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The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967
Peter Dale Scott
This article is from Pacific Affairs, 58, Summer 1985, pages 239-264. Peter Dale Scott is a professor of
English at the University of California in Berkeley, and a member of the advisory board at Public Information Research.
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 commander 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,27 possibly Australia. 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
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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.
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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 Saleh104 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
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Notes:
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 -- The Coup that Backfired, 1968 (cited hereafter
as CIA Study), p. 71n.
5. 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).
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.
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.
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Nixon chaired the 5412 committee that ran the Indonesian
"rebellion"
This was important administratively because by that time Frank Wisner, the CIA Deputy Director of Plans, had
set up his forward headquarters in Singapore and at the direction of the 5412 Committee of the National Security
Council, headed by Nixon, Wisner occupied that faraway headquarters himself. (It should be noted that in 1958 Allen
Dulles was the head of the CIA, his brother John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State, Eisenhower was President,
and Nixon, as Vice President, chaired the clandestine affairs committee, then known as the "Special Group
5412/2." In other words nothing was done in Indonesia that was not directed by Nixon. If an action had not
been directed by the NSC, then it was done unlawfully by the CIA.)
In 1958 Allen Dulles would have brought such a major operation to the attention of the Special Group and he would
operate with its approval. This was an essential step in national policy because it then empowered the Department
of Defense to provide the necessary support requested by the CIA. Much of this fell within the area of my responsibility
at Air Force Headquarters, and I was kept informed on a regular basis of approved action and of Nixon's keen interest
in this project.
The following appeared in the August, 1976 issue of Gallery magazine:
Indonesia 1958: Nixon, the CIA, and the Secret War
By L. Fletcher Prouty
reprinted with the permission of the author
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Blood ran in the streets. Villages were wiped out and a million people massacred in a battle for the riches
and political control of Indonesia. Nixon and the CIA wanted Sukarno overthrown.
But the creator of Indonesia knew how to fight.
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A letter from one of the most beautiful women in the world lies buried in a stack of mail on President Ford's desk.
Written in Paris on July 24, 1975, by Dewi Sukarno, the former First Lady of Indonesia and widow of Dr. Achmed
Sukarno, the charismatic Father of Indonesia, the letter is an appeal to President Ford for a complete explanation
of the CIA-led and supported rebellions that took place in Indonesia in 1958 and 1965.
It is not well known in the United States that the 1958 rebellion led to a major Indonesian civil war. The CIA-inspired
uprising in Indonesia, unlike the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, was a full-scale military operation. The Bay of
Pigs invasion in 1961 was made by a thin brigade of about 1,500 Cuban exiles trained by the CIA in Guatemala. But
the 1958 Indonesian action involved no less than 42,000 CIA-armed rebels supported by a fleet of bombers and vast
numbers of four-engine transport aircraft as well as submarine assistance from the U.S. Navy. It also involved
a major training and logistical supporting effort on the part of the Philippines, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Singapore.
But despite this massive armed force, the 1958 rebellion, like the Bay of Pigs invasion, was a total failure. Sukarno's
army drove the rebels on Sumatra and Celebes into the sea.
There are some who might call the 1965 uprising a success. At least the rebels were not driven into the sea. However,
for the United States it was a fantastically costly endeavor. The rebellion ended in the most massive and ruthless
bloodbath since World War II. While the headlines in the United States dealt with the slaughter in Vietnam, the
press of the rest of the world heaped blame on the United States for the barbaric massacre in Indonesia. The victorious
new government of General Suharto proceeded to assassinate nearly one million people. This terrible slaughter and
the ensuing imprisonment of tens of thousands of Indonesians stirred Dewi Sukarno to seek President Ford's assistance
in gaining the release of her countrymen from prison.
Dewi Sukarno has received no answer. But even without a reply she knows. The silence from Washington speaks for
itself. A denial, if true, would have come without hesitation. The Indonesians know. The Latins had a phrase for
it, "Is fecit cui prodest" -- the perpetrator of a crime is he who profits by it. Today, major U.S. enterprises
are plundering the raw material wealth of Indonesia -- rubber, tin, and oil -- in a manner that is more vile than
what is happening in Chile. And there is no one to stop them.
