political influence, does claim that a RAND paper he wrote on counterinsurgency and social justice, ignored by the U.S. military for whom it was intended, was influential in the development of his friend Suwarto's Civic Mission doctrine.
51. Noam Chomsky and E.S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1979), p. 206; David Mozingo, Chinese Policy Toward Indonesia (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 178.
52. Sundhaussen, The Road, pp. 178-9. The PSI of course was neither monolithic nor a simple instrument of U.S. policy. But the real point is that, in this 1963 incident as in others, we see conspiratorial activity relevant to the military takeover, involving PSI and other individuals who were at the focus of U.S. training programs, and who would play an important role in 1965.
53. Sundhaussen, The Road, pp. 228-33: in January 1966 the "PSI activists" in Bandung "knew exactly what they were aiming at, which was nothing less than the overthrow of Sukarno. Moreover, they had the protection of much of the Siliwangi officer corps" Once again, I use Sundhaussen's term "PSI-leaning" to denote a milieu, not to explain it.
Sarwo Edhie was a long-time CIA contact, while Kemal Idris' role in 1965 may owe much to his former PETA commander the Japanese intelligence officer Yanagawa. Cf. Masashi Nishihara, The Japanese and Sukarno's Indonesia (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1976), pp. 138, 212.
54. Sundhaussen, The Road, pp. 99-101. Lubis was also a leader in the November 1957 assassination attempt against Sukarno, and the 1958 rebellion.
55. Ibid., 188; cf. p. 159n.
56. Suharto's "student" status does not of course mean that he was a mere pawn in the hands of those with whom he established contact at SESKOAD. For example, Suharto's independence from the PSI and those close to them became quite evident in January 1974, when he and Ali Murtopo cracked down on those responsible for army-tolerated student riots reminiscent of the one in May 1963. Cf. Crouch, The Army, pp. 309-17.
57. Sundhaussen, The Road, pp. 228, 241-43. In the same period SESKOAD was used for the political re-education of generals like Surjosumpeno, who, although anti-Communist, were guilty of loyalty to Sukarno (p. 238).
58. Crouch, The Army, p. 80; at this time Suharto was already unhappy with Sukarno's "rising pro-communist policy" (Roeder, The Smiling, p. 9).
59. Crouch, The Army, p. 81; cf. Mrazek, The United States, vol. II, pp. 149-51.
60. Sundhaussen, The Road, pp. 241-3.
61. Through his intelligence group OPSUS (headed by Ali Murtopo) Suharto made contact with Malaysian leaders; in two accounts former PSI and PRRI / Permesta personnel in Malaysia played a role in setting up this sensitive political liaison: Crouch, The Army, p. 74; Nishihara, The Japanese, p. 149.
62. Sundhaussen, The Road, pp. 188.
63. Mrazek, The United States, vol. II, p. 152.
64. Cf. Edward Luttwak, Coup D'Etat: A Practical Handbook (London: Allen Lane / Penguin Press, 1968), p. 61: "though Communist-infiltrated army units were very powerful they were in the wrong place; while they sat in the Borneo jungles the anti-Communist paratroops and marines took over Jakarta, and the country."
What is most interesting in this informed account by Luttwak (who has worked for years with the CIA) is that "the anti-Communist paratroops" included not only the RPKAD but those who staged the Gestapu uprising in Jakarta, before putting it down.
65. Nishihara, The Japanese, pp. 142, 149.
66.Ibid., p. 202, cf. p. 207. The PRRI / Permesta veterans engaged in the OPSUS peace feelers, Daan Mogot and Willy Pesik, had with Jan Walandouw been part of a 1958 PRRI secret mission to Japan, a mission detailed in the inside account by former CIA officer Joseph B. Smith (Portrait of a Cold Warrior [New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1976], p. 245), following which Walandouw flew on "to Taipeh, then Manila and New York."
67. Personal communication. If the account of Neville Maxwell (senior research officer at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Oxford University) can be believed, then the planning of the Gestapu / anti-Gestapu scenario may well have begun in 1964 (Journal of Contemporary Asia, IX, 2 [1979], pp. 251-2; reprinted in Southwood and Flanagan, Indonesia: Law, p. 13):
"A few years ago I was researching in Pakistan into the diplomatic background of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan conflict, and in foreign ministry papers to which I had been given access came across a letter to the then foreign minister, Mr. Bhutto, from one of his ambassadors in Europe ... reporting a conversation with a Dutch intelligence officer with NATO.
