off on a plan that was badly conceived and doomed to failure. They intended to quietly arrest the generals—as had long been customary in Indonesia, since before Sukarno himself had been kidnapped in 1945—and present them to the president as traitors. Their deaths, in this version, would have been the result of incompetence and panic. This is probably the most “conservative” of the credible accounts, the account that presents the strongest case against the PKI.