Achmed Sukarno was one of those rare men who rose during the hours of crisis to unite one hundred million people
and lead them out of the ashes of World War II. Sukarno came to liberate his country from the Japanese, the Dutch,
the Portuguese, and from all others who were ready to enslave his country once again. He established his government
on the "Five Pillars": (l) belief in one supreme God (2) just and civilized humanity (3) unity of Indonesia
(4) democracy (5) social justice.
Sukarno was forced to thread his way between communism and capitalism. His independence made him both friends and
enemies. His worst enemies came from his polyglot people who are scattered over more than 3,000 islands. These
islands make up the world's largest archipelago; they stretch along the equator for over 3,400 miles and are located
in Southeast Asia between the Philippines and Australia. From one of these islands came Lt. Col. Alex Kawilarang,
the military attache serving in Washington who was to defect to the rebel forces and lead the rebel contingent
on Sumatra, the Indonesian island richest in natural resources.
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His Excellency President Gerald Ford
The White House
Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. President,
As the widow of the late President Sukarno and being the only member of the family living overseas,
I address myself to you, being deeply alarmed and disturbed by numerous and persistent reports in the international
press. For instance, the CIA is said to have spied on my husband: manufactured a fake film
in order to slander the good name and honor of Sukarno: prepared an assassination attempt against him
and conspired to oust him from power to estrange him from the Indonesian people by accusing him of collaborating
with international communism in betrayal of Indonesian independence, which of course was totally absurd.
My husband has repeatedly informed me that he was fully aware of these immoral, illegal, subversive, anti-Indonesian
activities against his beloved Indonesia, his people, and against him personally.
I would like to request from you, as well as from the responsible Congressional Committees in the United States
a full explanation about these reports and reprehensible practices as carried out by an official
United States Government Agency in the name of several American Presidents and Governments.
Both in 1958 and in 1965, the CIA directly interfered in the internal affairs of Indonesia. In 1958, this
monstrous action led to civil war. In 1965, it led to the ultimate takeover by a pro-Amencan military regime, while
hundreds of thousands of innocent peasants and loyal citizens were massacred in the name of this insane crusade
against international communism. Still today, ten years later, many tens of thousands of
true patriots and Sukarnoists are locked up in jails and concentration camps being denied the simplest and most
elementary human rights. American companies and aggressive foreign interests are indiscriminately plundering the
natural riches of Indonesia to the advantage of the few and the disadvantage of the millions of unemployed and
impoverished masses.
I must now ask you, Mr. President, in the name of freedom and justice, in the name of decency in relations
between states and statesmen, between powerful nations and developing lands, in the name of the Indonesian people
and the Sukarno family: did the United States of America commit these hideous crimes against Indonesia and against
the founder of the nation? Will your Government be prepared to accept responsibility
for these evil practices? Over one hundred million Indonesians have been brainwashed, as was the rest of
the world by the present regime's propaganda to believe that the communists carried out the insurrection.
My countrymen, as well as everyone else, have the right to know the truth of the historic facts. It will be the
painful duty for America now to reveal the CIA involvement in Indonesia and release all information and documents
relevant to who really initiated the terrifying bloodbath that led to the overthrow of the legal Government and
to the inhuman treatment in house arrest lasting three years until my husband's death.
In closing, I would like to strongly appeal to you, Mr. President, to use your influence with the military
regime
in Jakarta, to immediately free those many thousands of political prisoners, men and women, former cabinet ministers,
writers and journalists, who I know are entirely innocent of the crime of treason they have been accused of. If
the United States were to be instrumental in helping to improve the fate of so many thousands of courageous compatriots,
I think the entire Indonesian nation would be grateful and Indonesians would regain their confidence in America's
intentions towards the Third World.
Respectfully,
R. S. Dewi Sukarno
July 24, 1975
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What is not generally known about the complex Indonesian struggle is the role that was played by the then Vice
President
of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, and the bitter aftermath that involved the sudden ouster of Allen Dulles'
protege, Frank Wisner, who at that time was the head of the clandestine arm of the CIA.