According to my note of that letter, the officer had remarked to the Pakistani diplomat that 'Indonesia was going to fall into the Western lap like a rotten apple.' Western intelligence agencies, he said, would organize a 'premature communist coup ... [which would be] foredoomed to fail, providing a legitimate and welcome opportunity to the army to crush the communists and make Soekarno a prisoner of the army's goodwill.' The ambassador's report was dated December 1964."
68. Indonesia, 22 (October 1976), p. 164 (CIA Memo of March 27, 1961, Appendix A, p. 8); cf. Powers, The Man, p. 89.
69. Indonesia, 22 (October 1976), p. 165 (CIA Memo of March 27, 1961).
70. The lame-duck Eisenhower NSC memo would have committed the U.S. to oppose not just the PKI in Indonesia, but "a policy increasingly friendly toward the Sino-Soviet bloc on the part of whatever regime is in power."
"The size and importance of Indonesia," it concluded, "dictate [!] a vigorous U.S. effort to prevent these contingencies": Declassified Documents Quarterly Catalogue, 1982, 000592 (NSC 6023 of 19 December, 1960). For other U.S. intrigues at this time to induce a more vigorous U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, cf. Declassified Documents Quarterly Catalogue, 1983, 001285-86; Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1972), pp. 12-14, 17-20.
71. Jones, Indonesia: The Possible Dream, p. 299.
72. Mortimer, Indonesian Communism, pp. 385-6.
73. U.S. Department of Defense, Military Assistance Facts, May 1, 1966. Before 1963 the existence as well as the amount of the MAP in Indonesia was withheld from the public; retroactively, figures were published.
After 1962 the total deliveries of military aid declined dramatically, but were aimed more and more particularly at anti-PKI and anti-Sukarno plotters in the army; cf. fns. 46, 76 and 83.
74. The New York Times, August 5, 1965, p. 3; cf. Nishihara, The Japanese, p. 149; Mrazek, vol. II, p. 121.
75. A Senate amendment in 1964 to cut off all aid to Indonesia unconditionally was quietly killed in conference committee, on the misleading ground that the Foreign Assistance Act "requires the President to report fully and concurrently to both Houses of the Congress on any assistance furnished to Indonesia"
(U.S. Cong., Senate, Report No. 88-1925, Foreign Assistance Act of 1964, p. 11). In fact the act's requirement that the president report "to Congress" applied to eighteen other countries, but in the case of Indonesia he was to report to two Senate Committees and the speaker of the House: Foreign Assistance Act, Section 620(j).
76. Jones, Indonesia: The Possible Dream, p. 324.
77. U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Multinational Corporations and United States Foreign Policy, Hearings (cited hereafter as Church Committee Hearings), 94th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1978, p. 941; Mrazek, The United States, vol. II, p. 22. Mrazek quotes Lt. Col. Juono of the corps as saying that "we are completely dependent on the assistance of the United States."
78. Notosusanto and Saleh, The Coup, pp. 43, 46.
79. Nishihara, The Japanese (pp. 171, 194, 202), shows the role in the 1965-66 anti-Sukarno conspiracy of the small faction (including Ibnu Sutowo, Adam Malik, and the influential Japanese oilman Nishijima) who interposed themselves as negotiators between the 1958 PRRI Rebellion and the central government. Alamsjah, mentioned below, was another member of this group; he joined Suharto's staff in 1960. For Murba and CIA, cf. fn. 104.
80. Fortune, July 1973, p. 154, cf. Wall Street Journal, April 18, 1967; both in Scott, "Exporting," pp. 239, 258.
81. Declassified Documents Retrospective Collection, 609A (Embassy Cable 1002 of October 14, 1965); 613A (Embassy Cable 1353 of November 7, 1965).
82. The New York Times, August 5, 1965, p. 3.
83. U.S. Department of Defense, Military Assistance Facts, May 1, 1966. The thirty-two military personnel in FY 1965 represent an increase over the projected figure in March 1964 of twenty-nine. Most of them were apparently Green Beret U.S. Special Forces, whose forward base on Okinawa was visited in August 1965 by Gestapu plotter Saherman. Cf. fn. 122.
84. George Benson, an associate of Guy Pauker who headed the Military Training Advisory Group (MILTAG) in Jakarta, was later hired by Ibnu Sutowo to act as a lobbyist for the army's oil company (renamed Pertamina) in Washington: The New York Times, December 6, 1981, p. 1.
85. San Francisco Chronicle, October 24, 1983, p. 22, describes one such USAF-Lockheed operation in Southeast Asia, "code-named 'Operation Buttercup' that operated out of Norton Air Force Base in California from 1965 to 1972." For the CIA's close involvement in Lockheed payoffs, cf. Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar (New York: Viking, 1977), pp. 137, 227-8, 238.
