Introduction
IN MAY 1962, A YOUNG girl named Ing Giok Tan got on a rusty old boat in Jakarta, Indonesia. Her country, one of the largest in the world, had been pulled into the global battle between capitalism and communism, and her parents decided to flee the terrible consequences that conflict had wrought for families like hers. They set sail for Brazil, having heard from other Indonesians who had already made the journey that this place offered freedom, opportunity, and respite from conflict. But they knew almost nothing about it. Brazil was just an idea for them, and it was very far away. Suffering through anxiety and seasickness for forty-five days, they made their way past Singapore, across the Indian Ocean to Mauritius, down past Mozambique, around South Africa, and then all the way across the Atlantic to São Paulo, the largest city in South America.
If they thought they could escape the violence of the Cold War, they were tragically mistaken. Two years after they arrived, the military overthrew Brazil’s young democracy and established a violent dictatorship. After that, the new Indonesian immigrants in Brazil received messages from home describing the most shocking scenes imaginable, an explosion of violence so terrifying that even discussing what happened would make people break down, questioning their own sanity. But the reports were all true. In the wake of that apocalyptic slaughter in Indonesia, a young nation littered with mutilated bodies emerged as one of Washington’s most reliable allies, and then largely disappeared from history.
What happened in Brazil in 1964 and Indonesia in 1965 may have been the most important victories of the Cold War for the side that ultimately won—that is, the United States and the global economic system now in operation. As such, they are among the most important events in a process that has fundamentally shaped life for almost everyone. Both countries had been independent, standing somewhere in between the world’s capitalist and communist superpowers, but fell decisively into the US camp in the middle of the 1960s.
Officials in Washington and journalists in New York certainly understood how significant these events were at the time. They knew that Indonesia, now the world’s fourth most-populous country, was a far more important prize than Vietnam ever could have been.1In just a few months, the US foreign policy establishment achieved there what it failed to get done in ten bloody years of war in Indochina.
And the dictatorship in Brazil, currently the world’s fifth most-populous country, played a crucial role in pushing the rest of South America into the pro-Washington, anticommunist group of nations. In both countries, the Soviet Union was barely involved.
Most shockingly, and most importantly for this book, the two events led to the creation of a monstrous international network of extermination—that is, the systematic mass murder of civilians—across many more countries, which played a fundamental role in building the world we all live in today.
Unless you are Indonesian, or a specialist on the topic, most people know very little about Indonesia, and almost nothing about what happened in 1965–66 in that archipelago nation. Indonesia remains a huge gap in our collective general knowledge, even among people who do know a little about the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the Korean War, or Pol Pot, or can easily rattle off some basic facts about the world’s most-populous country (China), the second most-populous (India), or even numbers six and seven (Pakistan and Nigeria). Even among international journalists, few people know that Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, let alone that in 1965, it was home to the world’s largest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union and China.
The truth of the violence of 1965–66 remained hidden for decades. The dictatorship established in its wake told the world a lie, and survivors were imprisoned or too terrified to speak out. It is only as a result of the efforts of heroic Indonesian activists and dedicated scholars around the world that we can now tell the story. Documents recently declassified in Washington have been a huge help, though some of what happened still remains shrouded in mystery.
Indonesia likely fell off the proverbial map because the events of 1965– 1966 were such a complete success for Washington. No US soldiers died, and no one at home was ever in danger. Although Indonesian leaders in the 1950s and 1960s had played a huge international role, after 1966 the country stopped rocking the boat entirely. I know from thirteen years of working as a foreign correspondent and journalist that faraway countries that are stable and reliably pro-American do not make headlines. And personally, after going through the documentation and spending a lot of time with the people who lived through these events, I came to form another, deeply unsettling theory as to why these episodes have been forgotten. I fear that the truth of what happened contradicts so forcefully our idea of what the Cold War was, of what it means to be an American, or how globalization has taken place, that it has simply been easier to ignore it.
This book is for those who have no special knowledge of Indonesia, or Brazil, or Chile or Guatemala or the Cold War, though I hope that my interviews, archival research, and global approach may have delivered some discoveries that may be interesting for the experts too. Most of all I hope this story can get to people who want to know how violence and the war against communism intimately shaped our lives today—whether you are sitting in Rio de Janeiro, Bali, New York, or Lagos.
Two events in my own life convinced me that the events of the mid-1960s are very much still with us. That their ghosts still haunt the world, so to speak.
In 2016, I was working my sixth and final year as Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and I was walking the halls of Congress in Brasília. Lawmakers in the world’s third-largest democracy were preparing to vote on whether they would impeach President Dilma Rousseff, a former left-wing guerrilla and the country’s first female president. Down the corridor, I recognized an unimportant but reliably outspoken far-right congressman by the name of Jair Bolsonaro, so I approached him for a quick interview. It was widely known by that point that political rivals were trying to bring President Rousseff down on a technicality, and that those organizing her ouster were guilty of far more corruption than she was.2 Because I was a foreign journalist, I asked Bolsonaro if he worried the international community might doubt the legitimacy of the more conservative government that was set to replace her, given the questionable proceedings that day. The answers he gave me seemed so far outside the mainstream, such a complete resurrection of Cold War phantoms, that I didn’t even use the interview. He said, “The world will celebrate what we do today, because we are stopping Brazil from turning into another North Korea.”
This was absurd. Rousseff was a center-left leader whose government had been, if anything, too friendly with huge corporations. A few moments later, Bolsonaro walked up to the microphone in the congressional chambers and made a declaration that shook the country. He dedicated his impeachment vote to Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the man who oversaw Rousseff’s own torture as a colonel during Brazil’s dictatorship. It was an outrageous provocation, an attempt to rehabilitate the country’s anticommunist military regime and to become the national symbol of far-right opposition to everything.3
When I interviewed Rousseff a few weeks later, as she waited for the final vote that would remove her from office, our conversation invariably turned to the role of the United States in Brazil’s affairs. Considering the many times and ways Washington had intervened to overthrow governments in South America, many of her supporters wondered if the CIA was behind this one, too. She denied it: it was the result of Brazil’s internal dynamics.4 But that is, in its own way, even worse: Brazil’s dictatorship had transitioned to the type of democracy that could safely remove anyone—like Rousseff or Lula—whom the economic or political elites deemed a threat to their interests, and they could summon Cold War demons to go to battle for them when they pleased.
We now know the extent to which Bolsonaro’s gambit succeeded. When he was elected president two years later, I was in Rio. Fights immediately erupted in the streets. Big burly men started yelling at tattooed women who wore stickers supporting the rival candidate, screaming, “Communists! Get out! Communists! Get out!”
In 2017 I moved in the exact opposite direction that Ing Giok Tan and her family had so many years before. I relocated from São Paulo to Jakarta to cover Southeast Asia for the Washington Post. Just months after I arrived, a group of academics and activists planned to put on a low-key conference to discuss the events of 1965. But some people were spreading the accusation on social media that this was actually a meeting to resurrect communism— still illegal in the country, over fifty years later—and a mob made their way toward the event that night, not long after I had left. Groups composed largely of Islamist men, now common participants in aggressive Jakarta street demonstrations, surrounded the building and trapped everyone inside. My roommate, Niken, a young labor organizer from Central Java, was held captive there all night, as the mob pounded on the walls, chanting, “Crush the communists!” and “Burn them alive!” She sent me texts, terrified, asking for me to publicize what was happening, so I did so on Twitter. It didn’t take long for that to generate threats and accusations that I was a communist, or even a member of Indonesia’s nonexistent Communist Party. I had become used to receiving exactly these kinds of messages in South America. The similarities were no coincidence. The paranoia in both places can be traced back to a traumatic rupture in the middle of the 1960s.
But it was only after I began work on this book, speaking with experts and witnesses and survivors, that I realized the significance of the two historical events was much greater than the fact that violent anticommunism still exists in Brazil, Indonesia, and many other countries, and that the Cold War created a world of regimes that see any social reform as a threat. I came to the conclusion that the entire world, and especially the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America that Ing Giok sailed past with her family, has been reshaped by the waves emanating from Brazil and Indonesia in 1964 and 1965.
I felt a heavy moral responsibility to research that story, and tell it right. In one sense, doing so is the culmination of over a decade of work. But specifically for this book, I visited twelve countries and interviewed over one hundred people, in Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Indonesian. I pored through the archives in the same number of languages, spoke to historians around the world, and did work with research assistants in five countries. I didn’t have a lot of resources to write this book, but I gave it everything I had.
The violence that took place in Brazil, and Indonesia, and twenty other countries around the world, was not accidental, or incidental to the main events of world history. The deaths were not “cold-blooded and meaningless,” just tragic errors that didn’t change anything.5 Precisely the opposite. The violence was effective, a fundamental part of a larger process. Without a full view of the Cold War and US goals worldwide, the events are unbelievable, unintelligible, or very difficult to process.
The remarkable film The Act of Killing, by Joshua Oppenheimer, and its sequel, The Look of Silence, smashed open the black box surrounding 1965 in Indonesia, and forced people in the country and around the world to look inside. Oppenheimer’s masterful work employs an extreme close-up approach. I purposefully took the opposite approach, zooming out to the global stage, in the attempt to be complementary. I hope viewers of those films pick up this book to put them in context, and I hope readers will watch those films after they finish. I also owe Joshua a small personal debt for guiding my early research, but I owe much more to Indonesians and other historians, most of all Baskara Wardaya, Febriana Firdaus, and Bradley Simpson.
I decided that to really tell the story of these events and their repercussions—that is, the global extermination network they engendered— I had to try to somehow tell the wider story of the Cold War. It’s very often forgotten that violent anticommunism was a global force, and that its protagonists worked across borders, learning from successes and failures elsewhere as their movement picked up steam and racked up victories. To understand what happened, we have to understand these international collaborations.
This is also the story of a few individuals, some from the US, some from Indonesia, and some from Latin America, who lived through these events, and whose lives were changed profoundly by them. My choice of focus, and the connections that I saw, were probably dictated to some extent by the people I was lucky enough to meet, and by my own background and language skills, but as far as I’m concerned, their story is just as much the story of the Cold War as any other is, certainly more so than any story of the Cold War that is focused primarily on white people in the United States and Europe.6
The story I tell here is based on declassified information, the consensus formed by the most knowledgeable historians, and overwhelming first person testimony. I rely extensively on my own interviews with survivors, and of course I was not able to check every single one of the claims regarding their own lives, such as what things felt like, what they were wearing, or what date they were arrested. But none of the details I include contradict the established facts or the larger story that historians have already uncovered. To tell it as accurately as possible, to be faithful to the evidence and respectful to those who lived through it, I found it had to be done a certain way. First, the story is truly global; every life on Earth is treated as equally important, and no nations or actors are viewed, a priori, as the good or bad guys. Secondly, we’ve all heard the maxim that “history is written by the victors.” This is usually, unfortunately, true. But this story by necessity pushes back against that tendency—many of the people at its center were some of the biggest losers of the twentieth century—and we cannot be afraid to let the facts of their lives contradict accepted popular understandings of the Cold War in the English-speaking world, even if those contradictions may be very uncomfortable for the winners. And finally, I avoid speculation entirely, resisting any urge to try to tackle the many unsolved mysteries by myself. We have to accept there’s a lot we still don’t know.
So this book does not rely on guessing. In the moments when my colleagues and I stumbled onto what seemed like big coincidences— seemingly too big, perhaps—or connections we couldn’t explain, we stopped there and discussed them; we didn’t just pick our own theory as to what caused them.
And we certainly did stumble onto some connections.
1
A New American Age
THE UNITED STATES, A WESTERN European settler colony in North America, emerged from World War II as by far the most powerful state on Earth. This was a surprise to most Americans, and to most of the world.
It was a young country. It was only about a hundred years previously that the government set up in former British colonies finished incorporating former French and Spanish territories into the new country, giving its leaders dominion over the middle strip of the continent. In comparison, their cousins back in Europe had been conquering the globe for almost five centuries. They had sailed around the planet, carving it up for themselves.
To say that the United States is a settler colony means that the land was overtaken by white Europeans over the course of several centuries in a way that differed from the way that most countries in Africa and Asia were conquered. The white settlers came to stay, and the native population was excluded, by definition, from the nation they built. In order for the new white and Christian country to take form, the indigenous population had to get out of the way.
As every American boy and girl learns, there was a strong element of religious fanaticism involved in the founding of the United States. The Puritans, a group of committed English Christians, did not travel across the Atlantic to make money for England. They sought a place for a purer, more disciplined version of the Calvinist society they wanted to build. One way to put this is that they wanted religious freedom. Another is that they wanted a society that was even more homogeneous, fundamentalist, and theocratic than the one that existed in seventeenth-century Europe.1
In the late 1700s, the leaders of the British colonies expelled the monarchy in a revolutionary war and created a remarkably effective system of self-governance that exists in slightly modified form today. Internationally, the country came to represent and champion revolutionary, democratic ideals. But internally, things were much more complicated. The United States remained a brutally white supremacist society. The consequence of the a priori dismissal of the native population was genocide.
Throughout the Americas, from Canada down to Argentina, European colonization killed between fifty million and seventy million indigenous people, around 90 percent of the native American population. Scientists recently concluded that the annihilation of these peoples was so large that it changed the temperature of the planet.2In the new United States of America, the destruction of the local peoples continued long after the declaration of independence from British rule. US citizens continued to buy, sell, whip, torture, and own persons of African descent until the middle of the nineteenth century. Women were only given the right to vote nationwide in 1920. They could actually do so, however, while the theoretical voting rights granted to black Americans were beaten back by racist terror campaigns and laws that were meant to exclude them from real citizenship. When the United States entered World War II, it was what we would now consider an apartheid society.3
In that war, however, the better angels of American nature came to the fore. It wasn’t always clear that would be the case. In the 1930s, some Americans even sympathized with the Nazis, a hyper-militaristic, genocidal, and proudly racist authoritarian party governing Germany. In 1941, a senator from Missouri named Harry S. Truman said, “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”4 But when the US did join World War II, in an alliance with the British, French, and Russians against the Germans and Japanese, its troops fought to liberate prisoners from death camps and save Western Europe’s limited democracies from tyranny. Apart from five hundred thousand who tragically lost their lives, a generation of American boys came back from that war rightfully proud of what they had done—they had looked an entirely evil system in the face, stood up for the values their country was built on, and they had won.
The end of World War II was the beginning of a new global order. Europe was weakened, and the planet was broken into pieces.
Three Worlds
The second most-powerful country in the world in 1945, the Soviet Union, also emerged as a victor in that war. The Soviets were intensely proud too, but their population had been devastated. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party, despised their left-wing ideology and led a brutal invasion into their territory. Before the Soviets finally pushed them back—at Stalingrad in 1943, probably the turning point in the war, a year before the Americans landed in Europe—they had already suffered catastrophic losses. By the time the Red Army reached Berlin in 1945, occupying much of Central and Eastern Europe in the process, at least twenty-seven million Soviet citizens had died.5
The Soviet Union was an even younger country than the United States. It was founded in 1917 by a small group of radical intellectuals inspired by German philosopher Karl Marx, after a revolution overthrew a decrepit Russian monarchy ruling over an empire that largely consisted of impoverished peasants, and that was considered backward compared to the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe, where Marx—and Vladimir Lenin, the first Soviet leader—actually thought the world socialist revolution was supposed to start.
These revolutionaries faced a civil war from 1918 to 1920, and employed what the Bolsheviks themselves called “terror” to defeat the White forces, a loose coalition of conservatives, Russian nationalists, and anticommunists, who were also engaging in mass murder. After Lenin died in 1924, his ruthless successor, Joseph Stalin, forcefully collectivized agricultural production, built a centrally planned economy, and used mass imprisonment and execution to deal with his real and perceived enemies. Millions died as a result in the 1930s, including some of the original architects of the revolution, and Stalin shifted the official ideology of the international Communist movement back and forth to suit his own political needs. But much of the worst of this remained secret. Instead, the Soviet Union’s rapid industrialization and subsequent defeat of the Nazis—as well as the fact that it was communists who often resisted both fascism and colonialism earliest and most forcefully around the world—gave it significant global prestige in 1945.6
The Soviets became the world’s second “superpower,” but they were far weaker than the United States in every way that counts. By the late 1940s, the US produced a full half of the world’s manufactured goods. By 1950, the US economy was probably as big as all of Europe and the Soviet Union combined.7 As for military strength, the Soviet population had been decimated, and this was especially true for those who could be called on to fight in any war. Even though hundreds of thousands of Soviet women bravely fought the Nazis, the gender imbalance in 1945 drives home the devastation. By 1945, there were only seven men for every ten women between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine.8 The US had superior military power, and demonstrated the apocalyptic damage it could unfurl from the air when it dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That is what we are talking about when we discuss the “First World” and the “Second World” in the years after 1945. The First World consisted of the rich countries in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan, all of which had gotten wealthy while engaging in colonialism. Their leading power, the United States, was late to that game, at least outside North America, but it certainly played. The young United States took control of the Louisiana territories, Florida, Texas, and the Southwest by waging war or threatening to attack.9 Then, Washington took over Hawaii after a group of businessmen overthrew Queen Liliuokalani in 1893, and gained control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in the Spanish American War of 1898. The Philippines, the second-largest country in Southeast Asia, remained a formal colony until 1945, while Cuba moved into the informal US sphere of influence in Central America and the Caribbean—where US Marines intervened a dizzying twenty times, at least, by 1920—and Puerto Rico remains in imperial limbo to this day.10
The “Second World” was the Soviet Union and the European territories where the Red Army had set up camp. Since its founding, the USSR had publicly aligned itself with the global anticolonial struggle and had not engaged in overseas imperialism, but the world was watching how Moscow would exert influence over the occupied nations of Central and Eastern Europe.
And then there was the “Third World”—everyone else, the vast majority of the world’s population. That term was coined in the early 1950s, and originally, all of its connotations were positive. When the leaders of these new nation-states took up the term, they spoke it with pride; it contained a dream of a better future in which the world’s downtrodden and enslaved masses would take control of their own destiny. The term was used in the sense of the “Third Estate” during the French Revolution, the revolutionary common people who would overthrow the First and Second Estates of the monarchy and the clergy. “Third” did not mean third-rate, but something more like the third and final act: the first group of rich white countries had their crack at creating the world, as did the second, and this was the new movement, full of energy and potential, just waiting to be unleashed. For much of the planet, the Third World was not just a category; it was a movement.11
In 1950, more than two-thirds of the world’s population lived in the Third World, and with few exceptions, these peoples had lived under the control of European colonialism.12 Some of these countries had managed to break free of imperial rule in the nineteenth century; some earned their independence when fascist forces retreated at the end of World War II; some attempted to do so in 1945, only to be re-invaded by First World armies; and for many others, the war had changed little, and they were still unfree. All of them inherited economies that were far, far poorer than those in the First World. Centuries of slavery and brutal exploitation had left them to fend for themselves, and decide how they would try to forge a path to independence and prosperity.
The simple version of the next part of this story is that newly independent countries in the Third World had to fight off imperial counterattacks, and then choose if they would follow the capitalist model favored by the United States and Western Europe or attempt to build socialism and follow in the footsteps of the Soviet Union, hopefully moving from poverty to a position of global importance just as quickly as the Russians had. But it was more complicated than that. In 1945, it was still possible to believe they could be friendly with both Washington and Moscow.