After Watergate, when Anthony Lukas wrote in his book Nightmare, about the growing mistrust between Nixon and the
Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, he could have added that since the 1958 Indonesian rebellion there
were many in the CIA who made a career of hating Nixon because of what he had done to Frank Wisner, among others.
The Indonesian campaign began rather casually as so many CIA ventures do. Few if any ever originate at the top.
During an unguarded conversation in Washington the Indonesian military attache mentioned earlier made it known
to certain U.S. military acquaintances that there were many prominent and strong people in Indonesia who would
be ready to rise against Sukarno if they were given a little support and encouragement from the United States.
It happened that one of those U.S. military friends he talked to was not a military man at all, but a member of
the CIA. The provocative words got back to Frank Wisner, then the Deputy Director of Plans. He was in charge of
the CIA's clandestine activity and he authorized agents to follow up on that first conversation.
The Indonesian attache was wined and dined and encouraged to talk more. Reasons for the attache's return to Indonesia
on official business were successfully arranged. He was accompanied by CIA agents traveling under the cover of
"U.S. military" personnel. During this visit they spoke with rebel leaders. They learned enough about
the potential strength of this opposition to encourage the CIA to set in motion its biggest operation up to that
date.
In the Philippines there was a strong nucleus of military men, chief among them a Colonel Valeriano, who had been
President Magsaysay's military assistant. He had also worked on paramilitary exercises with the CIA during the
Magsaysay campaign against the leftist rebel Huk movement. This military group had gained considerable power during
the Magsaysay tenure. Many of these special warfare experts from the Philippines had volunteered for duty in South
Vietnam in 1955 when the CIA was deeply involved in providing undercover support for the new and uncertain regime
of President Ngo Dinh Diem.
By early 1958 these Filipinos and their CIA counterparts were prepared to involve the Philippines in the rebellion
against Sukarno by setting up special warfare "Green Beret" training bases and by providing the Indonesian
revolutionary council with clandestine air bases. One of those bases was on Palawan, the most western island of
the Philippine archipelago, in the vicinity of the airfield at Puerto Princessa on Honda Bay. The other base was
on the big southern island of Mindanao, near Davao Gulf.
Concurrently, in Washington, operations were being organized. Frank Wisner took over direct command of the everyday
operations of the Indonesian project. A large staff under Desmond Fitzgerald of the Far East Division was set up.
The most active element of this special staff came from the CIA's clandestine Air Division which at that time was
under the control of Dick Helms. As the plans expanded for this major undertaking, requirements for military equipment,
people, aircraft, weapons, bases, submarines, and communications skyrocketed.
In the Pentagon there are thousands of nondescript offices in which all sorts of tasks are done. One of these unobtrusive
offices was an Air Force Plans Division office. One day in 1958 two men from the CIA entered that office. After
being identified they were permitted entrance to an interior office that was the "Focal Point" office
for all U.S. Air Force Support of the clandestine operations of the CIA. I had established that office in 1955
on orders from Gen. Thomas D. White, then Chief of Staff of the Air Force. This came about after several meetings
with Allen W. Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence, and others. When the CIA men entered that office in
1958, I was still in charge.
The agents outlined the Indonesian Plan, the Philippine support and training program, and told me about their own
special operations staff that had been put together specifically for this vast project. Then they urgently requested
light bombardment aircraft and long-range transport aircraft. We decided to take a number of twin engine B-26 aircraft
out of mothball storage, put them through a retrofit line, and modify them so that they could be armed with a special
50-caliber machine gun package of eight guns, in the nose of the plane. This would give the B-26 more firepower
than it ever had during the Korean War or World War II. The project was given top priority and covered in deep
secrecy. Programs for pilot training and the recruitment of "mercenaries" were established.
Concurrent with our work the CIA was putting together a "wartime" operational staff. Lt. Gen. Earl Barnes,
who had been a senior air commander during World War II under Gen. Douglas MacArthur, was brought in to run all
clandestine air activities.