86. Church Committee Hearings, pp. 943-51.
87. Ibid., p. 960.
88. Nishihara, The Japanese, p. 153.
89. Lockheed Aircraft International, memo of Fred C. Meuser to Erle M. Constable, 19 July 1968, in Church Committee Hearings, p. 962.
90. Ibid., p. 954; cf. p. 957. In 1968, when Alamsjah suffered a decline in power, Lockheed did away with the middleman and paid its agents' fees directly to a group of military officers (pp. 342, 977).
91. Church Committee Hearings, p. 941; cf. p. 955.
92. Southwood and Flanagan, Indonesia: Law, p. 59.
93. Crouch, The Army, p. 114.
94. Declassified Documents Quarterly Catalogue, 1982, 002507 (Cable of April 15, 1965, from U.S. Delegation to U.N.); cf. Forbes Wilson, The Conquest of Copper Mountain (New York: Atheneum, 1981), pp. 153-5.
95. World Oil, August 15, 1965, p. 209.
96. The New York Times, June 19, 1966, IV, 4.
97. Ralph McGehee, "The C.I.A. and the White Paper on El Salvador," The Nation, April 11, 1981, p. 423. The deleted word would appear from its context to be "deception." Cf. Roger Morris and Richard Mauzy, "Following the Scenario," in Robert L. Borosage and John Marks, eds., The CIA File (New York: Grossman / Viking, 1976), p. 39:
"Thus the fear of Communist subversion, which erupted to a frenzy of killing in 1965-1966, had been encouraged in the 'penetration' propaganda of the Agency in Indonesia.... 'All I know,' said one former intelligence officer of the Indonesia events, 'is that the Agency rolled in some of its top people and that things broke big and very favorable, as far as we were concerned.'" All references to deletions appear in the original text as printed in The Nation. These bracketed portions, shown in this article in bold-face type, reflect censorship by the CIA.
98. Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Knopf, 1974), p. 245. For a list of twenty-five U.S. operatives transferred from Vietnam to Guatemala in the 1964-73 period, cf. Susanne Jonas and David Tobis, Guatemala (Berkeley, California, and New York: North American Congress on Latin America, 1974), p. 201.
99. Tad Szulc, The Illusion of Peace (New York: Viking, 1978), p. 724. The top CIA operative in charge of the 1970 anti-Allende operation, Sam Halpern, had previously served as chief executive officer on the CIA's anti-Sukarno operation of 1957-58: Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power (New York: Summit Books, 1983), p. 277; Powers, The Man, p. 91.
100. Donald Freed and Fred Simon Landis, Death in Washington (Westport, Connecticut: Lawrence Hill, 1980), pp. 104-5.
101. Time, March 17, 1961.
102. Sundhaussen, The Road, p. 195.
103. Jones, Indonesia: The Possible Dream, p. 374; Justus M. van der Kroef, "Origins of the 1965 Coup in Indonesia: Probabilities and Alternatives," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, III, 2 (September 1972), p. 282. Three generals were alleged targeted in the first report (Suharto, Mursjid, and Sukendro); all survived Gestapu.
104. Chaerul Saleh's Murba Party, including the pro-U.S. Adam Malik, was also promoting the anti-Communist "Body to Support Sukarnoism" (BPS), which was banned by Sukarno on December 17, 1964. (Subandrio "is reported to have supplied Sukarno with information purporting to show U.S. Central Intelligence Agency influence behind the BPS" [Mortimer, p. 377]; it clearly did have support from the CIA- and army-backed labor organization SOKSI.) Shortly afterwards, Murba itself was banned, and promptly "became active as a disseminator of rumours and unrest" (Holtzappel, p. 238).
105. Sundhaussen, The Road, p. 183; Mortimer, Indonesian Communism, pp. 376-77; Singapore Straits Times, December 24, 1964; quoted in Van der Kroef, "Origins," p. 283.
106. Sabah Times, September 14, 1965; quoted in Van der Kroef, "Origins," p. 296. Mozingo, Chinese Policy (p. 242) dismisses charges such as these with a contemptuous footnote.
107. Powers, The Man, p. 80; cf. Senate Report No. 94-755, Foreign and Military Intelligence, p. 192. CIA-sponsored channels also disseminated the Chinese arms story at this time inside the United States -- e.g., Brian Crozier, "Indonesia's Civil War," New Leader, November 1965, p. 4.