A Vietnamese man named Ho Chi Minh, who had previously worked as a photo retoucher in Paris and as a baker in the United States, embraced revolutionary Marxism after he blamed the Western capitalist powers for refusing to acknowledge Vietnamese sovereignty at the Versailles Peace Conference following World War I.13 He became an agent for the Communist International before he led the Viet Minh resistance movement against the Japanese occupation in the 1940s. But when he arrived at the Ba Đình flower garden in downtown Hanoi after the two nuclear strikes on Japan by the US to declare independence on August 17, 1945, he opened with the following words: “‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.”14
He was celebrating the revolutionary ideals that America’s Founding Fathers had bequeathed to the USA, and that its leaders still deeply believed in. He was trying to tell the world that the Vietnamese only wanted what any other people wanted, that is, the right to govern themselves. He was also trying to survive in a very desperate situation. The French colonial army was on its way back to assert white rule over Indochina, and he knew that the last thing he needed was the most powerful country in human history also committed to crushing his independence movement. He was appealing directly to the stated values of the American people, just like many other leftists around the Third World did at the time.
After all, the United States had allied with the Soviet Union against Hitler. For the powerful men in that nation’s capital, however, things were changing very quickly.
Washington’s anticommunist crusade had actually started well before World War II. Just after the Russian Revolution, President Woodrow Wilson chose to join the other imperial powers in helping the White forces attempt to retake control from the Bolshevik revolutionaries. For two reasons. First, the core, foundational American ideology is something like the exact opposite of communism.15 Strong emphasis is placed on the individual, not the collective, and an idea of freedom that is strongly linked to the right to own things. This had been, after all, the basis for full citizenship in the early American republic: only white men with property could vote. And secondly, Moscow presented itself as a geopolitical and ideological rival, an alternative way that poor peoples could rise into modernity without replicating the American experience.16 But in the years just after World War II, a series of events brought anticommunism to the very center of American politics, in an intensely fanatical new form.
Actually Existing Anticommunism
It started in Europe, in areas ravaged by World War II. It did not please leaders in Washington that Communist parties won the first postwar elections in both France and Italy.17 In Greece, communist-led guerrillas who had fought the Nazis refused to disarm or recognize the government set up under British supervision, and civil war broke out. Then there was West Asia. In Turkey, the victorious Soviets demanded naval bases at the Strait of Hormuz, sparking a small political crisis. In Iran, the northern half of which had been under Soviet control since 1941 (per agreement with the Western Allies), the Communist-led Tudeh Party had become the largest and best-organized political group in the country, and ethnic minorities were demanding independence from the Shah, or king, installed by the British.
President Truman had much less patience for the Soviet Union than his predecessor, and he was looking for a way to confront Stalin. Greece and Turkey gave it to him. In March 1947, he asked Congress for civilian and military support to those countries in a special address that outlined what would be known as the Truman Doctrine.
“The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists,” he said. “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”18
Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had given some advice to Truman—in order to get what they wanted, the White House had to “scare the hell out of the American people” about communism. Truman took that advice, and it worked wonders. The anticommunist rhetoric only intensified, as the nature of the US political system provided clear incentives for its escalation. After Truman was re elected in 1948, it just made political sense for the defeated Republican Party to accuse him of being “soft on communism,” even though he was nothing of the sort.19
The specific kind of anticommunism that took shape in these years was partly based on value judgments: the widespread belief in the United States that communism was simply a bad system, or morally repugnant even when effective. But it was also based on a number of assertions about the nature of Soviet-led international communism. There was widespread belief that Stalin wanted to invade Western Europe. It became accepted as fact that the Soviets were pushing for revolution worldwide, and that whenever communists were present, even in small numbers, they probably had secret plans to overthrow the government. And it was considered gospel that anywhere communists were acting, they were doing so on the orders of the Soviet Union, part of a monolithic global conspiracy to destroy the West. Most of this was simply untrue. Much of the rest was greatly exaggerated.
The case of Greece, the conflict Truman used essentially to launch the Cold War, is an important example. Stalin actually instructed the Greek communists to stand down and let the British-backed government take control after the Nazis left.20 The Greek communists refused to heed his instructions. Fighting a right-wing government that wanted to annihilate them was more important to them than any loyalty to the Soviet Union. Similarly, the Soviet leader told the Italian and French Communists to lay down their arms (they did), and asked Yugoslavia’s communist forces to stop supporting their Greek comrades, cede control of their country, and merge with Bulgaria (Yugoslavia’s leader, Josip Tito, did not, causing such a huge rift that Stalin tried to kill him).21 The leaders of Iran’s Tudeh Party thought their country was ripe for revolution after World War II, but the Soviets told them to try no such thing, and the USSR had already decided by 1946 that Turkey was not worth the trouble. The Soviet leader had no plans to invade Western Europe. Stalin of course did not back off in those parts of the world out of some generosity of spirit or his deep respect for the right of national self-determination. He did so because he had made a deal with the Western powers at Yalta, and he was too afraid of antagonizing the United States to violate it. He was surprised to see that Washington acted as if he had antagonized them anyway.22
The right-wing Greek government got the backing of the United States, which far preferred a British ally over leftist guerrillas, and employed a chemical called napalm for the first time in history to crush rebels who had fought against Hitler’s forces. The Royal Hellenic Air Force dropped the chemical poison over the verdant mountains of the Vitsi region, near the Albanian border. In Western Europe, the ancestral home of every US leader to date, Washington introduced the Marshall Plan, a brilliantly designed and magnificently effective economic aid package that put these rich countries on the path to American-style capitalist redevelopment.23
There existed many currents of socialism, Marxism, and communism in the world, and even parties that were theoretically loyal to the Soviet Union acted independently when they saw fit. And Marxism as a guiding ideology, including in the Marxist-Leninist formulation cemented by Stalin, certainly did not prescribe that everyone everywhere make revolution at all times. In their worldview, you certainly didn’t get socialism just because you wanted it.
Before Marx himself started writing, there was already a tradition of “utopian socialists.” One of the main points of Marxism was to reject the idea that you could simply will the world you want into existence, and Marx laid out a theory in which societies moved forward through conflict between economic classes. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Friedrich Engels praised capitalism as a revolutionary force, saying that the emergence of the bourgeoisie had liberated humanity from the bonds of feudalism and unleashed powers hitherto unseen. He predicted that the capitalist mode of production would lead to the growth of a working class, which would then overthrow these bourgeois masters in the advanced capitalist countries. This is not how it actually worked out in Europe, but the Soviets still believed in the theory, and in the primacy of class development and economic relations. You had to get through capitalism to get to socialism, their theory went.
Well before the Russian Revolution, some Marxist parties in Europe, such as the Social Democrats in Germany, rejected the revolutionary path and committed themselves to forwarding the interests of the working class within parliamentary electoral systems. Even among the explicitly pro Soviet parties in the new Communist International, or “Comintern,” active from 1919 to 1943, applications of the official ideology varied, and the way that they actually acted was usually based on some combination of the possibilities offered by their local conditions, an interpretation of Marxist orthodoxy, and geopolitical concerns.24
The case of Mao Zedong in China is an important example. The Comintern provided training to both his Communist Party and the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, directing them to organize along Leninist lines, meaning that they would be strictly disciplined and governed by the principle of “democratic centralism.” The Chinese Communists were ordered by Moscow to work directly with the Nationalists in a broad “United Front,” a concept that the Comintern itself had developed.25 It was believed that because China was such an impoverished peasant society, the country was nowhere near the state of capitalist development that would make revolution possible.
The experiences of an older Communist Party inspired this approach. A Dutchman named Henk Sneevliet, the local Comintern boss, had helped found Asia’s first Communist Party outside the former Russian Empire— the Indonesian Communist Party—and thought the Chinese party could learn from the success that Indonesian Communists had working with the Islamic Union mass movement.26 Mao’s job was to support the “bourgeois” Nationalists, and play a secondary role in the construction of a capitalist nation. A loyal Communist, Mao obeyed. This did not work out so well for the Chinese Communists. In 1927, Chiang turned on them. Starting with a massacre in Shanghai, Nationalist troops killed more than one million people, taking aim at Communists, peasant leaders, and organizers, across the country in a wave of “White Terror” over the next few years.27 The Chinese Communists and the Nationalists teamed up again to fight off the occupying Japanese until the end of World War II, and afterward, Stalin ordered the Communists to stand down again.28
In Eastern Europe, Stalin took a very different approach, as he considered this area his rightful sphere of influence, because his troops had taken it from Hitler, and an important buffer against possible invasion from the West. After the announcement of the Truman Doctrine and the beginning of the Marshall Plan, Moscow engineered a communist coup in Czechoslovakia. The Western powers did not play fair in the territory their armies had occupied, either. After it became clear that so many Italians and French wanted to vote freely for Communist parties, the US intervened heavily in Western Europe to make sure that the leftists didn’t take over. In Paris, the government, which was heavily dependent on US financial aid, ousted all its Communist ministers in 1947.29 In Italy the US funneled millions of dollars to the Christian Democratic Party and spent millions more on anticommunist propaganda. Big stars like Frank Sinatra and Gary Cooper recorded spots for the US government’s Voice of America radio station. Washington organized a huge writing campaign from Italian Americans to friends and relatives back in the home country, with form letters including messages such as “A communist victory would ruin Italy. The United States would withdraw aid and a world war would probably result” and “If the forces of true democracy should lose in the Italian election, the American Government will not send any more money to Italy.”30 The Communists lost.
By the end of the 1940s all of the area that had been liberated by the Red Army consisted of one-party Communist states, and all of the area controlled by Western powers was capitalist with a pro-American orientation, regardless of what the people may have wanted in 1945.
After a famous Winston Churchill speech, many in the West began to say that Eastern European socialist states were behind an “Iron Curtain.” Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, whose party remained popular for decades, said that the United States was a nation led by ignorant “slaveholders” who now wanted to buy entire nations just as they had bought human beings.31 Stalin, as a Marxist-Leninist, certainly thought that communism would eventually win. The laws of history made that inevitable. But for that very reason—and because the Soviets had been so weakened by the war—he had no intention of invading Western Europe. He thought that the next world war would break out between the imperialist Western powers, as his own theories seemed to indicate.32
But in China, Mao decided to ignore Stalin’s directives this time, continuing to wage a civil war after the end of World War II. In 1949, he finally defeated the Nationalists, whose venality, brutality, and incompetence had long troubled their backers in Washington. Like Ho Chi Minh in August 1945, Mao had also been under the illusion that he could have good relations with the United States. He was wrong, of course.33 After his victory, the emergency of “Red China” led to violent recriminations back in the United States.
Global McCarthyism
McCarthyism is named after Senator Joseph McCarthy, who led a wild search for communists in the US government in the early 1950s, but it’s best understood as a process that started before that man famously began drunkenly berating people in front of the entire nation, and its consequences extended long after he was exposed as a liar.34 The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began its activities in 1938, and only finished in 1975. The famous public trials weren’t simply “witch hunts,” in which mobs went after entities that don’t exist; there really were communists in the United States. They were active in labor unions, Hollywood, and some parts of the government, and the Communist Party USA had attracted many black and Jewish members. They were never hugely popular in the 1930s, but what changed after World War II was that communists were no longer welcome at all.
McCarthyism was a top-down process, driven especially by the presidency and the FBI. In 1947, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been hugely influential in creating and disseminating the anticommunist consensus, addressed HUAC and gave voice to some of the fundamental assumptions of that ethos.35 He said that communists planned to organize a military revolt in the country, which would culminate in the extermination of the police forces and the seizure of all communications. He said:
One thing is certain. The American progress which all good citizens seek, such as old-age security, houses for veterans, child assistance, and a host of others, is being deployed as window dressing by the Communists to conceal their true aims and entrap gullible followers. … The numerical strength of the party’s enrolled membership is insignificant… for every party member there are ten others ready, willing, and able to do the party’s work.… There is no doubt as to where a real Communist’s loyalty rests. Their allegiance is to Russia.36
Hoover had presented a logical death trap. If anyone accuses you of being communist, or communist-adjacent, no defense is possible. If you are simply promoting mild social reform, well, that is exactly what a communist would do, in order to conceal their true motives. If your numbers are insignificant, that is only further proof of your deviousness, as your comrades are all lurking in the shadows. And if there are a lot of you, or you’re openly, proudly communist, that’s just as bad.
As McCarthyism took off, anything smelling even remotely like communism was expelled from polite American society. A young actor named Ronald Reagan imposed a loyalty oath on all the members of the Screen Actors Guild, the powerful union he led at the time. At the levels of government that mattered, everyone who remained was a fanatical anticommunist—which meant that some of the smartest experts in the State Department, the US diplomatic service, were purged. Because of the “loss” of China to communism, longtime Asia specialists in particular were accused of harboring left-wing sympathies.37 As one Brazilian historian puts it, the USA had not invented the ideology, but in the years after World War II, the country was transformed into the global “fortress of anticommunism,” expending considerable resources on promoting the cause, and serving as a reference and source of legitimacy for like-minded movements around the world.38
By the end of the 1940s, the lines defining the First and Second World had become relatively stable. What was still in flux, however, was the future of the Third World.
The Jakarta Axiom
After the Truman Doctrine and the beginning of McCarthyism, there was no question that communists, and communist governments, were the enemy of Washington. No matter what they hoped for in 1945, Ho Chi Minh and Mao were not going to be welcomed onto the world stage. It was not so clear, on the other hand, what the men running the US government would do with the growing wave of radical Third World movements that were opposed to European imperialism, were not communist, but resisted forming an explicit alliance with Washington against Moscow. This was a very common phenomenon. Many leaders of Third World independence movements associated the United States with its Western European imperialist allies; others believed the Soviet Union was an important friend in the struggle against colonialism. Even if they did not want to be ruled by the Soviets, they wanted as many allies as they could get.
In 1948, the outcome of a small power struggle in the former Dutch East Indies seemed to offer a solution. On the island of Java, independence forces were battling an army that had arrived from the Netherlands in the attempt to reconquer its colonies in Southeast Asia. They had lost this vast archipelago to the Japanese during World War II, and refused to recognize the government set up by locals in 1945. During the war of independence, right-leaning republican forces clashed with communists within the revolutionary movement around the city of Madiun, East Java. The communists were defeated, with the support of independence leader Sukarno, and the head of the Indonesian Communist Party was killed in what became known as the Madiun Affair.39 The huge nation that Sukarno would go on to lead after the Dutch were finally expelled in 1949, now called Indonesia, was seen as willing enough to put down communist uprisings to be of long-term advantage of the United States.
Under Truman, the US foreign policy establishment saw Sukarno’s nascent Indonesia as the axiomatic case of a sufficiently anticommunist anticolonial movement, and so the name of its capital, Jakarta, came to signify this principle of tolerance for neutral Third World nations. As Cold War historian Odd Arne Westad put it, Washington adopted the “Jakarta Axiom.”40
This position was not very stable, nor were the real-world actions of the United States satisfactory to the leaders of the new Third World. A young congressman from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy had the curiosity, ambition, and money to travel the world trying to get an idea of their attitudes, and what he got was an earful.
Jack Kennedy, or JFK, was a rare bird among the US elite. He was a Catholic, and he was much more than the “First Irish Brahmin”—he was the first member of American royalty to descend from the masses of people who had come to the country as impoverished immigrants rather than as colonizers.41 His father, Joseph Kennedy, had fought prejudice and probability to build a huge fortune in finance and real estate, and by the time young Jack went off to fight in World War II, he had been on a grand tour of Europe, swung through most of South America, and graduated from Harvard.
Joe Kennedy understood one fundamental truth about political power in the United States. You can buy it. He spent a “staggering sum” on Jack’s 1946 congressional race, according to one of his cousins. He told two reporters: “Politics is like war. It takes three things to win. The first is money and the second is money and the third is money.” Joe’s assistant liked to hand out cash in public toilets, just to be on the safe side.42 Jack, who like his father was considered a playboy by those who knew him, won easily. But US politics can’t run on money alone—he did also need to maintain public support. The nature of his working-class Catholic constituency pushed him a bit to the “liberal” side of the aisle, however, into an alliance with those who had supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.
But Jack certainly had no time for the reds. During his first campaign, he said, “The time has come when we must speak plainly on the great issue facing the world today. The issue is Soviet Russia.”43 He saw labor unions as self-serving and infiltrated by communists, and let their members know it in congressional hearings. And in 1954, when a special Senate committee recommended that Joseph McCarthy be condemned for breaking Senate rules, John F. Kennedy was the only Democrat not to vote against him.44 However, perhaps because he was so well traveled, or perhaps because he was Irish, and knew in some very small way what it felt like to come from a people who had been oppressed somewhere, JFK viewed the Third World differently from most of the Washington elites. While so many others saw any deviation from an explicit alliance with the US as communist subversion of the global order, JFK believed that emerging nations were insisting on their right to forge their own path, and that this was entirely understandable.
In 1951, he went on a trip to Morocco, Iran, Egypt, Indochina, Malaya, Burma, India, and Pakistan, and came to the conclusion that the United States had failed to understand the importance of “nationalistic passions… directed primarily against the Colonial policies of the West.”45
Later that year, he went on another one of his long jaunts, this time to Israel, Iran, Pakistan, Singapore, French Indochina, Korea, Japan, and Indonesia. He observed that the US “was definitely classed with the imperialist powers of Europe.” Washington desperately needed to align with the emerging nations, but that was difficult because Americans were “more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people.”46
Reflecting on the situation in Vietnam, he reported that the United States had “allied ourselves to the desperate effort of a French regime to hang on to the remnants of Empire.” He said, “If one thing was borne into me as a result of my experience in the Middle as well as the Far East, it is that Communism cannot be met effectively by merely the force of arms.”47
But it was in India that Jack and his brother Bobby really got a lecture from one of the world’s new class of leaders. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, like Gamal Abdel Nasser, who came to power in Egypt in 1952, favored the construction of a socialist society. Both these leaders rejected the Leninist model and wanted to forge their own path, but when push came to shove, they often preferred to align with the Soviets rather than with the Americans and their European allies. Even if he had known about the worst tragedies of the 1930s in the Soviet Union, it would be hard to blame Nehru for distrusting the Western powers. During World War II, British policies created a famine that took the lives of four million people.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill blamed the Indians for the famine his own government caused, saying it was their fault for “breeding like rabbits,” and asked why Gandhi—whom Churchill loathed—hadn’t died yet.48
When Jack and two younger siblings dined with Nehru in 1951, the Indian leader was imperious, acting bored and unimpressed, and only showed interest in their sister Pat, Bobby Kennedy reported. When JFK asked Nehru about Vietnam, the Indian leader dismissed the French war as an example of doomed colonialism, and said the US was pouring its aid money down a “bottomless hole.” He gently lectured the Kennedys, as if he were speaking to children, and Bobby wrote down in his notes, in an exasperated tone, that Nehru told them communism offered the people of the Third World “something to die for.” Bobby continued jotting down Nehru’s comments in his journal: “We [Americans] have only status quo to offer these people.”49
Smiling Jones and Wisner’s Weirdos
As the United States woke up to its position of unprecedented global power, there were a few ways its government could interact with the rest of the world. The president was in charge of the Department of War, or the Pentagon, which soon became the Department of Defense. There was the State Department, the US foreign ministry and diplomatic service, which had been in operation since 1789. But there was no dedicated spy service— there was no permanent institution engaged in gathering information abroad and licensed to carry out secret operations, covert action seeking to change the course of events around the world. The Americans did not have the centuries of experience running a global empire the British did, or even the experience of ongoing, self-defensive spycraft the Soviets inherited from the Russian Empire. But Washington created a new intelligence agency very quickly, using the country’s vast wealth to fund it generously and young men who cut their teeth abroad during World War II to staff it.
