The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

by Vincent Bevins

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

none of the details I include contradict the established facts or the larger story that historians have already uncovered.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.”

Sukarno liked to call this “neocolonialism,” or the enforced conditions of imperial control without formal rule.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.