108. Mortimer, Indonesian Communism, p. 386. The Evans and Novak column coincided with the surfacing of the so-called "Gilchrist letter," in which the British ambassador purportedly wrote about a U.S.-U.K. anti-Sukarno plot to be executed "together with local army friends." All accounts agree that the letter was a forgery.
However it distracted attention from a more incriminating letter from Ambassador Gilchrist, which Sukarno had discussed with Lyndon Johnson's envoy Michael Forrestal in mid-February 1965, and whose authenticity Forrestal (who knew of the letter) did not deny (Declassified Documents Retrospective Collection, 594H [Embassy Cable 1583 of February 13, 1965]).
109. Cf. Denis Warner, Reporter, March 28, 1963, pp. 62-63: "Yet with General A.H. Nasution, the defense minister, and General Jani, the army chief of staff, now out-Sukarnoing Sukarno in the dispute with Malaya over Malaysia ... Mr. Brackman and all other serious students of Indonesia must be troubled by the growing irresponsibility of the army leadership."
110. The New York Times, August 12, 1965, p. 2.
111. Brackman, The Communist, p. 40.
112. McGehee, "The C.I.A.," p. 423.
113. Hughes, The End, pp. 43-50; cf. Crouch, The Army, p. 140n: "No evidence supports these stories."
114. Hughes, The End, p. 150, also tells how Sarwo Edhie exploited the corpse of Colonel Katamso as a pretext for provoking a massacre of the PKI in Central Java; cf. Crouch, p. 154n; also fn. 6.
115. Anderson and McVey, A Preliminary, p. 133.
116. Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey, "What Happened in Indonesia?" New York Review of Books, June 1, 1978, p. 41; personal communication from Anderson. A second newspaper, Suluh Indonesia, told its PNI readers that the PNI did not support Gestapu, and thus served to neutralize potential opposition to Suharto's seizure of power.
117. Thus defenders of the U.S. role in this period might point out that where "civic action" had been most deeply implanted, in West Java, the number of civilians murdered was relatively (!) small; and that the most indiscriminate slaughter occurred where civic action programs had been only recently introduced. This does not, in my view, diminish the U.S. share of responsibility for the slaughter.
118. CIA Study, p. 70; Sundhaussen, The Road, p. 185.
119. William Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 227. Crouch, The Army (p. 108), finds no suggestion in the Mahmilub evidence "that the PKI aimed at taking over the government," only that it hoped to protect itself from the Council of Generals.
120. McGehee, "The C.I.A.," p. 424.
121. Szulc, The Illusion, p. 16.
122. Southwood and Flanagan, Indonesia: Law, pp. 38-9 (Cambodia). According to a former U.S. Navy intelligence specialist, the initial U.S. military plan to overthrow Sihanouk "included a request for authorization to insert a U.S.-trained assassination team disguised as Vietcong insurgents into Phnom Penh to kill Prince Sihanouk as a pretext for revolution" (Hersh, The Price, p. 179).
As Hersh points out, Green Beret assassination teams that operated inside South Vietnam routinely dressed as Vietcong cadre while on missions. Thus the alleged U.S. plan of 1968, which was reportedly approved "shortly after Nixon's inauguration ... 'at the highest level of government,'" called for an assassination of a moderate at the center by apparent leftists, as a pretext for a right-wing seizure of power.
This raises an interesting question, albeit outlandish: did the earlier anti-Sukarno operation call for foreign elements to be infiltrated into the Gestapu forces murdering the generals? Holtzappel ("The 30 September," p. 222) has suspected "the use of outsiders who are given suitable disguises to do a dirty job." He points to trial witnesses from Untung's battalion and the murder team who "declared under oath not to have known ... their battalion commander." Though these witnesses themselves would not have been foreigners, foreigners could have infiltrated more easily into their ranks than into a regular battalion.
THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the full text of which appears in the following pages. Following this historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and "to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories."
PREAMBLE
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,
Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,
Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.
Article 1.
- All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2.
- Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 4.
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6.
- Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 7.
- All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Article 8.
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10.
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 11.
- (1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
- (2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
Article 12.
- No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 13.
- (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 14.
- (1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
- (2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 15.
- (1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
- (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
Article 16.
- (1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
- (2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
- (3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Article 17.
- (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
- (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Article 18.
- Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19.
- Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 20.
- (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
- (2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Article 21.
- (1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
- (2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
- (3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
Article 22.
- Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Article 23.
- (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
- (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
- (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
- (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
Article 24.
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Article 25.
- (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
- (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Article 26.
- (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
- (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
- (3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
Article 27.
- (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Article 28.
- Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
Article 29.
- (1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
- (2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
- (3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 30.
- Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
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