One of the most important new hires was Frank Wisner, who had a story he would tell every time he was trying to explain why he did what he did for the United States government. Wisner had flown into Romania in September 1944 to work as station chief for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the temporary spy agency that Washington set up during the war. Once there, he heard, and believed, that the Soviets were scheming to take control of the country, but his bosses back home were in no mood to hear that their allies were up to no good. In January 1945, Stalin ordered that thousands of men and women of German descent be taken back to the Soviet Union to be “mobilized for work.” Wisner knew some of them personally. As the forced evacuation began, he rode frantically around the city, as he told it, trying to save them. But he failed. Thousands of people were herded onto boxcars and sent to labor camps. According to his family, those scenes would haunt him for the rest of his troubled life.50
Wisner, sometimes just called “Wiz,” was born in 1909 to a wealthy family with a lot of land in Missouri, one of the states in the US South governed by Jim Crow laws, which discriminated against African Americans. He grew up in an insular, privileged household. As a child, he didn’t even put on his own clothes—he would lie down, raise his arms and legs, and his black maid would put his shirt and trousers on for him.51 Frank’s favorite book was Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, which told its story against the backdrop of the “Great Game” between the British and Russian Empires.52 Wiz was sent off to the aristocratic Woodberry Forest School in Virginia. He desperately lifted weights to add bulk to his wiry frame and was intensely competitive. At the University of Virginia, he was tapped to the join the Sevens, a secret society so baroque that it only revealed the names of its members at their death. He was intense, but could come alive, especially at parties liberally lubricated with alcohol. Wiz became a lawyer at a white shoe firm on Wall Street. Restless, and driven by an intense sense of moral purpose, he enlisted in the Navy a year before the Japanese attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor.53
The OSS liked to hire elite corporate lawyers from the best schools, and Wisner fit the bill. He got into the intelligence service with the help of an old professor, and took to the life like a fish to water. In Romania, he wasn’t only gathering information and attempting to save Germans. He was hobnobbing with royalty, drinking and dancing, living in a mansion, and doing magic tricks.54 He was also socializing alongside the more experienced Soviet agents. After he left Romania, it became clear that Russian spies had infiltrated his entire operation.55
Back on Wall Street after the war, Wisner was once more bored and listless. So he jumped at the opportunity to serve his country again, and to fight the communists.56 He took over a new covert operations organization innocuously named the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) and began activities in Berlin.
At the same time, a very different man named Howard Palfrey Jones, working in the opposite arm of the US foreign policy apparatus, arrived in Berlin along with Allen Dulles, Wisner’s old OSS boss. Jones was a diplomat and a veteran who had witnessed the brutality of German National Socialism early. On a trip to Germany in 1934, he was beaten by Nazi soldiers because he failed to salute the Nazi flag properly.57 He was already a grown man when World War II started, and served in Germany. Immediately after the war, he entered the State Department. Unlike Wisner, who was a die-hard crusader, Jones had an entirely different approach to the rest of the world. Rather than viewing every situation in terms of a black and-white global struggle, he sought to engage deeply with the complexities of each situation. And he was having a great time.
In almost every picture taken of him, Howard Palfrey Jones looks like a big, good-natured goofball. He has a wide grin on his face, looking just very pleased to be there, whether among Javanese dancers or rubbing elbows with fellow diplomats. His contemporaries described him in similar terms. He would strut around the world in white sharkskin suits, doing his best to use the local language and make friends with everyone. Even those who considered him an enemy—that is, the communists—called him Smiling Jones, and warned comrades not to be taken in by his wholesome demeanor.58
Jones was born into a middle-class family in Chicago in 1899. The city was bustling and chaotic, and he grew up causing all kinds of trouble with a mix of kids—sons of immigrants from Poland, Italy, Bohemia, and Norway —in the neighborhood.59
By global standards, his childhood was an absolute dream. But compared to the likes of Wisner and Kennedy, he was just a regular guy. And when asked later in life to describe the experience he was most proud of, he went straight to the time he tried to take on racism in the US. After college at the University of Wisconsin, he became a newspaper editor in Evansville, Indiana. The paper found that the Ku Klux Klan, a brutal white supremacist organization, was running a web of criminal activities and controlled the police. The editors prepared an exposé, and the KKK grand eagle called to threaten Jones directly. He ran the story anyway, and the Klan burned crosses throughout the town. Half the paper’s advertisers pulled out of the paper.60
The State Department was different from the hard-charging outfits Wisner worked for. But even compared to most diplomats at State, Jones was especially engaged and empathetic. He was called, perhaps a bit dismissively, the master of the “soft sell,” which meant that he presented the official position of the US government as gently as possible. For him, foreign policy had to be based on deep knowledge of what the local people wanted, and this meant that no one-size-fits-all approach could work. He certainly believed it was acceptable for Washington to try to change the world and pursue its own interests. But how could you do so without understanding each culture on its own terms?
In Berlin in 1948, Jones and Wisner were both working on the big issue of the day in Germany—financial affairs in the divided country. Wisner pressed hard for an adversarial stance toward Moscow. He supported the creation of a new currency in the Western-occupied areas. In June 1948, the Allied governments decided to unilaterally issue a currency for West Germany, the deutsche mark, catching the Soviets off guard and likely forcing the long-term split of the country into two.61
Afterward, Jones was sent to work in Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists had set up a government. Because they refused to recognize Mao’s communist government on the mainland, the US government recognized this as the “real” China, even though Taiwan had its own population and identity before they arrived. This was no democracy. In February 1947, the new government massacred thousands of people opposed to Nationalist rule, beginning another period of White Terror and intermittent repression of dissidents, often justified on anticommunist grounds, that continued for years.62
By 1951, Wisner’s OPC had been absorbed into a newly formed, permanent organ called the Central Intelligence Agency, and his title had become deputy director of plans. Wiz was the man in charge of clandestine operations. His team—often called his “gang of weirdos” elsewhere in Washington—started looking for ways to fight the Cold War, in secret around the world, however they could.
Wisner was a real blue blood. But most of the ranks of the early CIA were from an even higher strata of American society. Many were Yale men, of the type who would look down on other Yale men if they didn’t come from the right boarding school or enter the right secret society. But when it came to anticommunism, Wiz had most of them beat. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was an OSS sergeant in Germany, said, “I myself was no great admirer of the Soviet Union, and I certainly had no expectations of harmonious relations after the war. But Frank was a little excessive, even for me.”63
The CIA boys and their wives built a lively social life around Washington, DC. More urbane and liberal than most people in that city at the time, they would organize spirited dinner parties at their houses in Georgetown. They’d invite over CIA agents, defense officials, and influential journalists. After the meal, the women would retire to one room, while the men talked politics in another, which was the style at the time.64
They also liked to get very drunk, just like James Bond. As a matter of fact, they looked up to the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, the British agency that had accumulated so much expertise in spycraft while maintaining the British empire for centuries. And some of them loved James Bond himself. Tracy Barnes, one of the Agency’s founding figures, loved the character created by Ian Fleming in 1953, and would pass out copies of the novels to his family at Thanksgiving.65
Paul Nitze, the man who wrote the so-called blueprint of the Cold War, described the upper-class imperial values that children soaked up at the Groton School, a private institution which was modeled on elite English schools and gave the CIA many of its key early members.
“In history, every religion has greatly honored those members who destroyed the enemy. The Koran, Greek mythology, the Old Testament. Groton boys were taught that,” said Nitze. “Doing in the enemy is the right thing to do. Of course, there are some restraints on ends and means. If you go back to Greek culture and read Thucydides, there are limits to what you can do to other Greeks, who are a part of your culture. But there are no limits to what you can do to a Persian. He’s a Barbarian.” The communists, he concluded, “were barbarians.”66
From the beginning the CIA had two basic divisions. On one side was the gathering of intelligence through espionage. Their job was something akin to providing a private news service for the president. On the other side was covert action—the rough stuff, the active attempts to change the world. That was Frank Wisner’s territory.
Wiz started out by building a network of spies and “stay-behind” agents in Western Europe, whose job was to rise to action if the Soviets ever did invade.67 In Germany, the CIA had no problem recruiting former Nazis, including those who had run death squads, as long as they were anticommunist. Then Wisner looked for a way to penetrate Soviet territory. He recruited desperate, homeless Ukrainian refugees, many of whom had fought with the Nazis, to parachute into communist territory and revolt against the Russians. None of them survived.68 But that didn’t stop Wisner. The Agency sent hundreds of Albanian agents back to their homeland. Almost all were captured or killed. It almost seemed as if the Soviet-aligned government was waiting for them. They were. Kim Philby, a British agent who worked closely alongside Wisner and the rest of the CIA, had been a Soviet mole the whole time. Almost every single one of Wisner’s early operations had been compromised somehow. Wisner sent more men into Albania even after he found this out. They were caught and put on trial.
Slowly but surely, Wiz and the CIA boys realized that actual Soviet territory was mostly rock solid. They were certainly failing to penetrate it. If they wanted to fight communism—and they did, very badly—they had to look elsewhere. The Third World offered that opportunity. The problem these men overlooked, according to a mostly sympathetic history written by journalist Evan Thomas, was “the fact that they knew almost nothing about the so-called developing world.”69
2
Independent Indonesia
A New Life for Francisca
In 1951, Francisca came back to her home country. At twenty-four years old, she and her new husband moved into what was basically a garage at the Air Force airport, ten miles outside the center of town. This was much rougher than what she was used to, but they had a cousin who hooked them up with the space, and they took it. Every day, she woke up at six in the morning, rode her bicycle to the nearest station, caught a bus, then jumped on the back of a little six-seater car with a motorcycle engine, and rode in to work. There was only a little bit of traffic in those days, and almost no Muslim women covered up in hijab, but with heavy humidity and temperatures around ninety degrees almost every day of the year, commuting in Jakarta has always been a sweaty, difficult affair.
She didn’t mind any of this one bit. Francisca, like so many other Indonesians, was overcome with excitement. After hundreds of years of exploitation and slavery, she had her own country, and it was just one year old.
As she made her way across town every day, she didn’t think about the comfortable life she had given up. The only thing she cared about was that she was building up Indonesia from nothing. “We have to live life to the utmost, to do everything we can,” she thought. “When you’re working toward a cause like this, one that’s so much bigger than you, it hardly feels like work at all.”1
Francisca Pattipilohy was born in 1926, and she was technically royalty.
Indonesia has often been governed by numerous small kingdoms (and some large kingdoms), and her family were members of the upper class on Ambon, a quiet and comfortable little island surrounded by white sand and bright blue ocean, 1,500 miles northeast of Jakarta. Those aristocracies were often granted special privileges within the Dutch colonial structure, but her father chose to forgo them and make his life as an architect in the capital, which was then called Batavia. The larger island of Java is one of the world’s most densely populated pieces of land, with a dazzling constellation of cities, many of which are thousands of years old, but Batavia was never an important city for any of its local kingdoms. It was an outpost of the major pepper port of Banten when the Dutch East India Company, one of the most important organizations in the development of both global capitalism and colonialism, took over in 1619.2 The mega-city that exists now was largely a Dutch construction, and it still feels different from the rest of Java.
Francisca’s father thrived as an architect, and was able to afford a nice home in the city. He did so well, in fact, that Francisca was able to attend colonial school with Dutch children. At home, she loved to spend time in her father’s library, reading the children’s books he had bought for her. She was the only little girl in the family, so she was alone in the house a lot. Almost all the children’s stories then were in Dutch, telling tales of white children back in Holland or Germany. She dove so deeply into Grimm’s Fairy Tales, books about cowboys and Indians, and Hans Christian Andersen that she truly believed they referred to her own country. She thought that the Rhine flowed through some part of Indonesia until she was a teenager. But she read nothing about other Indonesians. At home, she would speak both the colonial language, Dutch, and some of the tongue her family had brought from Ambon. Her family was Protestant, as plenty of Indonesians in the “outer islands” are, and she studied at a private Christian school nearby. She was intensely smart and fiercely curious. When she spoke about the fun of learning something new, the pitch of her voice would always rise with excitement.
She also learned very quickly what it meant to be a brown girl in a colony run by white people. There were only five “native” students in her class, and the hierarchy of status was obvious. But it was outside school one Sunday that the brutal reality of her condition was driven home. It was especially hot. She went along with a friend from school and her Dutch family to the local pool, to spend the day swimming. As they handed their tickets to the man at the gate, he stopped her. Indonesians were not allowed. Her relative wealth didn’t matter, nor did the fact that the other girls protested. She was a native.
In 1942, when she was just sixteen, the Japanese arrived. Under Emperor Hirohito, the Japanese had become an aggressive imperialist power allied with the Nazis, and were sweeping through much of Southeast Asia, setting up occupation governments. At first, some Indonesians welcomed them, including the leaders of the country’s small independence movement, which had been bubbling up for decades. At least the Japanese were Asians, the thinking went. Their victory had proved whites were not invincible, and they might treat locals better than the Dutch had. The day after their invasion, Francisca’s father came home and announced to the family, “They are our liberators.”3
But young Francisca saw, before most of the country, that this was an illusion. Just days later, the family was going for a walk in their quiet leafy neighborhood, called Menteng, when a Japanese guard nearby started screaming at her father. He, of course, didn’t understand Japanese, and he didn’t know he was supposed to bow. So he didn’t. The guard came up to him and struck him hard, on the face, in front of his whole family. “After that, we hated the Japanese,” Francisca would say later. “We knew their true purpose.”
Others got it much worse. By the thousands, Indonesian women were forced into sexual slavery, made to work as “comfort women” for the occupying Japanese troops. The Dutch were put into concentration camps. Francisca was put into a different school.
The new school was a bit of a shock, for two reasons. First, she was considered equal to the other students. Second, she learned to speak Bahasa Indonesia, which means “the Indonesian language,” a version of Malay that is now Indonesia’s official tongue.4 Francisca had always excelled at language, but here she was starting from zero. She wasn’t alone, though. Only a small minority of Indonesians spoke it as their first language. It had been used as a lingua franca at ports and in trade for a while, but most people spread across the country’s thirteen thousand wildly diverse islands didn’t know it.5
Soon after the Japanese left in 1945, a man named Sukarno declared independence very close to Francisca’s house.6 He had been hesitant to do it. So three youth leaders in the independence movement, impatient with his decision, kidnapped him and fellow independence leader Hatta—this was considered a brusque but broadly acceptable way of forcing someone’s hand at the time—until Sukarno committed to proclaiming the creation of independent Indonesia.
Maybe he was right to be a bit worried. Not long after the speech, Sukarno’s independence movement was in trouble. Just as the French did in Indochina, the Dutch came back, attempting to reassert colonial rule. The Netherlands called the attempts at reconquest “police actions,” in terminology that managed to be both condescending and euphemistic, and they were brutal. As the Japanese had, the Dutch employed mass violence to suppress support for the new republic. The independence leaders, a mix of nationalists, leftists, and Islamic groups, hopped around the archipelago, making alliances with local kingdoms and mounting resistance.7
In the middle of all this, in 1947, Francisca went to Holland to study in the small university town of Leiden. She attended the Royal Institute of Eastern Countries, set up to study European colonial possessions. Right away, she got involved in the Indonesian student organization, as almost everyone did. And right away, she met a man named Zain, five years her senior.
She didn’t like him at first. She had considered herself “some kind of a feminist” from an early age, and had no intention of marrying, ever. She had seen that even the smartest, best-educated women in the Dutch East Indies never got to put to use all the wonderful things that they learned once they got married. She wanted to work. Zain was handsome, sure, even gallant, but he was a little too self-assured, maybe, a little too bossy when he asked her to take the role of treasurer within the student organization. She wasn’t going to let anyone think she was impressed with him, like so many other girls were. So at first, a bit coyly, she rejected his advances. But then she got to know him. They’d spend hours and hours talking, about history, and the anticolonial struggle, and the ways her childhood had been unjust, twisted by European domination. How they could fight to make things right. This was exciting. He was exciting, she was willing to admit that. They began working together tirelessly, united by a common cause. That cause, of course, was independence.
Somewhat ironically, direct contact with Europe had always been important for fomenting revolutionary movements in the Third World. The Indonesian independence movement had early roots in Holland, and it was in Paris that Ho Chi Minh got his political education. When studying or working back in the imperial capitals, colonial subjects often came into contact with ideas that were never allowed to reach their territories. Much of colonialism had relied on the logic of “Do as I say, not as I do.” Or in practice, “Do as white say, not as white do.” So while Europeans themselves were extending education to their entire populations, and their intellectuals were debating the merits of socialism and Marxism, much of this was banned in the colonies. The natives might get ideas. For example, in the Congo, brutally controlled by the Belgians since King Leopold II established the Free Congo State in 1885 (and the United States rushed to be the first country in the world to recognize the colony), authorities banned left-leaning publications and liberal lifestyle magazines that circulated freely back in Europe, and were scared even by the fact that working-class blacks lived together in urban areas. Wouldn’t this lead to subversion, or worse, Bolshevism? Congolese pupils learned about the Belgian royal family, but not the American civil rights movement, and the French Revolution was explained very carefully, so as not to make that whole affair seem too attractive in African editions of textbooks.
The justification given by European authorities in the Congo went like this: “All those in our colony are unanimous in stating that the blacks are still children, both intellectually and morally.”8 For Francisca and Zain, who began dating in earnest in the late 1940s, the colonial independence struggle was intimately tied to left-wing politics. So she, a wholehearted supporter of Indonesian freedom, fell naturally into socialist circles, as the two struggles had long been married together. In the 1930s and 1940s, practically no Europeans supported colonial independence except the leftists. The Indonesian Communist Party, the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), was founded in 1914 as the Indies Social Democratic Association with the help of Dutch leftists, worked alongside Sukarno and pro-independence Muslim groups in the 1920s, and then engaged in active antifascist work during the Japanese occupation.9
Francisca heard a little bit about socialism at the student meetings, and she liked what she heard, but she didn’t get too involved in any of the more intricate ideological battles. She didn’t take part in debates over the so called “Madiun Affair” and the clashes between communists and Sukarno’s republican forces within the revolutionary movement. It was much easier to take sides when the Netherlands launched a second attempt to reconquer Indonesia. In protest, all the students with Dutch scholarships returned them, and Francisca joined them in walking out of their classes. Then, that same year, she jumped at the opportunity to attend the second World Festival of Youth and Students in Budapest. It was organized by the World Federation of Democratic Youth. She knew, of course, that “Democratic” in this usage basically meant “socialist,” and that Hungary was allied with the Soviet Union, but none of that made the prospect of the journey any less exciting.
Not all of the Indonesian students could afford to attend, but she had the money for a ticket, so she jumped on the train and crossed what the Americans were now calling “the iron curtain.” She didn’t see one. For her, the trip was a wonder, and she stared out the windows as postwar Germany, then Austria and Hungary, flew by. Europe was in tatters; but still, Budapest was enchanting. And there, no one treated her like a second-class citizen, like they did in her home country. But nothing prepared her for the youth festival itself. She met left-wing students from all over the world, from nations across Asia, from Africa, and even from the United States! This was a real shock to her, as she’d really only seen Americans in the movies.