At that time Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer was Commander in Chief of the Ryukyu Command on Okinawa. One day he received
a call from General David M. Shoup, the U.S. Marine Commander on Okinawa, asking if the Army could spare 14,000
rifles for a Marine requirement. Surprised at the Marine request for such a large order of guns, Lemnitzer acquiesced
nonetheless and ordered the transfer of these weapons on the condition that they would be quickly replaced.[1]
High on the ridge line of central Okinawa overlooking the city of Naha there was a modest size "Army"
installation that hustled with considerable activity. This was the main CIA operational base in the Far East. It
was under the direction of Ted Shannon, one of the Agency's most powerful agents. It was Shannon's office that
had actually requested 42,000 rifles from General Shoup and since the order was so large Shoup had been unable
to supply them, and had therefore borrowed 14,000 from the Army.
On nearby Taiwan, the CIA had another large facility -- a "Navy" base known as the Naval Auxiliary Communication
Center (NACC). This "Comm Center" controlled a large and very active air base a few miles south of Taiwan's
capital, Taipei, and the huge Air America facilities near Taipei and the city of Tainan.
The B-26 bombers were ready to fly and a special ferrying arrangement was made with the Air Force to fly them across
the Pacific to the Philippines and Menado.
Rebel Indonesians, trained and equipped in the Philippines, were returned to Sumatra. Some were air-dropped and
others landed on the beach from submarines that the U.S. Navy was operating, in support of the CIA, in the oceans
south of Indonesia near the Christmas Islands.
The war was on.
On Feb. 9, 1958, rebel Colonel Maluddin Simbolon issued an ultimatum in the name of a provincial government, the
Central Sumatran Revolutionary Council, calling for the formation of a new central government. Sukarno refused
and called upon his loyal army commander, General Abdul Haris Nasution, to destroy the rebel forces. By Feb. 21
loyal forces had been airlifted to Sumatra and had begun the attack. The rebel headquarters was in the southern
coastal city of Padang. Rebel strongholds stretched all the way to Medan, near the northern end of the island and
not far from Malaysia.
This was important administratively because by that time Frank Wisner, the CIA Deputy Director of Plans, had set
up his forward headquarters in Singapore and at the direction of the 5412 Committee of the National Security Council,
headed by Nixon, Wisner occupied that faraway headquarters himself. (It should be noted that in 1958 Allen Dulles
was the head of the CIA, his brother John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State, Eisenhower was President, and
Nixon, as Vice President, chaired the clandestine affairs committee, then known as the "Special Group 5412/2."
In other words nothing was done in Indonesia that was not directed by Nixon. If an action had not been directed
by the NSC, then it was done unlawfully by the CIA.)
In 1958 Allen Dulles would have brought such a major operation to the attention of the Special Group and he would
operate with its approval. This was an essential step in national policy because it then empowered the Department
of Defense to provide the necessary support requested by the CIA. Much of this fell within the area of my responsibility
at Air Force Headquarters, and I was kept informed on a regular basis of approved action and of Nixon's keen interest
in this project.
The rebellion flared sporadically from one end of Indonesia to the other.
While the CIA was supporting up to 100,000 rebels, the State Department professed innocence. The U.S. ambassador,
Howard P. Jones, maintained that the United States had nothing to do with the rebellion and he protested the capture
of the American oil properties. On the other hand, Sukarno had asked for more arms aid from the United States.
He must have had strong suspicions about the source of rebel support. The vast number of guns, the bombers and
heavy air transport aircraft dropping hundreds of tons of arms and equipment, as well as submarines supporting
beach operations were just too sophisticated to be anything but major power ploys. Thus, his appeal for U.S. arms
aid had the ring of gamesmanship.
Playing along with the game, John Foster Dulles issued a statement saying that the United States would not provide
arms to either side. And while he was publishing that falsehood, the United States furnished and piloted B-26 bombers,
and these were bombing shipping in the Makassar Straits. Some had even flown as far south as the Java Sea. Almost
immediately all insurance rates on shipping to and from Indonesia went on a wartime scale and costs became so prohibitive
that most shipping actually ceased. The bombing attacks, kept so quiet in the United States that they hardly made
the news, were being viewed with great alarm by the rest of the world. What was "Top Secret" in Washington
was barroom gossip in the capitals of the world.
