Soon after his trip to Delhi, Bell offered pretty much the same advice to the newly self-installed leader of Indonesia, General Suharto, and got the opposite response. Suharto was so impressed, says Nehru, he called World Bank chief Robert McNamara and asked him to appoint Bell as the bank’s representative in Jakarta. Bell served in Jakarta from 1968 to 1972 and, along with a circle of U.S.-educated Indonesian technocrats who came to be known as the “Berkeley Mafia,” helped transform the impoverished country into a mini-Asian miracle over the next two decades.