She began talking to the students from the US, and was even more shocked to see a black man and a white woman together. She didn’t know much about international politics, but she knew all about the racism back in the United States. So she asked them, “How did you come here together? Isn’t it difficult for you? Don’t they keep you apart?”
They chuckled, and nodded. “Well, yes, but we manage,” the American woman said.
Next, she met students from Korea and the Congo. Among the Congolese delegation, she swears she met a charming young man by the name of Lumumba, but she didn’t know much else about him at the time.10 The students put on dances and cultural performances from all over the world. They were a display of international unity, as well as the pride that each nation felt. When she described this show afterward, her voice got so high it practically became a whistle.
In 1950, she and Zain eloped. They had to sneak off to Prague to get married, because Dutch authorities would have required her to get her father’s permission, and he was still withholding it for some reason or another—they didn’t care much why. The trip was another little adventure, and they got to put their language skills to use, because their humble ceremony had to be in German. No problem. By that time, Zain knew English, Indonesian, Dutch, and Batak (the language native to his family on the island of Sumatra), and Francisca was now fluent in German, French, Indonesian, Dutch, and English on top of a bit of Bahasa Ambon.
Francisca’s father came around to her new husband soon enough, and gave them his blessing. More importantly for them, they both established themselves quickly as productive members of a brand-new society. Upon returning to a new, independent Indonesia, Francisca started working as a librarian—a dream job, because she could be surrounded once more by books. It wasn’t hard for her to land a position. The new republic was starving for qualified workers, and was still relying on Dutch librarians to work alongside her. As a result of intentional Dutch neglect, the Indonesian people were badly deprived of education. By the time the Dutch withdrew, only around 5 percent of the Indonesian population of sixty-five million could read and write.11
Francisca said, “I think this was one of the worst crimes of colonialism. After three and a half centuries of Dutch occupation we were left with almost no knowledge of our own people, and our own culture.”
Meanwhile, Zain started working in journalism, and got a job at a paper called Harian Rakyat, or The People’s Daily. This was the newspaper run by the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI. It was a great job for Zain to land, and Francisca was very happy for him. There was nothing strange about working for a communist paper at that time, as far as she was concerned. She knew he was close to the Communist Party, and probably a member, but none of it was a big deal. After the 1948 clash, the Communist Party had reorganized and integrated into the new nation. The PKI was one branch of a multiparty patriotic revolution. The PKI was part of Sukarno’s new Indonesia.
Because of his language skills, Zain was assigned an extremely interesting beat at the paper. He began writing about international affairs, translating stories from abroad for a local audience. And for someone concerned with Third World liberation and the fight against “imperialism”—to use the language his paper used—the early 1950s were an incredibly interesting time.12
US troops were in Korea, in a war few people had expected to break out. After the Japanese left the Korean Peninsula, which they had dominated even more brutally than they did Indonesia, the country was divided in two. During Japanese rule, what was left of the Korean Communist Party (Stalin had much of its leadership executed in the late 1930s) waged fierce guerrilla warfare against the occupiers across Korea and Manchuria until they were forced into exile in Siberia. One of these Communists, Kim Il sung, took over in the North in 1945.13 In the South, the occupying US forces plucked up Syngman Rhee, a Christian and anticommunist who had lived in the US for decades, and installed him as leader. His authoritarian government targeted leftists and massacred tens of thousands of people on Jeju, an island that had been controlled since the war by independent “people’s committees,” using the threat of communism as justification.14 In 1950, war erupted at the dividing line. Northern communist troops rapidly pushed into Seoul, leading the United States to take to the UN to gather forces for a counterattack. For reasons that are unclear, Stalin instructed his ambassador to sit out the vote at the UN rather than protest, and the US easily won the vote. The US-UN troops pushed North Korea back to the original borders, but then proceeded north in an attempt to take the whole country. The Soviets offered little help, but to Washington’s surprise, Mao’s tired and ragged Red Army mobilized to help the Korean communists, largely because they felt they owed the Koreans a debt for the assistance Kim’s insurgents had offered them against the Japanese in Manchuria. During the resulting three-year stalemate, the US dropped more than six hundred thousand tons of bombs on Korea, more than was used in the entire Pacific theater in World War II, and poured thirty thousand tons of napalm over the landscape. More than 80 percent of North Korea’s buildings were destroyed, and the bombing campaign killed an estimated one million civilians.15
In Korea, the CIA boys also tried out some of the same tools they had unleashed in Eastern Europe. Thousands of recruited Korean and Chinese agents were dropped into the North during the war. Once again, the infiltration was a total failure. Later, classified CIA documents concluded that the operations “were not only ineffective but probably morally reprehensible in the number of lives lost.”16 The CIA only found out later that all the secret information the Agency gathered during the war had been manufactured by North Korean and Chinese security services.
Once again, the CIA’s well-funded covert operations came up short against actual, battle-hardened communist soldiers dedicated to achieving victory. In Iran, however, where there was no such contingent, the young CIA found its first big win.
Operation Ajax
At the end of 1952, Frank Wisner met with Monty Woodhouse, an English spy working in Tehran. The Brits had a problem and needed help. Since the end of World War II, they had been overseeing the formal deconstruction of much of their empire, but they certainly didn’t expect that to mean they would lose control over the natural resources, too. In Iran, new Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was overseeing the nationalization of oil production. And he had already caught MI6 trying to overthrow him for it.
Mossadegh and the Iranians had a lot of reasons to resent the British. During their period of imperial glory, Iran suffered a famine that took the lives of two million people. And after World War II, the British set up an arrangement in which they took twice as much income from petroleum as Iran, while local oil workers lived in shanties without running water. When Mossadegh and Iran’s elected parliament maneuvered around the Shah the British had put in place, London began looking for a way to claw back what it considered its own. The Americans, Wisner included, were wary of getting tied up in British imperial affairs. But their allies from across the pond appealed to their anticommunism. Mossadegh had legalized the well organized, Communist-led Tudeh Party (along with all other political parties), and the Brits suggested to the Americans that, perhaps, the Tudeh could take over if they weren’t careful, or even that the Soviets might invade.
Changes at the White House at the beginning of 1953 were a very big help to the supporters of regime change. Newly elected Republican President Dwight Eisenhower appointed John Foster Dulles to serve as secretary of state and tapped his younger brother, Allen Dulles, to lead the CIA. John Foster had two lifelong obsessions, according to historian James A. Bill: fighting communism and protecting the rights of multinational corporations. These came together in Iran. “Concerns about communism and the availability of petroleum were interlocked. Together, they drove America to a policy of direct intervention,” Bill wrote.17
The Dulles brothers and the CIA got the green light. Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, whom Wisner had hired in 1950, took charge of the mission, which they decided to call Operation Ajax. He had a million dollars to spend in Iran as he pleased, a huge sum for the kind of help he wanted to buy. The CIA bribed every politician it could, and looked for a general willing to take over and install the Shah as dictator. Agents paid street thugs, strongmen, and circus performers to riot in the streets. When CIA station chief Roger Goiran argued the US was making a historic mistake by aligning itself with British colonialism, Allen Dulles recalled him to Washington.
The CIA created pamphlets and posters proclaiming that Mossadegh was a communist, an enemy of Islam. They paid off journalists to write that he was a Jew. The CIA hired gangsters to pretend to be Tudeh Party members and attack a mosque. Two of Roosevelt’s Iranian agents, who were handling some of the hired muscle, tried to turn down further work at one point, saying the risk was becoming too great. But Roosevelt convinced them by saying that if they refused, he’d kill them.
For his part, the Shah was not convinced any of this was a good idea. He took off to Rome at one point, infuriating the Americans who wanted to make him king. But he returned to the palace in August 1953, rigged parliamentary elections, and served both the CIA and international oil companies well as ruler of the country. The Soviets did not rush to intervene in the country in which they were supposedly so powerful. In Washington, there were celebrations all around, and Kermit Roosevelt was declared a hero. Wisner had finally proved to the men upstairs that there was a real use for his gang of weirdos.18
In 1954, the CIA wrapped up another successful operation, nearby in the Philippines. The left-wing “Huk Rebellion” that began under Japanese occupation continued after both the Japanese left and the US (officially)
handed over power to Filipinos. Anti-occupation “Huk” guerrillas were opposed to the new president, who had been an active collaborator with the Axis powers, and the ongoing oligarchical control of the economy by hugely powerful feudal landowners. US military adviser Edward Lansdale, who would later inspire the character of Colonel Edwin Barnum Hillendale in Burdick and Lederer’s Ugly American, wrote in his diary that the Huks “believe in the rightness of what they’re doing, even though some of the leaders are on the communist side… there is a bad situation, needing reform.… I suppose armed complaint is a natural enough thing.”19 The US helped the Philippines devise and implement a counterinsurgency operation, and made considerable progress, including the use of more napalm.20 In a bit of bizarre psychological warfare, Lansdale also collaborated closely with Desmond FitzGerald—a Wisner recruit at the CIA—to create a vampire.
As part of a range of psychological operations alongside the war on the guerrillas, CIA agents spread the rumor that an aswang, a bloodsucking ghoul of Filipino legend, was on the loose and destroying men with evil in their hearts. They then took a Huk rebel they had killed, poked two holes in his neck, drained him of his blood, and left him lying in the road.21
After years of conflict, the Huks gave up, and the Philippines settled into right-leaning pro-American stability that would last decades. With special privileges granted to US corporations, the woeful condition of the Filipino people described by Lansdale remained entirely unchanged.
The People’s Daily reported on the events in Iran and the Philippines, of course.22 Even though Washington’s real activities were secret at the time, Zain’s newspaper and the global left-wing press were often closer to getting the story of Washington’s interventions right than US newspapers, which largely saw it as their duty to peddle the official line that Wisner and his team passed on to them.23
Zain, working late nights back in Jakarta every day, exhausted himself in this period, being one of a few people who could read and translate all the reports coming in. He was rarely at home with Francisca, as he was always rushing back to the newsroom, working night shifts. Harian Rakyat, or The People’s Daily, was always a lean operation, twenty to thirty people working in downtown Jakarta at all hours.24
For a communist newspaper in a heady postrevolutionary environment, The People’s Daily was a remarkably lighthearted read. There were cartoons poking fun at the bumbling Western imperialists, original works of fiction published every day, a children’s section, and educational inserts with explanatory essays on global left-leaning figures like Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin. International news, the area that Zain oversaw, was a huge part of the coverage, and the paper paid special attention to events in the rest of the Third World.
News from Amerika
1953 was the end of the Jakarta Axiom; independent countries were no longer tolerated just because they had left-wing forces in check. With the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, the new rule under Eisenhower was that neutral governments were potential enemies, and Washington could decide if and when an independent Third World nation was insufficiently anticommunist. Wiz and his boys, emboldened by the success in Tehran, turned their attention to Central America, where they would score the victory that would serve as a template for future covert interventions into the next decade.
A decade before, the Guatemalans had a small revolution. A series of strikes led to the overthrow of Jorge Ubico, a pro-Nazi dictator who had worked hand in hand with the landed aristocracy and foreign corporations for two decades to keep peasants in a system of forced labor—in other words, slavery. The left, including the Guatemalan communist party, called the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo, or PGT, had long been involved organizing workers in opposition to him. The revolution arrived in 1944, when the United States under FDR was in an alliance with the Soviet Union, and very busy fighting World War II. Perhaps for that reason, the new government didn’t ring many alarm bells for US politicians.25
From 1944 to 1951, popular schoolteacher Juan José Arévalo took control of the very young democracy in Central America’s largest country. But it was the election of Jacobo Árbenz, who took power in 1951, that really turned heads up North.
Árbenz was a middle-class soldier who became a large landowner himself, and to the extent that he ever held any radical ideas, they were probably due to the influence of his California-educated Salvadoran wife, María Vilanova, a more complex and fascinating figure than he. A polyglot social campaigner shocked by inequality, she rejected Central American high society, read intensely and widely, and formed links with leftist figures from around Latin America. Árbenz accepted the small but well-organized PGT as a part of his ruling coalition. But Guatemala voted against the Soviet Union’s actions at the UN, and the new president made it clear in his inaugural speech that his goal was to “convert Guatemala with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state.”26
This was no small task. When his government passed a 1952 land reform, this effort ran up against very powerful interests. The government began to buy back large, unused land holdings and distribute them to indigenous people and peasants. Processes of these kind were seen by economists around the world as not only a way of benefiting regular people, but of putting the whole country to productive use and unleashing the forces of market enterprise. But the law stipulated that Guatemala would make payments based on the land’s official value, and the United Fruit Company —a US firm that basically controlled the country’s economy for decades— had been criminally undervaluing its holdings to avoid paying taxes.
The powerful company howled in protest. United Fruit was extremely well connected in the Eisenhower administration, and started a public relations campaign denouncing Árbenz as a communist in the US, and brought US journalists on press junkets, which were successful in getting deeply critical stories published in outlets like Time, U.S. News & World Report, and Newsweek.27 The CIA again asked Kermit Roosevelt to oversee operations. He refused this time, telling his superiors that future coups wouldn’t work unless the people and the army in the country “want what we want.”28 Frank Wisner chose Tracy Barnes instead.
Washington made three coup attempts, and it was the third one that worked.29 In November 1953, Eisenhower removed the ambassador in Guatemala City and sent in John Peurifoy, who had been in Athens since 1950 and had thrown together a right-wing government favorable to both Washington and the Greek monarchy. Leftists there called him the “Butcher of Greece.”30
In Guatemala, the North Americans did their best to create a pretext for intervention. The CIA planted boxes of rifles marked with communist hammers and sickles so they could be “discovered” as proof of Soviet infiltration. When the Guatemalan military, unable to find any other suppliers, did actually buy some weapons (that turned out to be worthless) from Czechoslovakia, Wisner’s boys were relieved. Now they had their excuse. Árbenz uncovered plans for the third coup attempt in January 1954, and had them published in the Guatemalan press. The CIA men were so confident that they kept going anyway, issuing denials to the US press. They organized a tiny rebel force around General Carlos Castillo Armas, an unimpressive man despised even by the conservative officers in the Guatemalan military. They began broadcasting false reports, on US controlled radio stations, of a military rebellion marching toward victory, and dropped bombs on Guatemala City. This was psychological warfare, not a real invasion—the ragtag group over the border in Honduras and El Salvador had no chance of actually entering and defeating the real military, and the bombs that US pilots dropped on the capital became nicknamed sulfatos, or sulfate laxatives, because their job was not to do damage, but to make Árbenz and everyone around him so afraid they would fill their pants.31
Miguel Ángel Albizures, nine years old, heard the bombs explode near him, and the shock seared a feeling of fear deep into his brain. He was having breakfast before school in the capital, at one of the public eateries set up by Árbenz, when it started. He was terrified—yes, so shocked, so afraid he felt like he could shit himself, exactly as intended—and ran to take cover under the pews in the closest Catholic church.32
Árbenz, realizing that the US was determined to oust him, began to contemplate giving in. His government frantically offered to give United Fruit what it wanted. But it was too late for concessions. The communists and a few others urged Árbenz not to hand over power. In vain, a twenty five-year-old Argentine doctor living in Guatemala City at the time, named Ernesto “Che” Guevara, volunteered to go to the front, then tried to organize civilian militias to defend the capital.
Instead, the president resigned on June 27, 1954, and handed over power to Colonel Díaz, head of the Armed Forces. Díaz had met with Ambassador Peurifoy, and believed he would be an acceptable replacement to the United States. He told Árbenz he had an understanding with the North Americans, and that if he took power, at least they could avoid losing the country to the hated Castillo Armas, which helped persuade the president to step down.33 That deal didn’t last long. Just a few days after Díaz took power, CIA station chief John Doherty and his deputy, Enno Hobbing—former Time bureau chief in Paris—sat him down. “Let me explain something to you,” said Hobbing. “You made a big mistake when you took over the government.” Hobbing paused, then made himself very clear. “Colonel, you’re just not convenient for the requirements of American foreign policy.”
Díaz was shocked. He asked to hear it from Peurifoy himself. According to Díaz, when Peurifoy came over, at four in the morning, he backed up Doherty and Hobbing. He also showed Díaz a long list of Guatemalans who would need to be shot immediately.
“But why?” Díaz asked. “Because they’re communists,” Peurifoy responded.34
Castillo Armas, the US favorite, took over. Slavery returned to Guatemala. In the first few months of his government, Castillo Armas established Anticommunism Day, and rounded up and executed between three thousand and five thousand supporters of Árbenz.35
Eisenhower was elated. Even though Wisner had been anxious throughout the operation, this was another triumph for his approach. After he and Barnes met with the president, they burst back into Barnes’s living room in Georgetown and “did a little scuffling dance.”36
The People’s Daily paid very close attention to the events in the small country, half a world away. Day after day, the situation in Guatemala was at the top of the front page, and the headlines were clear and precise: “Amerika Menjerang Guatemala” (America threatens Guatemala), and then a long explanatory article, “This Is Guatemala,” featuring a map of the faraway region, and then referring to “American aggression.”37
The US press covered it differently. The New York Times referred to the coup plotters as “rebels,” while calling the Árbenz government “reds” or a “Communist threat,” and saying that the US government was “helping” mediate peace talks, rather than organizing the whole thing. Most historians today would quickly recognize that this small Indonesian communist newspaper reported the events more accurately than the New York Times.38 There is a reason for that. Sydney Gruson, an enterprising Times correspondent, was planning to launch an investigation of the “rebel” forces. Frank Wisner wanted him stopped. He asked his boss, Allen Dulles, to speak with the New York Times higher-ups, which he did. Believing he was performing a patriotic act, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger ordered Gruson to stay away.39
There’s also a reason that Zain and his colleagues paid so much attention to Guatemala. A front-page story in The People’s Daily on June 26 said that what was happening in Guatemala “threatens world peace, and could threaten Indonesia as well.”40
An internal State Department document, now publicly available, should dispel the notion that Washington thought Guatemala was an immediate “communist threat.” According to Louis J. Halle in a note to the director of the policy planning staff, the risk was not that Guatemala would act aggressively. The risk was that Árbenz would provide an example that inspired his neighbors to copy him. The note reads, “The evidence indicates no present military danger to us at all. Although we read public references to the facts that Guatemala is three hours’ flying time from the oil-fields of Texas and two hours’ flying time from the Panama Canal, we may console ourselves that Guatemala’s capability for bombing either is nil. The recent shipment of arms makes no difference to this conclusion, nor would repeated shipments…”
The real risk, Halle said quite clearly, was that communist “infection” could
spread through the example of independence of the U.S. that Guatemala might offer to nationalists throughout Latin America. It might spread through the example of nationalism and social reform. Finally and above all, it might spread through the disposition the Latin Americans would have to identify themselves with little Guatemala if the issue should be drawn for them (as it is being drawn for them), not as that of their own security but as a contest between David Guatemala and Uncle Sam Goliath. This latter, I think, is the danger we have most to fear and to guard against.41
The question of land reform was an exemplary and recurring case of “Do as I say, not as I do.” When General MacArthur was running Japan immediately after World War II, he pushed through an ambitious land reform program, and US authorities oversaw redistribution in South Korea in these years as well. In strategic, US-controlled nations, they saw the necessity of breaking up feudal land control in order to build dynamic capitalist economies. But when carried out by leftists or perceived geopolitical rivals—or when threatening US economic interests—land reform was more often than not treated as communist infiltration or dangerous radicalism.