While Wisner communicated with Washington clandestinely, anyone in the bar at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, in
the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon, or even on the streets of Istanbul, could learn all about the "American CIA
attack" on Sukarno.
The CIA was demanding so much support for its far-flung operations that a top-level committee was established in
the Pentagon. Its purpose was to keep track of how much war equipment was being requested and sent to Indonesia.
Not unlike the Lemnitzer-Shoup rifle problem, there were problems in the Pentagon because of the way the CIA requested
equipment through phony "military" cover channels.
Early in this operation I had put some men from my office into the air-combat section in the Philippines, and the
Air Force was reasonably well aware of what was going on. But that was not so for the other services. At the time,
Admiral Arleigh Burke was the Chief of Naval Operations. He went one step further than we did. At the height of
the rebel operations, Burke sent his Chief of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Luther Frost, to Jakarta, Indonesia's
capital, where he stayed for several months carrying on a delicate relationship with the American ambassador and
with the Indonesian naval chiefs. This, while U.S. Navy submarines were aiding the rebels south of Sumatra. It
turned out to have been a masterful gambit because later, when the rebellion collapsed, the U.S. Navy was able
to declare innocence. The Air Force was not so fortunate.
The pretense that the U.S. Government was in no way involved in this massive civil war against Sukarno was wearing
thin. It was a reasonable cover as long as the United States could plausibly deny its role in the action. But one
day, a lone B-26 out of the rebel CIA base at Menado, flying low over the Straits of Makassar, came upon an Indonesian
ship -- an ideal target. The pilot banked to take a good run at the ship and began strafing it with those eight
lethal .50-caliber machine guns. He was committed to the attack before he found out that the freighter was armed.
The B-26 was hit and it ditched near the ship. The pilot, an American named Allan Lawrence Pope, was picked up.
Pope was identified as a former U.S. Air Force pilot. The cork was out of the bottle. Sukarno had his proof of
U.S. involvement and he played his ace card for an international audience. That one plane and that one pilot cost
the U.S. Government tens of millions of dollars in ransom and tribute during the next several years.
After the capture of Pope the rebellion rapidly fell apart. Loyal forces captured Donggala in central Celebes.
And on far away Halmahera, government forces captured Jailolo. That ended all opposition except for the CIA-rebel
air base at Menado. With the rebellion all but crushed, except for the continued existence of the main CIA force,
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles ended the embargo of arms to Sukarno and agreed to send aid to the government
of Indonesia! What wondrous duplicity! And Sukarno was not fooled. His forces had been fighting a major civil war
inspired and clandestinely supported by the United States, while concurrently the overt branches of the U.S. Government
acted as though nothing at all had happened.
By the end of June 1958 it was all over. Then a very strange and rare (rare in terms of normal bureaucracy) thing
happened. During the months of this operation it had been my custom to visit the CIA special operations center.
One morning I caught the unmarked, dull-green CIA shuttle bus at the Pentagon and rode to the operations center.
I went in. Not a soul was there. The place had been cleaned out. Office after office was absolutely bare. Finally
I found one secretary. She was sitting in a straight-back chair and her telephone was on the floor. There were
tears in her eyes. She took a call from time to time and gave guarded answers about the former members of that
huge staff. The entire section had been scattered to the four corners of the world. A large number of top-level,
experienced, clandestine agents and operators had vanished. It took our Air Force office, skilled as we were in
the ways of the CIA, months to find some of them again.
Then we began to piece together what had happened. With the collapse of such a major effort and with the inability
of the Government to deny plausibly before the world its role in the whole sordid affair, blame had to be placed
somewhere. In an unprecedented action, Nixon had summarily fired Frank Wisner, along with some others. But Frank
Wisner, a longtime OSS and CIA man, was a key intelligence officer. Few knew enough about his career to realize
that he was senior, by far, to Helms and Colby. Clearly, he was Allen Dulles' heir apparent. When the OSS had been
deactivated after World War II by President Truman, it was Wisner who had kept a tight-knit band of professionals
together. This small cadre kept valuable OSS records and, more importantly, they had maintained the delicate lines
of communication with agents, spies, and underground personnel in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Germany. They held
this fragile web together. Without them hundreds of people might have been killed and priceless assets destroyed.
And Frank Wisner suddenly, almost whimsically, had been fired.
To a man, the Agency was aroused by this action. Rightly or wrongly, they hated Nixon for this. I remember being
at meetings during which the name of Nixon would be mentioned and I have seen CIA men bristle and redden as though
someone had let a poisonous snake loose in the room. Some vowed he would never become President.
Meanwhile the Agency moved to pull itself together. That one deft bloodbath appeared to end things. There was no
Board of Inquiry as there was after the Bay of Pigs. And, remarkably, there was no public outcry as there would
be a few years later after the U-2 scandal. The agency was busy sweeping things under the rug.
Meanwhile those special B-26s were all flown back to the States and based at Elgin Air Force Base in Flonda. That
was late in 1958. By 1959 they began to stir again. A man named Castro had come to power in Cuba. During those
fateful days in April 1961 it was those same B-26s that the CIA used to attack Cuba.
This is the story that Dewi Sukarno is asking President Ford to explain to her and to the Indonesian people. Actually,
the 1958 civil war was child's play compared to the brutal bloodbath of 1965. Sukarno was in control after the
1958 disaster and he wrung a heavy tribute from the U.S. Government for its indiscretions. But in 1965 his game
ended, like Allende's in Chile, with defeat. An attempted communist coup d'etat was defeated by General Suharto.
Sukarno never made the great public statement that was to assure the success of the coup, and after its defeat
and the ensuing bloodbath, he was stripped of his power. After a few years of ignominious house arrest the hero
of all Indonesia died in 1970.
What was the story behind Nixon's harsh action against Wisner? Was that the deep-rooted reason why CIA top-echelon
insiders such as Dick Helms really hated and distrusted Nixon? In later years did they take out their grudge against
him with a piece of tape on a Watergate doorway? There may never be answers to these questions, or perhaps they
have been answered already. It is said that when the great volcanic mountain of Krakatoa in Indonesia blew up causing
the greatest explosion the world had ever known, the dust of Indonesia was spread all over the world. The holocausts
of 1958 and 1965 may have done the same thing.
_______
1. the following is an excerpt from an interview conducted with L. Fletcher Prouty on May 6, 1989, regarding his
book The Secret Team, The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, Prentice Hall, 1973.
This segment recounts Prouty's experience when he found out that some things he had been doing for years in support
of the CIA had not been known by the senior military officer in the armed forces -- the chairman of the JCS --
and that they had been done, most likely, in response to other authority. A transcript of this interview will be
published in 1998 by rat haus reality press as the book Understanding Special Operations.
Prouty: . . . Millions and millions of dollars were poured into that exercise -- a lot of people were involved
in it -- and it never went through any Air Force procurement. Now, the cleared individual -- the man in the team
-- in the procurement offices, made papers that covered up this gap. There were papers in the files but they had
never been worked on -- they were simple dummy papers in the files. Now, we could do things like that with no trouble
at all. The U2 was started like that. That's how the U2 got off the ground. Ostensibly, purchased by the Air Force,
but not paid for by the Air Force, and so on.
So, when I say that this team was quite effective, it was very effective, very strong, handled a lot of money,
worked all over the world, thousands of people were involved. I know, one time, when I was speaking to the Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at that time General Lemnitzer, he said, "You know, I've known of two or three
units in the Army that were supporting CIA. But you're talking about quite a few. How many were there?" Well,
at that time, there were 605. Well General Lemnitzer had no idea. It's amazing -- heres the top man in the military
and he had no idea that we were supporting that many CIA units. Not military units -- they were phony military
units. They were operating with military people but they were controlled entirely, they were financed by the CIA.
Six hundred and five of them. And I'm sure that from my day it increased; I know it didn't decrease.