The Dulles brothers had worked on Wall Street, and both had actually done work for the United Fruit Company. To this day, there is a debate as to whether or not the CIA engineered the coups in Iran and Guatemala for cynical economic reasons—to help business buddies and American capitalism more generally—or if the Agency really felt threatened by “communism.” There can be more than one explanation. The leader of the PGT, Guatemala’s communist party, said that “they would have overthrown us even if we had grown no bananas.”42 Wisner’s discussions at home, with his family, indicated he really felt that the Iranian Tudeh and Guatemalan PGT were somehow a danger to his country.43
But the motivation didn’t matter much to the millions of people reading about the events back in Asia, nor to the Latin Americans watching up close. Whatever their reasons, the United States established a reputation as a frequent and violent intruder into the affairs of independent nations.
That young doctor, Che Guevara, believed he learned an important lesson in 1954. He came to the conclusion that Washington would never allow mild social reform, let alone democratic socialism, to flower in its backyard, and that any movement for change would have to be armed, disciplined, and prepared for imperialist aggression. Then twenty-six years old, he wrote to his mother that Árbenz “did not know how to rise to the occasion.” The Guatemalan president, Che said, “did not think to himself that a people in arms is an invincible power. He could have given arms to the people, but he did not want to—and now we see the result.” Che took off to Mexico City, and began to formulate a more radical revolutionary strategy based on what he had seen in Guatemala.44
Back in Indonesia Francisca, though not following the news as closely as Zain, felt that the Indonesian revolution was far from complete. They had only been free from white colonialism for five years, she thought, and therewas no guarantee the freedom would last. But she was usually busy working at the library and caring for their first daughter. Zain would come home late, and they would mostly sit around and talk about the books they were reading, mostly European literature, rather than discuss international news. Zain had enough of that at work. But she knew that their situation was fragile, and that the Western powers were not inclined to simply cede freedom to the peoples of the Third World. The brutal French invasion in Vietnam was more proof of that. President Sukarno was always on the radio, putting his considerable rhetorical skills to use to drive home the point that Indonesians still had to fight. The way it looked from Indonesia was that in both Iran and Guatemala, nascent democratic movements had tried to assert new independence in the global economy, and the new Western power had reacted violently, and crushed them back into the subservient role they had always played. Sukarno liked to call this “neocolonialism,” or the enforced conditions of imperial control without formal rule. Thoroughly modern, he loved neologisms and acronyms, and later coined NEKOLIM—that is, neocolonialism, colonialism, and imperialism—to name the enemy he believed they all faced.
In 1954, after Ho Chi Minh’s surprisingly well-organized forces emerged victorious at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the French finally gave up in Vietnam. In Geneva, the US was helping to hammer out the division of that country, under the stipulation that a national referendum would take place to reunite its two halves by 1956. In Jakarta, Sukarno was about to meet one of the West’s new representatives. Always sunny-faced and eager, Howard Palfrey Jones landed in July.
President Sukarno
When Smiling Jones arrived in Jakarta for the first time, he was enchanted. A “teeming, steaming metropolis,” he called it. He also recognized, very quickly, that America’s supposed enemies operated here. He was sent to be chief of the Economic Aid Mission, and saw that in Independence Square, where Sukarno had made his famous 1945 proclamation, now across from the US Chancery, every tree was plastered with a poster bearing the hammer and sickle. The same was true in front of his house, and when he got a chance to drive around the island of Java, he often found his car passing under arches of hammer-and-sickle streamers.
Even though Sukarno, Indonesia’s charismatic first president, was friendly with Washington and had always operated in varying degrees of opposition to the PKI, a minority party among many, the apparent boldness of the Communist Party—just advertising openly like that, rather than hiding in the shadows—was worrying to the US.
A few days after he got there, Pepper Martin, a senior foreign correspondent at U.S. News & World Report gestured toward the communist symbols, turned to Jones, and said, “It looks as if it’s all over but the shouting, doesn’t it?”45 Jones would learn soon that it was far from over. And when he met Sukarno for the first time, he was blown away by just how complicated things were. Jones himself, like everyone else in the US government, was an anticommunist, and thought it was his job to fight that system. But he thought the major failure of US diplomacy at the time was a persistent inability to understand the differences between Third World nations, and the nature of Asian nationalism. He believed that after World War II, the US was “too involved in the complexities of intimate relations with our allies of that war, to hear the cry of peoples halfway around the word.” He wrote, “We didn’t understand and made little attempt to comprehend the political, economic and social revolution that was sweeping Asia.”46
Unlike many other Americans, Jones refused to dismiss the beliefs and practices of the locals, a priori, as backward. He paid close attention. Of course, he lived a very different life from the Indonesians. State Department officials lived in colonial mansions, and had maids and cooks and drivers. Almost any US citizen in the Third World would have been considered incredibly rich, even if they were not working for Uncle Sam.
Once, one of the pools began to leak constantly. The local embassy staff knew what to do. They called a hadji, a Muslim who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, who came and meditated. He told the Americans the premises had not been ritually consecrated. Jones recounted, without hesitation or skepticism, that they held a slametan ceremony, appeasing the surrounding spirits by planting a rooster head on each corner of the pool. It never leaked again. Jones, a Christian Scientist who himself had watched his mother recover miraculously after bouts of prayer, never questioned there may be forces at work in Indonesia most Americans didn’t fully comprehend.47
When interacting with other US government officials, Jones would proudly correct them when they would mislabel Asians or their political affiliations. Most crucially, he thought Americans failed to understand what nationalism was in the context of emerging countries, and its difference from communism. Nationalism in the Third World meant something very different from what it had meant in Germany a decade prior. It was not about race, or religion, or even borders. It was built in opposition to centuries of colonialism. Exasperated, Jones often stressed that to Americans, this might look like an instinctive anti-Western disposition, and that young nations might make early mistakes when forming a government. But wouldn’t Americans feel the same way, and demand the right to make their own mistakes?
When Jones finally met Presiden Sukarno—as he is called in Indonesian —he was deeply impressed. He wrote: “To meet him was like suddenly coming under a sunlamp, such was the quality of his magnetism.” He quickly noticed, he said, Sukarno’s “enormous brilliant brown eyes, and a flashing smile that conveyed an all-embracing warmth.” He would watch, amazed, as Sukarno spoke eloquently on “the world, the flesh, and the devil: about movie stars and Malthus, Jean Jaures and Jefferson, folklore, and philosophy,” then wolf down a huge meal, and dance for hours. Even more impressive to Jones, who had lived a relatively comfortable life, was that this remarkable man—about the same age as Jones—learned to eat this way, and became so steeped in knowledge, while spending years behind bars for opposing Dutch colonial rule.48 Along the way, he had learned to speak in German, English, French, Arabic, and Japanese, in addition to Bahasa Indonesia, Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, and Dutch.49
When Sukarno opened his mouth in any of these languages, the whole country stopped to listen, and Jones noticed that this had gone to his head. Sukarno told him once, after surviving yet another assassination attempt, “There is only one thing I can think of after yesterday.… Allah must approve of what I am doing, otherwise I would long ago have been killed.”50
Sukarno was born in 1901 in East Java. His mother was from Bali, and therefore Hindu; and his father, from an upper-middle class of Javanese civil servants, was Muslim, like the vast majority of the island. On Java at the time, Muslims could be roughly divided into two categories. There were the santri, the stricter, orthodox Muslims, more influenced by Arab religious culture. Then there were the abangan, whose Islam existed on top of a deep well of mystical and animistic Javanese traditions. Sukarno grew up in the latter tradition.51 From an early age, he was well steeped in the wisdom of the wayang, the all-night shadow puppet shows that function here in the same kind of way that epic poetry functioned in classical Greece.
Though not from the elite, Sukarno was able to study in good colonial schools. Officially, he studied architecture, but on his own, he studied political philosophy. He began to move in Indonesian nationalist circles, which welcomed a broad range of anticolonial schools of thought. Sarekat Islam, the Islamic Union, was the central nationalist organization at the time; it had conservative Islamic thinkers, as well as many who were loyal to the Communist Party. Then called the Indies Communist Party, the party had often disobeyed directions from Moscow when its leaders saw fit, and saw Muslim unity as a revolutionary, anticolonial force. There were committed Muslim Communists who wanted to create an egalitarian community—inspired to varying degrees both by Marx and the Koran—but felt that foreign infidels were holding them back. And for almost everyone in the country, “socialism” by definition implied opposition to foreign domination and support for an independent Indonesia.52
This brought Indonesians together. At one December 24 PKI convention at Sarekat Islam headquarters, they decorated the walls with red and green (for Christmas Eve), and dyed a hammer-and-sickle design in traditional Javanese batik style.53
Sukarno by nature was a syncretist, always more interested in mixing and matching and inclusion than shrill ideological disputes. In 1926, he penned an article titled “Nationalism, Islam, and Marxism,” in which he asked: “Can these three spirits work together in the colonial situation to become one great spirit, the spirit of unity?” The natural answer for him was yes. Capitalism, he argued, was the enemy of both Islam and Marxism, and he called upon adherents of Marxism—which he said was no unchanging dogma, but rather a dynamic force that adapted to different needs and different situations—to struggle alongside Muslims and nationalists.54
The next year, he founded the Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI), which sat in the middle of the currents struggling against Dutch imperial rule— with the Communists to his left, and the Muslim groups to his right. Sukarno’s natural predilection toward inclusion was extremely well suited to the historical moment. Indonesia is an archipelago whose islands sprawl across two million square miles of sea and are home to hundreds of distinct nationalities speaking more than seven hundred languages. Nothing brought them together other than the artificial boundaries imposed by a racist foreign power. The young nation needed a shared sense of identity more than anything else.
Sukarno was the prophet of that identity. In 1945, he provided an ingenious, impassioned basis for what it meant to be Indonesian when he put forward the Pancasila, or five principles. They were, and remain: belief in God, justice and civilization, Indonesian unity, democracy, and social justice. In practice, they combine the broad affirmation of religion (that would likely mean Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, or Buddhism), revolutionary independence, and social democracy. They certainly didn’t exclude the communists, either, since the vast majority of them were abangan Muslims like Sukarno, or Balinese Hindus like his mother. Even if a tiny minority of high-level communists might have been without religion, they were happy enough to sign off on Pancasila within a few years. Later the chairman of the PKI would justify this by offering a very novel spin on Marxism, saying that within Indonesia, widespread belief in one God was an “objective fact” and that “communists, as materialists, must accept this objective fact.”55
The Republic of Indonesia adopted a national slogan—Bhinneka Tunngal Ika, meaning “unity in diversity” in Old Javanese, the language spoken by the largest number of people, most of whom live in the middle of that central island. Pancasila, or Pantja Sila, is itself derived from Sanskrit, which was used in the pre-Islam days across the Nusantara archipelago, when much of the islands were strongly influenced by cultural and religious elements originating on the Indian subcontinent. (“Indonesia” itself simply means “Indies islands,” and is derived, like the name “India,” from the Indus River).
It was under Sukarno’s watch that the young country chose to make Bahasa Indonesia the official Indonesian language. A leader of less wisdom might have been inclined to make his native Javanese into the official tongue, but this is a hard language to learn and easily could have been seen as a kind of chauvinistic or even colonial imposition from the strongest island. Instead, Indonesia picked an easy, seemingly neutral language, and most of the country learned it within a generation or two. This was a significant achievement; nearby countries in Southeast Asia still have not established truly national languages.56
Sukarno was a left-leaning Third World nationalist, and he was more of a visionary than a nuts-and-bolts administrator, as Howard Jones and the rest of the Americans would learn soon enough. True to his conciliatory nature, he was committed to maintaining a friendship with both the United States and Moscow, and he certainly was not trying to aggravate the leadership in Washington.
Jones struck up a kind of friendship with Sukarno, despite the fact that many of his American colleagues thought they were “losing” Indonesia to communism. Indeed, he surprised many of the locals, including those on the more radical left, by simply calling them up for a chat. By now, the left automatically viewed the US with suspicion—the days of Ho Chi Minh’s overtures to Washington were over. Jones quickly came to the conclusion that in order to be effective, the aid programs he was managing could not in any way appear to be paternalistic or offend Indonesians’ fierce pride in their independence. As for the point of that aid in the first place, he was quite open with the Indonesians—Washington didn’t want Indonesia to enter the “Communist bloc.”57
Sukarno was unquestionably president, but ruling required constant maneuvering within an unwieldy parliamentary system. He led a coalition government, and though the PKI supported the arrangement, there were several other parties that were much more influential, and the PKI had no representatives in his cabinet.58 As was his wont, Jones continued to correct other American officials who didn’t comprehend Asia on its own terms. He understood when the Indonesian president told him, “I am a nationalist, but no Communist.” Smiling Jones was proud—and dismayed—that he was “the one American who was convinced Sukarno was not a Communist.”59
As leader of such a large Third World country, Sukarno was relatively well known back in Washington. But a year after Jones landed, Sukarno would put on an event that would launch him onto the global stage, and change the meaning of the Indonesian revolution forever.
Bandung
That term, “Third World,” was born in 1951 in France, but it really only came into its own in 1955, in Indonesia.
As historian Christopher J. Lee has written, it was the Konferensi Asia Afrika, held in Bandung in April, that really solidified the idea of the Third World.60 This remarkable gathering brought the peoples of the colonized world into a movement, one that was opposed to European imperialism and independent from the power of the US and the Soviet Union.
It didn’t happen automatically; it was the result of concerted efforts by a few of the world’s new leaders. In 1954, Indonesia got together with Burma (Myanmar), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Pakistan, and India, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, the same leader who gave the Kennedy brothers a lecture over dinner. They formed the Colombo Group, named after the Sri Lankan capital, where they met, and began planning a bigger meeting. Indonesia’s prime minister initially proposed a 1955 conference as a response to the founding of SEATO, the US-sponsored copy of NATO in Southeast Asia. But the invitation list soon expanded rapidly, as Nehru invited China (this necessarily excluded Taiwan), while apartheid South Africa and both Koreas (technically still at war) as well as Israel (whose presence might have upset Arab nations) weren’t invited.
The people who came together at the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference represented about half the United Nations, and 1.5 billion of the world’s 2.8 billion people. As Sukarno declared in his opening speech, delivered in bursts of accented but perfect English, it was the “first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind!”61 Some of the countries there had recently achieved independence while others were still fighting for it. Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, attended as a friendly “observer” from outside Asia and Africa.
The very existence of the conference elevated Sukarno and Nehru to the status of global leaders. It was also a catapult to worldwide relevance for Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had taken over in Egypt, the world’s largest Arab country, just three years earlier. Like Nehru, Nasser was secular and left leaning, and insisted on his right to make alliances with every country, including the Soviet Union. By attending, Mao’s foreign minister, Zhou Enlai, sought to legitimate the communist People’s Republic of China among its neighbors and take the side of the Third World.62
The content of the meeting led to a flowering of global organizations, some of which are active to this day. They were inspired by the “Spirit of Bandung,” which Sukarno put forward very clearly in the rest of that powerful opening speech:
We are gathered here today as a result of sacrifices. Sacrifices made by our forefathers and by the people of our own and younger generations. For me, this hall is filled not only by the leaders of the nations of Asia and Africa; it also contains within its walls the undying, the indomitable, the invincible spirit of those who went before us. Their struggle and sacrifice paved the way for this meeting of the highest representatives of independent and sovereign nations from two of the biggest continents of the globe.…
All of us, I am certain, are united by more important things than those which superficially divide us. We are united, for instance, by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism. And we are united by a common determination to preserve and stabilize peace in the world.…
Sukarno wore a tailored white suit, glasses, and small peci hat, and as he spoke, world leaders sitting around the small chambers clapped, and leaned in to take in more. He had their attention as he turned his legendary rhetorical skills against Western imperialism:
How is it possible to be disinterested about colonialism? For us, colonialism is not something far and distant. We have known it in all its ruthlessness. We have seen the immense human wastage it causes, the poverty it causes, and the heritage it leaves behind when, eventually and reluctantly, it is driven out by the inevitable march of history. My people, and the peoples of many nations of Asia and Africa, know these things, for we have experienced them.… Yes, some parts of our nations are not yet free. That is why all of us cannot yet feel that journey’s end has been reached. No people can feel themselves free, so long as part of their motherland is unfree. Like peace, freedom is indivisible. There is no such thing as being half free, as there is no such thing as being half alive.…
Almost everyone in the room knew exactly what he meant. The people in the room that day would spend the rest of their lives describing the energy he had summoned in the crowd. He went on:
And, I beg of you, do not think of colonialism only in the classic form which we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew. Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever, and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth.
Sukarno and the organizers had gone to great trouble to avoid antagonizing or frightening the most powerful country on earth with their openly anti-imperialist rhetoric. So they scoured their American history books, and asked the Americans they knew, looking for a way to connect the date of the conference to the United States.63 They found one. The president continued:
The battle against colonialism has been a long one, and do you know that today is a famous anniversary in that battle? On the eighteenth day of April, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, just one hundred and eighty years ago, Paul Revere rode at midnight through the New England countryside, warning of the approach of British troops and of the opening of the American War of Independence, the first successful anticolonial war in history. About this midnight ride the poet Longfellow wrote: “A cry of defiance and not of fear, A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, and a word that shall echo for evermore. Yes, it shall echo for evermore.”
As Howard Jones understood, the Bandung Conference put forward an entirely different type of nationalism from the type that existed in Europe. For leaders like Sukarno and Nehru, the idea of the “nation” was not based on race or language—it indeed could not be in territories as diverse as theirs —but is constructed by the anticolonial struggle and the drive for social justice. With Bandung, the Third World could be united by its own common purposes, such as antiracism and economic sovereignty, Sukarno believed. They could also come together and organize collectively for better terms within the global economic system, forcing rich countries to lower their tariffs on Third World goods, while the newly independent countries could use tariffs to foster their own development.64 After centuries of exploitation, these nations were far, far behind the rich world, and were going to force that to change.
There were twenty-nine countries officially participating, plus states attending as observers. Both Vietnamese states took part, because at this point they were still officially in peaceful coexistence until the 1956 referendum to reunite them. Cambodia’s Norodom Sihanouk, like Sukarno a strong supporter of independence from both Washington and Moscow, was there. The Syrian Republic, Libya, Iran (now under the Shah), and Iraq (still a kingdom) sent representatives, and Pakistani Prime Minister Mohammed Ali came along. Momolu Dukuly took a seat for Liberia, the country founded by former American slaves in the nineteenth century.
Sukarno himself often linked the anticolonial struggle to the fight against global capitalism. But the Bandung Conference was also a small blow to his supporters in the PKI, since Indonesia’s Communist Party favored a direct alliance with the Soviet Union. Because of his language skills, Francisca’s husband, Zain, was one of the Indonesian journalists lucky enough to cover the conference. He wrote it up for The People’s Daily, which showered praise on the event, despite this small slight.
“Long live the friendship and cooperation between the peoples of Africa and Asia!” the paper exclaimed on opening day, featuring a cover illustration of a man, his muscular frame held together by the flags of the Third World, turning the wheel of history. The next day, after Sukarno’s opening speech, The People’s Daily printed caricatures of figures representing Britain, the USA, the Netherlands, and France in a daze, suffering from a bad headache, with a slightly forced little pun underneath. The “Afro-Asian” (AA) conference, Zain’s paper joked, made the imperialist powers desperate for Aspirin-Aspro (AA), because watching the unity of the independent young nations made their heads pound.65
From the United States, the keenest observer of the conference was Richard Wright, the black novelist and journalist. The former communist and author of Native Son wrote an entire book on his experience there, which went on to influence much anticolonial and antiracist thought. Once he found out about “a meeting of almost all of the human race living in the main geopolitical center of gravity of the Earth,” a conference of “the despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race,” he wrote, he had to go and document it.66
Before leaving for Bandung, Wright spoke to North Americans and Europeans aghast at the idea of the conference, certain that a meeting of those nations could only amount to “racism in reverse,” hatred of whites inspired by the Communists, or a global antiwhite alliance.67 Even Wright himself was skeptical of the Bandung mission until he saw the legacy of colonialism and heard the speeches. He realized quickly that locals would speak to him entirely differently when there were no white people in the room. Wright met an Indonesian who had worked as an engineer for three months in New York, but barely left his apartment—he was too afraid of racist confrontations on the street.68 Then Wright came across a 1949 book designed to teach Indonesian to colonial officials and tourists—except it didn’t contain any words allowing conversation. It was mostly a list of orders, all punctuated with exclamation marks.
Gardener, sweep the garden!
That broom is broken! Make a new broom!
Here are the dirty clothes!
And then, in a section called “Hold the Thief”:
All the silver is gone
The drawers of the sideboard are empty69
Wright also realized just how little anticommunism there was in Asia, compared to his native United States. Even the head of Masjumi, the Muslim party receiving CIA funding, told him the West’s predominant “fear of communism” made trusting First World leaders difficult.
“We shall always have our misgivings about the real aims of the West, of which we have had good reasons to be suspicious in our past history,” the Masjumi leader said. “No real success can be expected from a cooperation based on such weak grounds,” meaning a partnership based purely on Washington’s desire to find anybody to oppose the communists.
Not everything went smoothly at Bandung. The Cold War hung over the conference, and not everyone could agree on how to mark themselves out from the major powers. Nehru, for example, resisted attempts by Western oriented Third World states, such as Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, to condemn Soviet movements in Asia as colonialism. The delegates failed to come to an agreement as to how they could practically support territories still under colonial domination. In the end, they came up with ten basic principles that would come to govern relations between Third World states:
1. Respect for human rights and the United Nations Charter.
2. Respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations.
3. Recognition of the equality of all races and the equality of all nations large and small.
4. Non-intervention: abstention from interference in the internal affairs of another country.
5. Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself.
6. Abstention from the use of collective defense to serve the particular interests of any of the big powers, and abstention from exerting pressure on other countries.
7. Refraining from acts or threats of aggression against any country.
8. Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means. 9. Promotion of mutual interests and cooperation.
10. Respect for justice and international obligations.
Most famously, the Bandung Conference provided the structure that would grow into the global Non-Aligned Movement, which was founded in 1961 in Belgrade. But in Asia and Africa, Bandung led to changes that were felt immediately. Collectives, communications networks, and international organizations sprung into existence. Leaders began to broadcast radio messages throughout the two continents, carrying the message of the “Spirit of Bandung” to peoples still struggling against colonialism. Most notably, Nasser pointed his Radio Cairo broadcasts south toward sub-Saharan and East Africa with this message.70 In the Congo, people began listening to La Voix de l’Afrique from Egypt and All India Radio, which featured broadcasts in Swahili, as a man named Patrice Lumumba was beginning to form the Mouvement National Congolais, a very “Spirit of Bandung” independence movement that rejected ethnic divisions and sought to build the Congolese nation out of anticolonial struggle.71
In 1958, the first Asian-African Conference on Women was held in Colombo, and launched a transnational Third World feminist movement. For the 1961 Cairo Women’s Conference, Egyptian organizer Bahia Karam wrote in her introduction to the proceedings: “For the first time in modern history, feminine history that is, that such a gathering of Afro-Asian woman has taken place… it was indeed a great pleasure, an encouragement to meet delegates from countries in Africa which the imperialists had never before allowed to leave the boundaries of their land.”72 The press in Egypt, for example, began to focus on the lives of women from around the Third World, including Indonesia, discussing the “ties of sisterhood and solidarity between the women of Africa and Asia.”73
And the Bandung Conference countries would go on to found the Afro Asian Journalist Association, an attempt by people from the Third World to cover the Third World without relying on the white men, usually sent from rich countries to work as foreign correspondents, who had been telling their stories for decades, if not centuries.
Within Indonesia, Sukarno had cemented himself in the minds of the people as the leader of a new kind of revolution. Francisca, absolutely inspired, would be able to recite parts of Sukarno’s opening speech at Bandung by heart long afterward.
In Washington, the attitude was very different. The response was racist condescension. State Department officials called the meeting the “Darktown Strutters Ball.”74
But to Eisenhower, Wisner, and the Dulles brothers, Sukarno’s behavior was no joke. For them, by now, neutralism itself was an offense. Anyone who wasn’t actively against the Soviet Union must be against the United States, no matter how loudly he praised Paul Revere.
Now a senator, John F. Kennedy made his opposition to this approach very public in a set of speeches given in the years after Bandung. In a speech harshly criticizing the French for attempting to hold on to Algeria by force, he said that “the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man’s desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain.”75 JFK’s star was rising, and this kind of position was rare among US politicians. President Sukarno noticed what he said. But Kennedy was in the opposition. And one more event in 1955, in Indonesia, alarmed the anticommunists in power in Washington even more.
The CIA spent a million dollars trying to influence the parliamentary elections in September of that year. The Agency’s chosen partners, the Masjumi, were solidly to the right of Sukarno. Nevertheless, Sukarno and his supporters did well.76 Even worse for the Americans, the PKI came in fourth place, with 17 percent of the votes cast. It was the best performance in the history of the Indonesian Communist Party.
3
Feet to the Fire, Pope in the Sky
Soccer with Sakono
In March 1956, the new leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, shocked the communist world. In an initially “secret speech” to the Communist Party, he issued a lengthy, unflinching denunciation of crimes committed by Stalin.1 Stalin had been unprepared for World War II, he claimed. He tortured his own comrades and forced them into confessing to crimes they had never committed, as an excuse to have them shot and secure his grip on power.
Stalin had died just three years earlier. When he did, so many people rushed toward his funeral procession that some were crushed—at the time, many citizens of the Soviet Union and other communist countries felt real affection for the man, and a deep identification with the collectivist, socialist project overall.2 To hear him attacked, by the leader of the world’s foremost Marxist-Leninist party no less, was an unexpected blow to communists around the world.
Some leftists, especially in Western Europe, reacted by distancing themselves from the Soviet project altogether. Others, most notably Mao, accused Khrushchev of distorting or exaggerating Stalin’s misdeeds for his own benefit. He began to claim Khrushchev was guilty of the crime of “revisionism” of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the first crack in a growing split between the two countries.3 Under its new leader, the Soviet Union pursued peaceful coexistence with the West, warmed to nonaligned countries, and expanded its aid to Third World countries like Indonesia, Egypt, India, and Afghanistan.
Officially, the PKI went along with Khrushchev into a post-Stalinist, more moderate future. But in practice, the communist world was even more divided than it had been at the beginning of the Cold War. The Indonesian communists, confident in the importance of their country and growing in size and strength, were even more certain than before that they didn’t need to take orders from abroad.
After the failed Madiun uprising in 1948, the PKI had reorganized under the leadership of D. N. Aidit. Self-confident and gregarious, Aidit was born off the coast of Sumatra into a devout Muslim family and became a Marxist during Japan’s occupation. With Aidit as its leader, the PKI transformed into a mass-based, legal, ideologically flexible movement that rejected the armed struggle, frequently ignored Moscow’s directions, stuck close to Sukarno, and embraced electoral politics. The party was doing things very differently from the Russian or the Chinese communist parties. The PKI’s goal, both publicly and privately, was to form an antifeudal “united national front” with the local bourgeoisie, and not to worry about implementing socialism “until the end of the century.”4
Internationally, the PKI was committed to anti-imperialism; and locally, party members were growing their movement by winning democratic elections.
As 1956 progressed, the communist world was divided further, when Khrushchev sent tanks into Hungary to crush an uprising and reassert Soviet control. The violence of October and November 1956 was a public relations debacle for Moscow. It was also a deep personal failure for Frank Wisner. Though the US denied this publicly, the CIA had been encouraging the Hungarians to revolt, and many did so thinking they would receive support from Washington. When the Dulles brothers decided against this course of action, seemingly hanging the protesters out to dry, Wisner felt personally betrayed.
His behavior became increasingly erratic. William Colby, a senior CIA officer in Rome, said in 1956 that “Wisner was rambling and raving, totally out of control. He kept saying, all these people are getting killed.” His son noticed that he appeared overworked and was deeply emotionally involved in the events in Europe. Wiz began acting in ways the people working with him had a hard time understanding. They thought it might have been because of an illness caused by a bad plate of clams he had in Greece.5 While Second World communism was suffering from fissures, the Third World was further united by a bit of First World bumbling. After Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, France and Britain invaded—against Washington’s wishes—to reassert control of the waterway and oust the Egyptian leader. They were joined by the young state of Israel, whose creation had been supported by both Washington and Moscow, but eventually had to back down because of US pressure. Despite Eisenhower’s anger with the new Jewish state, Washington steadily increased support for Israel from the middle of the 1950s for Cold War reasons. It was the nascent alliances between the USSR and radical Arab nationalist regimes, we know now, that formed the basis for a growing US-Israel alliance.6 Something else happened in 1956. Or rather, it didn’t happen. The division between North and South Vietnam was supposed to be resolved by an election that would unite the country under a single government. But Ngo Dinh Diem, the Catholic leader of majority-Buddhist South Vietnam whom the United States had handpicked before he turned out to be hopelessly corrupt and dictatorial, knew that he would lose badly to Ho Chi Minh. So Diem decided to cancel the vote. Washington went along with this, just as it did when Diem fraudulently declared he had won an election in 1955 with 98.2 percent of the vote.7 From that moment on, the government in North Vietnam, and many communists in the South, believed they had the right to directly oppose Diem’s US-backed regime. In the same turbulent year, Sukarno went to Washington. It’s not clear whether or not the Indonesian leader himself knew this, but the visit did not go well. The impression he made with the most powerful people on the planet was not a good one. Back home in Indonesia, Sukarno’s sexual appetites were famous, but they shocked the Americans. John Foster Dulles, a deeply prudish Presbyterian, found him “disgusting.” Frank Wisner, who usually didn’t take his work home with him, confided to his son that “Sukarno wanted to make sure his bed was properly filled, and the Agency was not without the ability to satisfy the Indonesian ruler’s lust.”8 To make things worse, he went from Washington straight to Moscow and Beijing. He believed this his right as an independent world leader, of course, but this was not the kind of thing the Eisenhower administration tolerated.
In the fall of 1956, Wisner told Al Ulmer, head of the CIA’s Far East Division, “I think it’s time we held Sukarno’s feet to the fire.”9 In elections the following year, the Indonesian Communist Party did even better than it had in 1955. The PKI was the most efficient, professional organization in the country. Crucially, in a country plagued with corruption and patronage, it had a reputation for being the cleanest of all the major parties.10 Its leaders were disciplined and dedicated, and Howard Jones saw quickly that they actually delivered on what they promised, especially to peasants and the poor. Jones was not the only one in the US government who understood why the Communists kept winning. The vice president at the time, Richard Nixon, gave voice to the general feeling in Washington when he said that “a democratic government was [probably] not the best kind for Indonesia” because “the Communists could probably not be beaten in election campaigns because they were so well organized.”11 And most importantly, Jones recognized that the PKI was going into the countryside, delivering the kind of programs that spoke directly to the people’s needs. The party was “working hard and skillfully to win over the underprivileged,” he worried.12
Sakono Praptoyugono, the son of farmers in a village in Central Java, remembers the impact of these programs very well. Sakono—not to be confused with Sukarno, the president—was born in 1946 in the Purbalingga Regency, the sixth of seven children, while the Dutch were still trying to crush Indonesia’s independence movement. After Indonesia was established, his father got a bit of rice from the revolutionary government, and their family worked a small plot of land. While his parents were peasants who spoke only Javanese, the young republic gave Sakono a chance to study, and he took to it like a fish to water.13
You might call Sakono something of a teacher’s pet. He was the kind of kid who read the whole newspaper every day, and organized extra classes for him and his friends after school. He absolutely loved studying history, and politics, and by the age of nine, he was already following Sukarno’s near-constant radio speeches—he was a huge fan—and the results of national elections. Short and solidly built with twinkling eyes, Sakono was the kind of guy who rattles off facts and quotes and phrases from foreign languages, smiling the whole time, so excited he may not notice when others may want to talk about something else. He read The People’s Daily, or Harian Rakyat to him, and he started an extracurricular study group under a young member of the PKI, which was engaged in constant outreach in his town.
The most important of the PKI programs in his region was carried out by the Indonesian Farmers Alliance (BTI), which sought to enforce peasants’ rights within the existing legal framework and push for land reform. BTI members told Sakono and his family that “the land belongs to those who work it, and it can’t be taken away,” and even more importantly, they surveyed and recorded holdings, made sure laws were enforced, and helped improve agricultural efficiency.
Twice a week, Sakono and two of his friends got together for three hours with a man named Sutrisno, a tall, happy-go-lucky party member with brown curly hair, to study basic politics in the Marxist tradition. Sakono learned about feudalism, and that the inefficient distribution of land his family lived under would be replaced if Indonesia ever transitioned to socialism. They studied the concepts of neocolonialism and imperialism, and learned about the capitalist United States. Sutrisno told them about Khrushchev and Mao, and the “revisionist” debate, but said that the PKI had chosen the peaceful path to power in the context of President Sukarno’s revolution. Sakono could not afford to buy issues of Harian Rakyat, the paper Zain wrote for, so he’d go read it at the newsagent’s house for free.
As teenagers often do, Sakono got a bit obsessed. His love for left-wing theory suffused every part of his life. He and his friends would play soccer in the middle of town (there was no proper field in their small Javanese village, of course), and as they kicked the ball back and forth, he told himself he was learning important political lessons. “Soccer was the people’s sport, because it was cheap,” he would remember later. “And sport builds the collective spirit, it teaches you to work with others, that you can’t accomplish anything alone. I realized soccer taught me that if you have something you want to accomplish, you have to cooperate.”
The PKI claimed it was organized along Leninist lines, but it wasn’t really. It was a “broad mass party,” in its own terminology, growing far too quickly to maintain the strict hierarchical discipline Lenin himself argued for.14 The party had active members, or cadres, like Sakono’s teacher Sutrisno, who took a pledge to uphold party ethics, and it also ran a number of affiliated organizations, like the BTI, which were meant for mass civilian participation. The industrial counterpart to BTI was SOBSI, the affiliation of union members that included much of the country’s working class, whether they cared about Marxism or not. Then there was LEKRA, the cultural organization, which provided an essential service in small towns where there was little to do—it put on concerts, and plays, and dances, and comedy shows, which would often go on all night and provide the best (and perhaps only) entertainment in town.15 “Oh, everyone went,” Sakono said. “It didn’t matter what your politics were. If it was happening, you had to come and watch.”
Broadly speaking, all these Communist-affiliated organizations supported President Sukarno, though not uncritically. The Indonesian Women’s Movement, or Gerwani, opposed the traditional practice of polygamy, which Sukarno embraced very publicly while president. Gerwani became one of the largest women’s organizations in the world. It was organized along feminist, socialist, and nationalist lines, and focused on opposing traditional constraints put on women, promoting the education of girls and demanding space for women in the public sphere.16
In Sakono’s part of Central Java, the Women’s Movement was focused on the most basic of issues. A young woman named Sumiyati, who joined the organization as a teen in her village in Jatinom, was taught how to sing, dance, play sports, and, most of all, defend “feminist ideals, and the rights of women to fight to destroy the shackles that bound them, and our rights to learn and to dream.” On the question of polygamy in general, the movement was uncompromising in its opposition. On the question of Sukarno’s specific polygamy, it made compromises.
“No man is perfect,” Sumiyati learned. “This is a time of transition and we have to struggle for the changes we want to see. We move forward step by step, we can’t expect the world to turn over as easily as we turn the palm of our hands.”17
At absolutely no point did cheerful, studious Sakono think his leftism made him a subversive. If anything, he was almost a nerd, a kind of overenthusiastic young fan of the country’s revolution. “The Communists are the good guys,” he often thought. They were doing well in elections, and were friends with his hero, President Sukarno.
In his studies, Sakono also developed a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between economic conditions and ideology. “You see, the Communist Party in the United States never grew because it didn’t have the right roots,” he concluded. “But in Indonesia we have so much injustice and exploitation. There’s a relation between the material conditions of our society and the ideology which flowers here. And injustice is very fertile soil for its roots to grow.”
By 1957, Indonesia’s left already considered Washington an obstacle to the nation’s development, if not an all-out enemy. But soon, things got much worse. Rebellions against Sukarno’s government broke out on the “outer islands” to the northeast of Java and Bali, as well as on the island of Sumatra. The rebellions were both economically and ideologically motivated, demanding more control over the income from their regions, as well as the prohibition of communism—which greatly pleased Washington.
Because the rebels had such good weaponry, people like Sakono and his teacher believed the USA was helping them. “It’s the strategy of divide et impera,” he said, using the Latin for “divide and conquer.” “It is the Cold War,” he said. “Let me explain—‘Cold War’ is the name they have given to the process by which America tries to dominate countries like Indonesia.”
Bombs over Ambon
As the Indonesian left became more certain that Washington was somehow behind the growing civil war, Sakono’s village received a copy of Harian Rakyat with a cartoon on the front page. The headline above the illustration read “Two systems—Two sets of morals.” On the left, the Soviet Union was launching something upward: Sputnik, the first satellite ever sent into orbit by humankind, which had been a fabulous propaganda tool for global communism all year. On the right, the United States was dropping something from the sky: bombs, onto Indonesia.18
Howard Jones was working a stint in Washington as all this was going on, until he got a metaphorical tap on the shoulder. President Eisenhower asked him to return to Indonesia. This time, he would be United States ambassador. And as soon as he got there, he had to face a government that was increasingly suspicious of the United States.
Just days after Smiling Jones presented his credentials in March 1958, Sukarno’s foreign minister asked to speak with him. Subandrio, a thin, bespectacled, and thoughtful diplomat who had tried to rally international support from London during Indonesia’s independence struggle, asked the new US ambassador, as politely as possible, to explain a cache of weapons that had been air-dropped to the rebels. There were machine guns, STEN guns, and bazookas, and the weapons bore the mark of a manufacturer in Plymouth, Michigan.
Jones said he didn’t know anything about them, and pointed out that US weapons were available for purchase on the open market all over the world.
Subandrio backed off, saying he did not want to imply that Washington was arming those who sought to break up Indonesia. Carefully and articulately, however, he would refer back to the issue several times, as delicately as possible. Subandrio was taking extreme care not to confront or offend the new ambassador. This is the stereotypically Javanese way of broaching sensitive topics; one dances around them suggestively, even with close friends, and this was a representative of the most powerful nation on earth. It slowly became clear to Jones that the foreign minister was convinced the rebels were receiving external support, but he wasn’t saying it outright. Finally, he did. Subandrio submitted that the Indonesians believed someone was behind the rebellion, but took his accusation no further. Jones knew his bosses were sympathetic to the rebellion—everyone did—but he had nothing to admit, and the meeting ended.