So, people don't understand the size and the nature of this clandestine activity that is designed for clandestine
operations all over the world. And it goes back, again, to things we've spoken of earlier, that that activity must
be under somebody's control. There is no law for the control of covert operations other than at the National Security
Council level. And if the National Security Council does not sign the directives, issue the directives, for covert
operations, then nobody does. And that's when it becomes a shambles as we saw in the Contra affair and in other
things. But when the National Security Council steps in and directs it and holds that control, then things are
run properly. And we've seen that during the last decade theres been quite a few aberrations where they were talking
about Iran or Latin America or even part of the Vietnam War itself. In fact, it was in the Vietnam War where the
thing really began to come apart -- it just outgrew itself and the leadership role disintegrated. And we see the
worst of it in the Iran-Contra affair.
Ratcliffe: Following on that you write about Dulles being able to "move them up and deeper into their cover
jobs" -- would this be a function of them being there longer than the people who would be promoted to something
else in time?
Prouty: Yes. When we put them in, they might be somebody's assistant. And they've been there for three years and
the man that was above them, who was probably a political appointee, leaves and they might move this man up there.
Or when a newer political appointee comes, he has no knowledge that this man is really from CIA. He's just a strong
person in his office and he gives him a broader role. Sometimes these people (chuckling) were working -- well,
one man I know was in FAA and we needed his work to help us with FAA as a focal point there. He'd been there so
long the FEA had him in a very big, very responsible job, and you might say 90% of his work was regular FAA work.
A very strong individual. Well, that meant that when we needed him to help us with some of our activities on the
covert side of things, he was in a much better position to handle this than he had been originally.
This happened with quite a few of them. That's why I say in the case of Frank Hand, he had been in the Defense
Department so long that he was able to handle really major operations that weren't even visualized at the time
he was assigned. All this carries over into many other things. I pointed out that the Office of Special Operations
under General Erskine had the responsibility for the National Security Agency as well as CIA contacts and the State
Department, and so on. Well, as we filled up these positions, some of them became dominant in some those organizations,
such as NSA.
Early people in this program have created quite a career for themselves in other work. For instance, a young man
in this system was Major Haig. Major Al Haig. He went up through the system. He was working as a deputy to the
Army's cleared Focal Point Officer for Agency support matters who was the General Counsel in the Army, a man named
Joe Califano -- a very prominent lawyer today. When the General Counsel of the Army was moved up into the office
of Secretary of Defense later -- in McNamara's office -- he carried with him this then-Lieutenant Colonel Al Haig
up to the office of Secretary of Defense. And during the Johnson Administration when they moved to the White House,
Califano and Haig moved to the White House. Then during the Nixon time, Haig with all his experience in the White
House worked with Kissinger. And you can see that it was this attachment through the covert side which gave Haig
his ability to do an awful lot of things that people didn't understand, because he had this whole team behind him.
To be even more up-to-date, there was a Major Secord in our system. And Major Secord is the same General Secord
you've been reading about in the Iran-Contra business.
A lot of these people worked right up into the White House. And there were these same assigned people even at the
White House level that really were working on this CIA covert work rather than the jobs that they seemed to hold,
that the public understood was the job that they were working for. It's a much more effective system than people
have thought it was. . . .
Ratcliffe: You describe what seems to be a very enlightening day -- an event in 1960 or 1961 when you briefed "the
Chairman of the JCS on a matter that had come up involving the CIA and the military." [p.257] As you described
it:
The chairman was General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, and his commandant was General David M. Shoup. They were close friends
and had known each other for years. When the primary subject of the briefing had ended General Lemnitzer asked
me about the Army cover unit that was involved in the operation. I explained what its role was and more or less
added that this was a rather routine matter. Then he said, "Prouty, if this is routine, yet General Shoup
and I have never heard of it before, can you tell me in round numbers how many Army units there are that exist
as `cover` for the CIA?" I replied that to my knowledge at that time there were about 605 such units, some
real, some mixed, and some that were simply telephone drops. When he heard that he turned to General Shoup and
said, "You know, I realized that we provided cover for the Agency from time to time; but I never knew that
we had anywhere near so many permanent cover units and that they existed all over the world."