Soon after, Jones met with Hatta, the second-most important Indonesian revolutionary behind Sukarno. Like Subandrio, Hatta wore glasses and the flat peci cap, the Indonesian version of the fez—a very popular look among Indonesia’s early revolutionaries. The two men talked about the logistics of the rebellion, and Hatta made it clear he shared Washington’s commitment to fight communism. But, he said, this rebellion was an entirely different matter, and they considered it a threat to Indonesia itself. They finished the meeting. But just as Jones was turning to leave, he slipped the new ambassador a piece of information that spoke directly to his concerns.
“From the standpoint of America, you could not have a better man as chief of staff of the Indonesian Army,” Hatta said, referring to General Nasution. “From your standpoint, Nasution is fine.”
“What do you mean by that, Dr. Hatta?” Jones replied.
“The communists call me their Enemy Number One,” Hatta said. “They call Nasution Enemy Number Two.”
Jones had a revelation. “Then what has happened in Indonesia is that… anticommunists are fighting anticommunists. Communism is not a major issue of this dispute.” That was right. The Army was perhaps the most anticommunist force in the country, apart from the most radical Islamists. A few of its top generals had even studied in the United States.19
As the rebellion dragged on, protesters began to gather in front of Jones’s ambassadorial mansion, convinced the US was behind the rebels.20 The New York Times had Washington’s back, lambasting Sukarno and his government in a May 9 editorial for doubting assurances the US would never intervene in the conflict.21 Jones dealt with the protesters as well as he could. But the rebellion was not happening in the capital, where things were mostly comfortable. The fighting was raging to the west, on the large island of Sumatra, and on the smaller islands to the northeast.
Most crucially, planes were circling over Ambon, the home island of Francisca’s family, and dropping fiery death onto its residents. Day after day, bombs fell onto Indonesian military and commercial shipping vessels. Then, on May 15, the explosions hit a market, killing both morning shoppers and Ambonese Christians attending church.22
On May 18, 1958, the Indonesians managed to shoot down one of the planes, and a single figure floated slowly toward a coconut grove. His white parachute got caught in the branches of a tall palm tree, where he was stuck for a moment—then he fell to the ground and broke his hip. He was quickly found and captured by Indonesian soldiers, who probably saved him from being killed on the spot by furious locals.
His name was Allen Lawrence Pope; he was from Miami, Florida; and he was a CIA agent.23 Howard Jones didn’t know it, but Frank Wisner’s boys had been actively supporting the rebels since 1957.24 The two men, and their differing approaches to fighting communism, had come into direct conflict.
After Wiz returned from sick leave in 1957, he had warned the Dulles brothers that the rebellion would be an unpredictable, potentially explosive affair. They ignored his concerns, and gave Wisner the authority to spend $10 million to back a revolution in Indonesia. CIA pilots took off from Singapore, an emerging Cold War ally, with the goal of destroying the government of Indonesia or breaking the country into little pieces. They chose not to tell Howard Jones’s predecessor, John Moore Allison, about the covert action because, as Wisner put it, the plans “might elicit an adverse reaction from the Ambassador.” Instead, they transferred him to Czechoslovakia, and brought in the oblivious Jones.25
Jones was brought back so that he could keep smiling to the Indonesians while another arm of his own government dropped tons of exploding metal onto small, tropical islands. Jones noticed that the Indonesian newspaper Bintang Timur (Eastern Star) came up with a nifty drawing to illustrate this posture. They drew John Foster Dulles in a boxing ring. On one of his gloves, they wrote, “Goodwill Jones,” and on the other, they wrote, “Killer Pope.”26
Throughout the course of the CIA’s history, this dynamic would often be repeated. The Agency would act behind the back of the diplomats and experts at the State Department. If the CIA was successful, the State Department would be forced into backing the new state of affairs the Agency had created. If the secret agents failed, they would just move on, leaving the embarrassed diplomats to clean up the mess.
That’s what happened with Jones. For reasons we still don’t understand, Allen Pope was carrying identifying papers when he was captured. He was put on trial, and he became a very potent symbol of US involvement in the rebellions, and apparent proof that the Indonesians—especially the left— had been right all along. Even so, Ambassador Jones received orders to issue categorical denials that the US had controlled any missions that impinged on Indonesia’s sovereignty, including Pope’s.
Not long after, Jones was authorized to offer Indonesia’s prime minister thirty-five thousand tons of rice if the government “took positive steps to curb Communist expansion within the country.”27 Taken together, it was a carrot-and-stick approach, but with the stick very poorly hidden.
The 1958 operation in Indonesia was one of the largest in the CIA’s history, and it was patterned on the successful coup in Guatemala—in other words, it was exactly what the People’s Daily writers such as Zain had been worried about four years earlier, as they carefully reported on the events in Central America.28
But this one failed. The Indonesian Army put down the rebellions, greatly increasing their power within the country as a result, and no more US military missions were uncovered.
Sukarno, of course, felt deeply betrayed. He put it in very personal terms. He said, “I love America, but I’m a disappointed lover.”29
Jones did not enjoy the position that Wisner’s CIA operation put him in one bit/ Reflecting later on the tragic, absurd failure of the operation, Jones turned back to the nature of his country to find an explanation. “Washington policymakers had not been privy to all the facts nor really grasped the inwardness of the situation, but had proceeded on the assumption that Communism was the main issue,” he wrote. “This was the all too common weakness of Americans-- to view conflict in black and white terms, a heritage, no doubt, from our Puritan ancestors. There were no grays in the world landscape. There was either good or evil, right or wrong, hero or villain.”30
...
... Very little of this made the news back home, but people in the Third World knew.
Frank Wisner begsan to act increasingly erratically .... underwent shock therapy.
......
... But that wasn't the only issue threatening the US-Indonesia relationship.
Decolonization was far from finished ...
To Sukarno, the issue was incredibly simple. The Dutch had absolutely no business being anywhere but back home in Holland. Indonesia was a democratic, multiethnic national republic. Race didn't matter, and neither did Papua's level of ...
......
Howard Jones … He recounts that locals came to him, time and time again, and asked, with genuine mystification: “We just don’t understand America. You were once a colony. You know what colonialism is. You fought and bled and died for you freedom. How can you possibly support the status quo?” After over a decade representing the United States in Asia, Jones had no answer. The behavior of the United States lent weight to the charge, he realized, “that we had become an imperial power ourselves.” 39
4
An Alliance for Progress
Benny
Benny Widyono was born in 1936 in Magelang, Central Java, into a family of Chinese descent. Immigrants from China, particularly the south, started moving to the islands of Southeast Asia centuries earlier. They often fled starvation or bandits, ...
.... Since 1956, the Ford Foundation had been providing fellowships that brought young Indonesian economists to the US. 10
In 1959, much to his surprise, Benny received a scholarship to study in the United States. This was a very welcome .....
.........
..... They had cars, and they had cash, so they would drive to meet the students in the ...
..... Indonesia is not a prudish country, but this type of show was something you ...
After the prudish Eisenhower, the United States elected a president who was a womanizer, just like Sukarno. The two would meet soon, and get along well.
......
... Krushchev told Communist allies he feared Kennedy was no match for the huge military-industrial complex in the US, and worried the young president couldn’t keep the “dark forces” of his country at bay. 27
......
The CIA supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to the new regime, which slaughtered untold numbers of people. A Baath Party member named Saddam Hussein, only twenty-five years old, reportedly took part in this US-backed anticommunist program. 43 .....
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5
To Brazil and Back
Squeezed Out
In the same years that Benny was in Kansas, life for Indonesians of Chinese descent like him got increasingly difficult back home. They had long suffered from intermittent explosions of racism, but as lines .....
......
He undertook an ambitious infrastructure program and built a new capital, Brasília, from scratch in the middle of the country. Still, the ......
As the former labor minister for Vargas, Goulart had introduced the explosive bill to double the minimum wage in 1954. He was firmly a member of Bazil’s elite political establishment, a millionaire landowner and devout Catholic. But Goulart’s proposed reforms set off alarm bells in Washington. This was not little Cuba, they reasoned. This was one of the world’s biggest countries. If Jango was not stopped, warned US Ambassador Lincoln Gordon, Brazil could become “the China of the 1960s.” 18
.......
... the organized left.25
Goulart also alienated the military high command with reforms that would affect them more directly. He wasn't just proposing to extend the vote to illiterates—he also wanted to allow lower-ranking soldiers to cast ballots. Current law dictated that they could not do so while serving. The idea that he was appealing directly to the lower ranks made the high-ranking officers, who tended to be more conservative than their left-leaning subordinates, very suspicious. If he was ignoring their authority over the lower orders, they could convince themselves, perhaps he wanted to overturn their authority entirely. In Brazil, the threat of rebellion from below had terrified elites for five centuries, and they always responded—successfully—with violence.
It didn't take Kennedy's White House long to respond, either. Jango went to Washington in early 1962, and it seemed to go OK, though he failed to get any concessions on aid or trade. On July 30, however, Kennedy had a meeting with Ambassador Gordon, which was recorded. The two men agreed to spend millions on anti-Goulart plans for elections that year, and to prepare the ground for a military coup to, as Gordon put it, “push him out, if it comes to that.”
Gordon said, I think one of our important jobs is to strengthen the spine of the military. To make it clear, discreetly, that we are not necessarily hostile to any kind of military action whatsoever if it’s clear that the military action is—“
“Against the left,” Kennedy finished. 26
Gordon: “He’s giving the damn country to the—“
“Communist,” said Kennedy.
“Exactly.”
After Gordon's July meeting with JFK, CIA money began pouring into Brazil. ... ......
......
It was also a major departure from JFK’s promises to the Third World, and from the original intent behind the Alliance for Progress. That program was now widely seen as an imperfect cover for traditional US policy in the region, not only because Washington continued intervening throughout the region. One of JFK’s best biographers put it this way,
How could he square professions of self determination—a central principle of the Alliance—with the reality of secret American interventions in Cuba, Brazil, British Guiana, Peru, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and every other country that seemed vulnerable to left-wing subversion? (And that was just the beginning: A June National Security directive approved by the president had listed four additional Latin American countries “sufficiently threatened by Communist-inspired insurgency”—Ecuador, Columbia, Guatemala, and Venezuela. …) 32 (Source: "An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917 - 1963" By Robert Dallek 2003)
In Brazil, Goulart’s most controversial proposal was land reform, as had been the case in Guatemala under Arbenz. Brazil’s landed gentry were horrified by the policy: they withdrew from negotiations and put all their energy into taking down Jango instead. Inflation was out of control, but things got much worse for the economy when all US aid dried up, and Brazil’s international creditors stopped all further loans while Washington instead funneled cash to state governors committed to a golpe de estado, or coup, in Brazil. 33 Brazil’s Congress caught one US-backed front channeling millions to opposition politicians, and Jango shut them down, but it didn’t stop the ongoing, effective destabilization of his government. 34 …. He certainly had no help from the men in Moscow; after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets did not want to cause any trouble in Washington's backyard. 35
......
Ambassador Lincoln Gordon called the 1964 coup “the single most decisive victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century.”
As Brazilian historian Marco Napolitano puts it, “Just as in a Hollywood film, there was a happy ending (for the plotters, that is). … And best of all: this was achieved without the United States needing to appear as a visible agent of the conspiracy.” 75
......
6
The September 30th Movement
The coup in Latin America reverberated around the globe, and made its way to Indonesia. The mainstream press in Indonesia covered it; so did the communist People's Daily. A new English-language publication run out of Jakarta called the Afro-Asian Journalist said the “military junta” helped to carry out a “US imperialist plot.” 1
.......
.... When London finally decolonized the region and began to create the new country of Malaysia, Sukarno became adamantly opposed to the form it took. He believed that the English were employing imperial trickery to weaken revolutionary forces in Asia. He was mostly right. And Howard Jones knew it. 10
........
..... But a few months after JFK’s death, Jones asked the newly sworn-in Johnson to sign an official determination that continued aid to Indonesia was in the US national interest. Johnson declined. “President Kennedy, I knew, would have signed the determination almost as a matter of routine. It was disappointing,” Jones remembers. In December, Robert McNamara, one of the advisors left behind by Kennedy, began suggesting aggressive curtailment of aid. .......
Johnson did make a deal, with the British. In exchange for their support in Vietnam, where things were beginning to escalate, Washington would back them on the creation of Malaysia. 21
......
In response to that discussion, the Indonesian president gave a speech in … his message to them was: “Go to hell with your aid!” .....
Over the next few months all direct aid to the national government dried up completely. Crucially, one program continued. The US continued to pour money directly into the Armed Forces, and military advisers continued to work closely with Indonesian Army high command.
.......
The Army was opposed to the idea, however, and Sukarno planned to talk about it with them soon.35 As the CIA noted in ...
Aidit, the leader of the Communist Party, went to Beijing and had a meeting with Mao, and we have a partial transcript of their conversation:
Mao: I think the Indonesian right wing is prepared to seize power. Are you determined, too?
.....
Like Kernnedy before him, Johnson’s administration considered Indonesia more important than Vietnam. “President Johnson has come increasingly to the conclusion that, at the end of the day, he would be ready for major war against .....
.....
On October 1, 1965, most Indonesians had no idea who General Suharto was. But the CIA did. As early as September 1964, the CIA listed Suharto in a secret cable as one of the Army generals it considered to be “friendly” to US interests and anticommunists. 53 The cable also put forward the idea of an anticommunist military-civilian coalition that could gain power in a succession struggle.
......
Once in command, Suharto ordered all the media be shut down, with the exception of the military outlets he now controlled. Curiously, Harian Rakyat—the Communist Party newspaper where Zain had worked for more than a decade—published a front page editorial endorsing the September 30th Movement on October 2, a full day after the coup had failed and the offices were reportedly occupied by the military. ......
......
7
Extermination
They say that time feels like it slows down in revolutionary or historic moments. And we know that in moments of trauma or violence, time can nearly come to a stop. When eyewitnesses and victims talk about the six ...
......
Aceh's military commander in 1965 was Ishak Djuarsa, an avid anticommunist who had studied at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.5 On October 7, he left the capital, Banda Aceh, for a whirlwind tour of the province, giving speeches to quickly ......
......
It is believed the mass murder started that day, on the island of Sumatra. Some of the killings were “spontaneous,” carried out by civilians acting on their own after receiving orders like this. But that was ......
......
The military told the world Aidit confessed to plans to take over the country, and this account was later published in Newsweek. After the issue came out, a cable from the embassy told the State Department that embassy staff knew it was “impossible to believe that Aidit made such a statement” because according to the military’s version, he allegedly referenced a fake document, one they knew “was obviously being disseminated as part of an anti-Communist ‘black propaganda’ operation.” 21
......
But US officials were also very alarmed that the military government-in-waiting had not yet reversed Sukarno’s plans to take over US oil companies, by far their most important economic concern at the time. ......
......
March. 17.
Washington, DC—Incoming cable from Jakarta:
“1. Several American correspondents here have sought our comments on 'reports from [Jakarta]' which we have traced to high-level British sources in Singapore. AP correspondent John Cantwell (protect source) told Congen flatly that British are planting stories.”
The reporter knew he had been receiving misinformation as part of a campaign to strengthen Suharto. He didn’t mind. The memo continues:
“Correspondent complained that, although he was reasonably certain British were feeding him false or misleading information, their stories were so spectacular he had no choice but to file them.” 38
.......
On April 13, 1966, C.L. Sulzberger penned a piece, one of many in this genre, with the headline “When a Nation Runs Amok” for the New York Times. As Sulzberger described it, the killings occurred in “violent Asia, where life is cheap.” He reproduced the lie that Communist Party members had killed the generals on October 1, and that Gerwani women slashed and tortured them. He went on to affirm that “Indonesians are gentle… but hidden behind their smiles is that strange Malay streak, that inner, frenzied blood-lust which has given to other languages one of their few Malay words: amok.” 40
The Malay, and now Indonesian, concept of amok actually referred to a traditional form of ritual suicide, even if the anglicization now refers to wild violence more generally. 41 But there’s no reason to believe that the mass violence of 1965–1966 has its roots in native culture. No one has any evidence of mass murder of this kind happening in Indonesian history, except for when foreigners were involved. 42
This story of inexplicable, vaguely tribal violence—so easy for American readers to digest—was entirely false. This was organized state violence with a clear purpose. The main obstacles to a complete military takeover were eliminated by a coordinated program of extermination—the intentional mass murder of innocent civilians. The generals were able to take power after state terror sufficiently weakened their political opponents, who had no weapons, only public sympathy. They didn’t resist their own annihilation because they had no idea what was coming. 43
In total, it is estimated that between five hundred thousand and one million people were slaughtered, and one million more were herded into concentration camps. Sarwo Edhie, the man who ambushed Sukarno in March, once bragged that the military had killed three million people. 44 There’s a reason we have to settle for estimates. Because, for more than fifty years, the Indonesian government has resisted any attempt to go out and record what happened, and no one around the world has much cared to ask, either.Millions more people were indirect victims of the massacres, but no one came around to inquire how many loved ones they had lost.
Their silence was the point of the violence. The Armed Forces did not oversee the extermination of every single communist, alleged communist, and potential communist sympathizer in the country. That would have been nearly impossible, because around a quarter of the country was affiliated somehow with the PKI. Once the killings took hold, it became incredibly hard to find anyone who would admit to any association with the PKI.
Around 15 percent of the prisoners taken were women. They were subjected to especially cruel, gendered violence, which sprung directly from the propaganda spread by Suharto with Western help. Sumiyati, the Gerwani member who lived near Sakono in her teens, fled the police for two months before turning herself in. She was made to drink the urine of her captors. Other women had their breasts cut off, or their genitals mutilated, and rape and sexual slavery were widespread. 46 There has been some debate as to whether the Indonesian mass killings can be catagorized a “genocide,” but taht is largely an argument about the meaning of the term, not about what happened. 47 In the overwhelming majority of cases, people were killed for their political beliefs or for being accused of having the wrong political beliefs. It is also true that some murders used the chaos to settle personal scores, and thousands were killed because of their race. This was especially true for the entire Chinese population. But the vast majority of real leftists were no more deserving of any punishment than those who were inaccurately accused of being associated with the Communist Party.
Except for a tiny number of people possibly involved in the planning of the disastrous September 30th Movement, almost everyone killed and imprisoned was entirely innocent of any crime. Magdalena, an apolitical teenage member of a communist-affiliated union, was innocent.
.......
It wasn’t only US government officials who handed over kill lists to the Army. Managers of US-owned plantations furnished them with the names of “troublesome” communists and union organizers, who were then murdered.
The prime responsibility for the massacres and concentration camps lies with the Indonesian military. We still do not know if the method employed— disappearance and mass extermination—was planned well before October 1965, perhaps inspired by other cases around the world, or planned under foreign direction, or if it emerged as a solution as events unfolded. But Washington shares guilt for every death. The United States was part and parcel of the operation at every stage, starting well before the killing started, until the last body dropped and the last political prisoner emerged from jail, decades later, tortured, scarred, and bewildered. At several points that we know of—and perhaps some we don’t—Washington was the prime mover and provided crucial pressure for the operation to move forward or expand.
.........
And in the end, US officials got what they wanted. It was a huge victory.
As historian John Roosa puts it, “Almost overnight the Indonesian government went from being a fierce voice for cold war neutrality and anti-imperialism to a quiet, compliant partner of the US world order.”