I then asked General Lemnitzer if I might ask him a question. He said I could. "General", I said, "during
all of my military career I have done one thing or another at the direction of a senior officer. In all those years
and in all of those circumstances I have always believed that someone, either at the level of the officer who told
me to do what I was doing or further up the chain of command, knew why I was doing what I had been directed to
do and that he knew what the reason for doing it was. Now I am speaking to the senior military officer in the armed
forces and I have just found out that some things I have been doing for years in support of the CIA have not been
known and that they have been done, most likely, in response to other authority. Is this correct?"
This started a friendly, informal, and most enlightening conversation, more or less to the effect that where the
CIA was concerned there were a lot of things no one seemed to know. [p.258]
Can you recount more of the details of this enlightening conversation for us?
Prouty: Well, you know I referred to it earlier. It astounded me, that day. I assumed that there were a lot things
that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was not aware of every day in the Air Force, in the Navy, and in
the CIA. But I had never expected such a blanket answer, that he didn't know, and that General Shoup didn't. Now,
what we were talking about was rather specific.
At the time of the rebellion in Indonesia when the CIA supported tens of thousands of troops with aircraft, and
ships, submarines, and everything else, in an attempt to overthrow the government of Sukarno, we needed rifles
pretty quick to support these rebels and I called out to Okinawa and found out that the Army didn't have enough
rifles for what we wanted. We wanted about 42,000 rifles and they had about 28,000. But that he said he thought
he could get -- General Lemnitzer was a Commander at that time in Okinawa. So he was right up close to this thing.
He said that he'd have somebody call the Marine Corps and see what he could get from them. Well, it just happened
that General Shoup was the head of the Marine unit at Okinawa and he said, sure, he could provide the extra 14,000.
So without delay, we had 4-engine aircraft -- C-54's- -flown by Air America crews but under military cover -- appeared
to be military aircraft -- come into Okinawa, pick up these 42,000 rifles, prepared for air drop in Indonesia.
They'd fly down to the Philippines and then down to another base we had and then over into Indonesia and drop these
rifles.
Well of course, we replaced those rifles. The General didn't know where they were going, we just borrowed them,
and the unit that borrowed them was military and the call had come from the Pentagon. There was no problem with
supplying the rifles. So years later, we replaced them. Well then when I told him about that in the Pentagon, he
said he never knew where those rifles went and General Shoup said, "you know, Lem, when you asked me for 14,000
rifles, I thought you wanted them and, of course, being a good Marine, I gave you 14,000 rifles." He said,
"you owe me 14,000." They were sitting there kidding but they never knew they went to Indonesia. You
see, they never knew they were part of a covert operation going into Indonesia.
Well, this is true of a lot of things that go on. We kept the books in the Pentagon. We covered that. We got reimbursement
for it. That part of it was all right. And that's what kept it from being a problem because as long as General
Lemnitzer's forces got the 28,000 rifles back and Shoup got the 14,000 back for the total of 42,000, they didn't
complain to anybody. They had their full strength of rifles. That's the magic of reimbursement.
Well, his kind of thing, on an established basis -- the units are there -- when I said there are 605 units, those
are operating units- -now, some of them may only be telephone drops, because that's their function, they don't
need a whole lot of people, they're just handling supplies, or something like that. But put this in present terms.
When Colonel North believed that he had been ordered to take 2,008 Toe missiles and deliver them to Iran -- see?
-- there has to be some way that the supply system can let those go. You can't just drive down there with a truck
to San Antonio at the warehouse, and say, "I want 2,008 missiles." You have to have authority. And 2,008
Toe missiles -- I don't know what one of them costs, but it's an awful lot of money, and somebody had to prepare
the paperwork for the authorization to let the supply officer release those. And I'm sure they went to a cover
unit that North was using for that purpose. But it appears from what we've heard from this that, unlike the way
we used to run the cover operations, when these things got to Iran, these characters sold them them for money.
In fact, they sold them for almost four times the listed value of these things.
And this is the problem Congress has been having -- is what happened to the money after they got there. And you
can see how the system developed. You see, originally, we developed it on this one-for-one basis. Another thing
is we never used this kind of supply, to deliver grenades to the Contras and charge them $9.00 a grenade or whatever
it was. We just delivered the grenades. It was part of a Government program. And the CIA would reimburse the Defense
Department. Everything came out even. We didn't "sell" anything.
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