This was something for almost everyone in the US government and elite media circles to celebrate, given the thinking that was dominant at the time. James Reston, a liberal columnist at the New York Times, published a piece under the headline “A Gleam of Light in Asia.” He noted, correctly, that “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. … it is doubtful if the coup would ever have been attempted without the American show of strength in Vietnam or been sustained without the clandestine aid it has received indirectly from here.” Reston said that the :savage transformation of Indonesia from a pro-Chinese policy under Sukarno to a defiantly anti-Communist policy under General Suharto is, of course, the most important” of a number of “hopeful political developments in Asia” that he saw as outweighing Washington’s more widely publisized setbacks in Vietnam. 52
......
..... But how could the international press, and the State Department, remain entirely untroubled by the fact that this was achieved through mass murder of unarmed civilians? Howard Federspiel, at the State Department, summed up the answer perfectly. “No one cared,” he recalled, “as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered.” 54
8
Around the World
Indonesia did indeed become a “quite, compliant partner” of the United States, which explains why so many Americans today have barely heard about the country. But at the time things were very different.
... But first, that giant bloody wave wrought short-term consequences as it crashed onto shores around the world. ...
By The fall of the PKI “greatly reduced America's Around the World.
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..... The official organ of the party, The People, didn’t comment on events in Indonesia until October 7, when the paper published a message from Ho Chi Minh to President Sukarno. It avoided the question of commenting on the September 30th entirely.
“We are very delighted to hear the President is well. We wish that you and the Indonesian people are able to continue with your revolution.”
Then, on October 9 and October 18, The People published two headlines: “Forces in Indonesia, supported by the imperialist US, have for months planned a coup against President Sukarno,” read the first one; the second read, “Imperialist US and their cohorts are provoking an anti-communist campaign in Indonesia.” 4
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..... After learning about the mass extermination program, Pravda asked in February 1966, “What for and according to what right are tens of thousands of people being killed?” The official Communist paper reported that “rightist political circles are trying to eliminate the communist party and at the same time ‘eradicate’ the ideology of Communism in Indonesia.” They compared the slaughter to the "White Terror” unleashed in Russia in 1917. 10
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It’s believed the events of 1965-66 in Indonesia were the first time Asia suffered from disappearances as a tactic of state terror. 20 In 1965, two men with direct knowledge of US activities in Indonesia arrived in Guatemala City. Historians who study violence in Latin America believe that 1966 in Guatemala was the first time the region suffered from disappearances as a tactic of state terror. 21
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.... Mao and Zhou Enlai had encouraged the Indonesian leftists to arm the people. 29 It did not. Then overnight, hidden right-wing elements emerged to kill them all and turn a left-leaning anti-imperialist nation into an ally of Washington. It would be the perfect propaganda tale to invent, if it were not all true.
The United States US government officials were almost uniformly celebratory of the massacres in Indonesia, even as their scope and brutality became clear. Ironically, one dissenting voice on this topic came from the man with a reputation for pushing for the most violent and reckless covert operations in the early 1960s.
In January 1966, Senator Bobby Kennedy said, “We have spoken out against the inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the Communists. But will we speak out also against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged Communists have not been perpetrators but victims?”
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In his 1965 book, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, he wrote that “neo-colonialism is the worst form of imperialism.” According to Nkrumah, the new way of the world was that “foreign capital is used for the exploitation, rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world,” and that imperial powers no longer even had to admit what they were doing—not even to themselves. 38
In 1966, while the US was still assisting in the extermination of Indonesia’s leftists, Nkrumah was deposed in a military coup backed by the United States and Britain. The role of the CIA is still unclear; it is established, however, that the coup plotters had trained in the United Kingdom. Nkrumah took refuge in Guinea, then led by Third World movement ally Ahmed Sekou Toure.
.... and US-backed Saddam Hussein would finish him off soon; Egypt’s Nasser had been weakened ....
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In 1966, the MIR newspaper, Punto Final, published a text attributed to philosopher Bertrand Russell. “I fear that the horror of the killings in Indonesia was only possible because in the West we are so saturated with racism that the death of Asians, even in the hundreds of thousands, doesn’t impress us. Blacks in North America know it well,” the article continued. “Knowing the same thing, the peoples of the world should take the path of open struggle.” 48 Punta Final also published a guide to CIA activities in Indonesia, the Congo, Vietnam, and Brazil. 49 The paper got some details wrong; but just as was the case when Hirian Rakyat covered Guatemala in 1954, Chile’s left-wing press described events in Indonesia more accurately than mainstream US press at the time.
… Allende himself had become more radical after he heard about what happened in Guatemala in 1954. 50 But like Carlos and the Communist Party, he believed in Chile’s institutions.
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Barack Obama’s memories of life as a young boy in Jakarta from 1967 to 1971, published in his book Dreams from My Father, provide a vivid picture of life in the capital as Suharto's government, and the US State Department, attempted to move on from the violence they had just finished inflicting on the country.
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Lolo shrugged and rolled his pants leg back down. “That’s usually enough. Men take advantage of weakness in other men. They’re just like countries in that way. The strong man takes the weak man’s land. He makes the weak man work his fields. If the weak man’s woman is pretty, the strong man will take her.” He paused to take another sip of water, thn asked, “Which would you rather be? 60
9
Jakarta is Coming
Paradigm Shift
The governments established in Brazil in 1964 and in Indonesia in 1965 were not Washington’s obedient servants. They remained nationalist, in a way, and pushed back, at times, against the United States. ...
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Allende Arrives, Barely In 1970, Salvador Allende ran for office again in Chile, and again the CIA financed a scare campaign. Henry Kissinger, national security advisor to President Nixon, approved the use of hundreds of thousands of dollars for a political warfare mission. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,” Kissinger said. 15
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The chaos and violence in Chile was not caused by President Salvador Allende, or the failures of his democratic socialist project. US-backed right-wing terrorism began before he even took office.
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... Ambassador Edward Korry told Kissinger, hopefully “forcing Allende to adopt the harsh features of a police state.” 20 They wanted Allende to abandon democracy. Track Two was a military coup. The CIA began conspiring with right-wing military officers, and funding a group of radicals that would grow into Patria y Libtertad, an anticommunist terrorist group known for its hideous geometric spider logo and sympathies with fascism. 21
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Washington was not worried that Chile’s economy would be destroyed under irresponsible left-wing mismanagement either, or even that Allende would harm US business interests. What scared the most powerful nation in the world was the prospect that Allende’s democratic socialism would succeed.
Just days after Allende was elected, President Nixon convened his National Security Council. Nixon said:
Our main concern in Chile is … that [Allende] can consolidate himself, and the picture presented to the world will be his success. … If we let the potential leaders in South America think they can move like Chile and have it both ways, we will be in trouble. I want to work on this and on military relations put in more money. On the economic side we want to give him cold Turkey [sic].... We’ll be very cool and very correct, but doing those things which will be a real message to Allende and others. … No impression should be permitted in Latin America that they can get away with this. 30
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In 1971, the year that Brazil’s military began to “disappear” its own dissidents, Medici’s dictatorship helped to overthrow the government in Bolivia and install right-wing General Hugo Banzar as dictator. Evidence indicates Brasila and Washington both supplied money and assistance for the August coup.
A few months later, Uruguay had an election. It appeared the left-leaning Frente Amplio coalition might win, so Brazil moved troops to the border and covertly interfered with the vote. Authorities handed the victory to the incumbent, right-leaning Colorado Party. 31
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The same year, back in the United States, former Ambassador Howard P. Jones published his memoir on Indonesia, The Possible Dream, reflecting on the failures of US policy in Asia. ....
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Operacao Jacarta, or “The Jakarta Operation,” was the name of a secret part of an extermination plan, according to documentation compiled by Brazil’s Truth Commission. Testimony gathered after the fall of the dictatorship indicates Operação Jacarta may have been part of Operação Radar, which was aimed at destroying the structure of the Brazilian Communist Party. The goal of Operação Jacarta was the physical elimination of communists. It called for mass murder, just as in Indonesia. Before the Jakarta Operation, the dictatorship had aimed its violence at open rebellions. Operação Jacarta was a hidden plan to expand state terror to Communist Party members operating openly with civil society groups or in the media.
The Brazilian public would not hear the words Operação Jacarta until three years later. But in Chile, the word “Jakarta” made a very public arrival.
Around Santiago, especially in the eastern part of the city—up in the hills, where the well-to-do people lived—someone began to plaster a message on the walls. It took a few forms.
“Yakarta viene.”
“Jakarta se acerca.”
That is: “Jakarta is Coming.”
Or sometimes, simply, “Jakarta.”
The events in Indonesia had been a part of right-wing discourse for years. Most significantly, Juraj Domic Kuscenic, a Croatian anticommunist who wrote in right-wing outlets like El Mercurio and had maintained close contact with Patria y Libertad since 1970, had made frequent references to it since the 1960s. 35
The first record of “Jakarta” appearing as a threat was in a January 1972 edition of El Rebelde, the official MIR newspaper. The cover asked, “What is Djakarta?” and on the inside showed a photo of the word slapped onto a wall. In a small article, “La Via Indonesia de Los Fascistas Chilenos,” the paper attempted to explain what the message meant. The Indonesian Communist Party had played an active role in an “independent, progressive” state, and then—overnight—all that was left of its members was a “sea of blood.” 36 At this point, not all of the Chilean left knew the Indonesian story, and the idea of a wave of violence here seemed far-fetched.
The second article on Jakarta came out in February 1972 in Ramona, a Communist Party youth magazine. It claimed that the right wing had adopted something called “Plan Djakarta,” and said it had gotten the plan from David Rockefeller or Agustín Edwards (the owner of the El Mercurio newspaper, which received CIA funding). “The Chilean extreme right wants to repeat that massacre,” the article explained. “What does that mean concretely? The terrorists have a plan which consists of killing the entire Central Committee of the Communist Party, the top of the Socialist Party, the national directors of CUT, the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores de Chile union organization, leaders of social movements, and all prominent figures on the Left.” The article was published on February 22, signed by Carlos Berger, the Communist Party member who had argued with Carmen Hertz about left-wing tactics and the meaning of the Indonesian massacre when she was back at the University of Chile. 37 Carlos and Carman Hertz were now married.
Wall painting was a popular political device in Santiago in the early 1970s. On the left, volunteer collectives painted murals with elaborate images created by young artists inspired both by famous international muralists, such as Diego Rivera in Mexico, and by Chile’s indigenous Mapuche culture. On the right, money pouring in from Washington or supplied by local elites was used to contract professional painters, who were both more efficient and less talented, because they were used to plastering simple advertising messages. Patricio “Pato” Madera, a founding member of the left-wing Ramona Parra Brigade of muralists, recognized the “Jakarta” graffiti as the handiwork of the same class of hired hands who had been painting right-wing slogans in recurring terror campaigns since 1964. But this was an escalation. It was a mass death threat. 38
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Operação Jacarta. Yakarta Viene. Plan Yakarta. In both Spanish and Portuguese, in all three ways it was used, it’s clear what “Jakarta” meant: anticommunist mass murder and the state-organized extermination of civilians who opposed the construction of capitalist authoritarian regimes loyal to the United States. It meant forced disappearances and unrepentant state terror. And it would be employed far and wide in Latin America over the two decades that followed.
Operation Condor
In 1973, Allende fell. He died, and so did the Chilean dream of democratic socialism. In its place emerged a violent anticommunist regime that worked with Brazil and the United states to form an international extermination network. Their murderous terror was not only reserved for the left. They also unleashed it on former allies who got in the way.
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“You’re all indoctrinated!” he screamed. “And it’s because of this indoctrination that we’re going to put into effect Operation Jakarta, and neutralize two thousand coimmunists right here in São Paulo.” He began to list the names of targets.
Luciano scribbled down, furiously, “Neutralizar 2mil comunistas em São Paulo ...”
The general had gone off script. This was a dictatorship, however, and he had an easy way to make sure it stayed off the record.
“If you publish a single line of what I just said, it will be 2,001!”
The students kept quiet, for quite some time. 65
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10
Back Up North
New Theaters
In 1975, the Cold War underwent some geographic shifts. Washington abandoned some of the regions where it had made constant war on communism, while the anticommunist regimes it had helped create continued to scorch the earth all around them.
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.... After the US-backed coup that deposed him, the ousted prince, Sihanouk, published a book of memoirs titled My War with the CIA. “We refused to become US puppets, or join in the anti-communist crusade,” he wrote. “That was our crime. He threw his support behind a small, shadowy, and strange group of Marxists he had repressed while in power. The Khmer Rouge, as he called them in the old colonial language, were the only ones fighting against Lon Nol and the US Army, which was wiping out entire swathes of the population. ....
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Suharto looked east, and he pulled out his old bag of tricks. Among Portugal’s newly freed colonies was the small nation of East Timor, which shared an island with Indonesian territory. When East Timor gained its independence, Suharto claimed he was threatened by communism on his borders.
Calling this a wild exaggeration would be generous. ....
.... To put down the freedom fighters, the Indonesian Armed Forces killed up to three hundred thousand people. 8 … up to a third of the population of East Timor, a higher percentage than those who died under Pol Pot in Cambodia.
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... “Subversives” were tortured and killed for their real or perceived communism; for their real or perceived atheism; for their real or perceived Jewishness; or just for union activities. Ford Motor Company and Citibank collaborated with the disappearance of union workers. 14 ...
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But the Condor alliance didn’t limit their activities to their own continent. They built upon the “stay-behind” armies Frank Wisner had helped to build in Europe to pursue their enemies in Germany, Spain, Italy, and Ireland. 18 The men behind Operation Condor often considered the nonviolent democracy and human rights activists operating abroad to be even more dangerous than armed guerrillas at home. 19 Most infamously, this logic led US citizen, known CIA contact, and Condor operative Michael Townley to murder former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letlier in the heart of WAshington, DC. A car bomb placed on Embassy Row blew Letelier’s legs off, killing him instantly; his twenty-five-year-old American assistant, Ronni Moffit, staggered from the car and slowly drowned in her own blood. 20 Townley is now in FBI witness protection.
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... Miguel fled onto the roof, and jumped from building to building to escape. Another time they shot down several of his colleagues in front of the Coca-Cola factory. ...
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By 1978, things were changing for Central America. In Nicaragua, a left-wing guerrilla group inspired by the Cuban revolution, the Sandinistas, was poised to win power. In El Salvador, the government responded to protests against an obviously rigged election with a massacre. Hundreds were killed. Then a coup there led to a civil-military regime, which also devolved into murderous repression, leading the civilians to quit, and support gre for leftist guerrillas.
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The Guatemalan government began to kill indigenous people en masse simply because of their ethnic background. Entire ethnicities, whole tribes, complete villages were marked as either communist or liable to become communist. They were often people who had only a vague idea of what Marxism or the guerrilla groups were. This was new, different from the urban terror tactics, in which government forces kidnapped individual people. For the Mayans and other indigenous groups, the Army would come and simply kill every single one of them.
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Even the clash, the punk band over in England, sang ecstatically about the shocking development:
For the very first time ever,
When they had a revolution in Nicaragua,
There was no interference from America
Human rights in America
Well the people fought the leader, And up he flew...
With no Washington bullets what else could he do?
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The Fall
The violence in central America raged on until the fall of the Berlin wall, and then kept going. From 1989 to 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart spectacularly, along with all the states that Moscow directly established in the wake of World War II. ...
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It’s hard to explain US behavior toward Cuba as a response to the fear of Soviet Communism, or as a defense of freedom. From 1960 to the present, Cuba was very far from the most repressive political system, or the worst violator of human rights, in the hemisphere.
Perhaps Castro had committed the unforgivable sin of very publicly surviving repeated coup and assasiniation attempts in a way that embarrassed Washington. Or perhaps the real threat Washington perceived was the possibility of a rival model outside the global American-led system, the same thing that we now know bothered US officials about Guatemala in 1954, Bandung in 1955, and Chile in 1973.
There’s another thing the US certainly didn’t change. Immediately after the end of the Cold War, US officials, especially President George H. W. Bush, had talked about a “Peace Dividend.” The idea was that, with Soviet .... Barack Obama ran as an antiwar candidate, yet when he finished his term in 2016, the United States was actively bombing at least seven countries. 63
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“When I finally got to go back to Indonesia, it was shocking to hear what people think communism is,” Nury said. “I lived through it, and they are just wrong. And living in Bulgaria under communism was a hell of a lot better than living in Suharto’s Indonesia.”
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11
We Are the Champions
What kind of world did we get after the Cold War? Who won this war? Who lost? And more specifically, how did the anticommunist crusade concretely affect life for billions of people today? ... .........
... There was no central plan, no master control room where the whole thing was orchestrated, but I think that the extermination programs in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines, South Korea, Sudan, Taiwan, Thailand, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Vietnam should be interconnected, and a crucial part of the USUS victory in the Cold War. ...... Without the mass murder of the PKI, the country would not have moved from Sukarno to Suharto. Even in countries where the fate of the government was not hanging in the balance, mass murders functioned as effective state terror, both within the countries and in the surrounding regions, signaling what could happen to you if you resisted.
I am not saying that the United States won the Cold War because of mass murder. The Cold War ended mostly because of the internal contradictions of Soviet Communism, and the fact that its leaders in Russia accidentally destroyed their own state. I do not want to claim that this loose network of extermination programs, organized and justified by anticommunist principles, was such an important part of the US victory that the violence profoundly shaped the world we live in today.
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The fourth way that anticommunist extermination programs shaped the world is that they deformed the world socialist movement. Many of the global left-wing groups that did survive the twentieth century decided that they had to employ violence and jealously guard power or face annihilation. When they saw the mass murders taking place in these countries, it changed them. Maybe US citizens weren’t paying close attention to what happened in Guatemala, or Indonesia. But other leftists around the world definitely were watching. When the world's largest Communist Party without an army or dictatorial control of a country was massacred, one by one, with no consequences for the murderers, many people around the world drew lessons from this, with serious consequences.
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12
Where Are They Now? And Where Are We?
Denpasar
Wayan Badra the Hindu priest lives on the street where he grew up, in Seminyak, Southwest Bali. But the neighborhood has changed drastically. That same beach that he used to walk on for forty minutes every morning, as he headed to school down in Kuta, is certainly not empty. It's packed wall to wall with luxury resorts and “beach clubs,” a very common type of business on the island, where foreigners can sip cocktails all day, and take a dipo in the pool, right on the sand.
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If you had to sum up Jair Bolsonaro’s political career in two words, “violent anticommunism” would be a very good choice. He was an unremarkable soldier and an unremarkable politician, ... He once said, “Voting won’t change anything in this country. Nothing! Things will only change, unfortunately, after starting a civil war here, and doing the work the dictatorship didn’t do.Killing some thirty thousand people, and starting with FHC [referring to then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso of the Brazilian Social-Democratic Party]. If some innocents die, that's just fine.” 3 Over the years, his vehement defense of the dictatorship, man including its most ...
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... he is proud of it. On the front, he had written, “God is love.”
In Guatemala City, if you ask people when democracy ended ...
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Domingo, the owner of the bus, had the answer: “Well, they said they were communists and that communists are dangerous. But actually, the government are the ones who did all the killing. So if anyone was dangerous, if anyone was ‘communist,’ it must be them.”
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Vincent Bevins "The Jakarta Method" PDF
Vincent Bevins "The Jakarta Method" three links
How ‘Jakarta’ Became the Codeword for US-Backed Mass Killing 05/23/2020
How ‘Jakarta’ Became the Codeword for US-Backed Mass Killing 05/18/2020
Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister and President of Ghana, 1965 "Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of imperialism"
Allende and Chile: ‘Bring Him Down’ 11/03/2020
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