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March 30 - April 30, 2024
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,
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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
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There were machine guns, STEN guns, and bazookas, and the weapons bore the mark of a manufacturer in Plymouth, Michigan.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Jones stressed that the Indonesians only turned to the Communist Bloc for economic and military aid after they had exhausted their attempts to get the same kind of help from America.31 In 1955, the Soviet Union had offered substantial aid, but Indonesia, pursuing a strictly neutral position, said it wouldn’t take any more than the Americans offered. Even then the government hesitated, unsure if it should take anything from the Soviet Union at all—until 1958, the year Allen Pope and other CIA operatives burned Indonesians alive, when they took it.
Jones, along with the US military attaché in Indonesia, took Hatta’s advice. He emphasized to Washington that the United States should support the Indonesian military as a more effective, long-term anticommunist strategy. The country of Indonesia couldn’t be simply broken into pieces to slow down the advance of global socialism, so this was a way that the US could work within existing conditions. This strategic shift would begin soon, and would prove very fruitful.
And the CIA discussed simply murdering Sukarno. The Agency went so far as to identify the “asset” who would kill him, according to Richard M. Bissell, Wisner’s successor as deputy director for plans.34 Instead, the CIA hired pornographic actors, including a very rough Sukarno look-alike, and produced an adult film in a bizarre attempt to destroy his reputation.
Immigrants from China, particularly the south, started moving to the islands of Southeast Asia centuries earlier. They often fled starvation or bandits, looking for work or at least refuge in a land where it was always warm and it seemed you could always just pick coconuts from the trees when you were hungry. Some Chinese came to Southeast Asia as early as the eleventh century, and immigration continued until much more recently.
But in 1959, as Benny was finishing his undergraduate studies, the nature of Indonesian democracy changed: it took a big step backward. A few months after the regional rebellions backed by the CIA were defeated, Sukarno declared that the country would be moving to a system he had been discussing for a few years called “Guided Democracy.” As he put it, the system was a national response to the weakness of liberal democracy. Liberalism and party democracy, he complained, were a Western import that pitted everyone against each other, forcing each person to fight for their own selfish interests.
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As Guided Democracy went into effect, the Army became one of a few key actors in Indonesian society. The military was to the right of the president, the Communists were on the left, and Sukarno provided a delicate balance by playing political forces against each other.
In 1953 and 1954, there were about a dozen Indonesian officers training in the United States, and that number dropped to zero in 1958, the year Allen Pope bombed Ambon. In 1959, zero became forty-one, and by 1962, there were more than one thousand Indonesians studying operations, intelligence, and logistics, mostly at the Fort Leavenworth Army base.
In its basic approach, Modernization Theory replicated the Marxist formulation that societies progress through stages; but it did so in a way that was highly influenced by the anticommunist, liberal American milieu in which it emerged. The social scientists who pioneered the field put forward that “traditional,” primitive societies would advance through a specific set of stages, ideally arriving at a version of “modern” society that looked a whole lot like the United States.
In 1959, the State Department completed a major study informed by this logic. The recent history of Latin America, the study claims, “indicates that authoritarianism is required to lead backward societies through their socio-economic revolutions.… The trend towards military authoritarianism will accelerate as developmental problems become more acute.” The National Security Council met to discuss the report with the president, and to shower its conclusions with lavish praise.
At the same time, young Indonesians were brought to study in universities in the United States through various scholarship and funding programs. The idea, as with similar programs around the Third World, was to show the young intellectuals how things worked in the US, which would hopefully inspire them to take pro-American ideas back home. Since 1956, the Ford Foundation had been providing fellowships that brought young Indonesian economists to the US.
The young academics and the Army guys didn’t talk too much politics, but it became clear to the grad students that the idea was to “groom them to be anti-Sukarno generals,” in Benny’s words. “They were all well-trained, and Americanized, and many of them became anticommunists there in Kansas.”
But just months after his election, the young, inexperienced politician made a serious mistake, at least given the rules of the global Cold War. As Belgian forces (and mining interests) backed a white-supported secession movement in the Katanga Province, Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help. The UN offered nothing more than a strongly worded resolution—but Lumumba was desperate, and thought he deserved troops. So on July 14, 1960, he sent a cable to Moscow asking for further assistance. It was immediately leaked to the CIA.
On August 25, the White House gave the order, and the CIA drew up plans to have him killed.19 Bissell asked Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s in-house scientist—the same man who had overseen MKUltra, a program that kidnapped poor black men in the United States and dosed them with LSD to see if the Agency could control their minds—to prepare a poison.20 The CIA made plans to inject it into Lumumba’s food or toothpaste.21 That operation fizzled, so the Agency ran an operation to lure Lumumba out of United Nations protection, where he could be killed by local rivals.
Although ultimately without direct Agency participation, this is what happened. Lumumba lost UN recognition on November 22, and five days later fled house arrest in Leopoldville. Troops loyal to Joseph Mobutu, the CIA-backed Army chief of staff and former friend of Lumumba, caught up with Lumumba, kidnapping him and delivering him to the Belgian-backed rebels in Katanga. Working with four Belgians, Katangan rebel forces stuffed Lumumba into the back of a car, then unloaded him near a shallow well. They shot him three times, and shoved him into the hole.23
But at the very beginning, Castro hoped for decent relations with Uncle Sam, and some in Washington even welcomed his victory. This fell apart quickly. Washington responded to Castro’s agrarian reforms and nationalizations by imposing severe trade restrictions, which led Cuba to turn to the Soviet Union for badly needed fuel imports.
The parcel bomb, the third attempt to destroy Sihanouk, was traced to a US base in Saigon, but may have been sent without US knowledge. However—and this crucial dynamic repeats itself throughout the Cold War—the incident would not have happened if the South Vietnamese thought Washington would disapprove.
After the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, the Kennedy brothers debated the merits of sending in the Marines. Because this would not look good, Bobby suggested they simply blow up the US consulate themselves. That could provide the rationale for the invasion.
The first major blow was a 1959 law, passed just as Benny was heading to Kansas, that took some economic rights away from foreign nationals. In practice, this included the country’s large ethnic Chinese population. It was not Sukarno who pushed for this—it was the military—but he let the racist law, a deviation from Indonesia’s foundational values, pass.
she realized very quickly that Brazil is a Western European settler colony, with extreme inequality and a very obvious racial hierarchy.
The Portuguese arrived in this part of South America around 1500, and like so many other places in the colonial world, it was named for one of its first raw material exports: brazil wood, or pau brasil
After Gordon’s July meeting with JFK, CIA money began pouring into Brazil. The Agency sent agent Tim Hogan under “deep cover,” and he began “organizing farmers and labor.”27 Kennedy’s administration initiated a “counterinsurgency” assessment, authored by General William H. Draper Jr., which came to the conclusion that “every effort should be made” to provide US training for the local Army.28
anyone who was paying attention knew that Washington had been behind the regime change operations. These very obvious signs of US intervention had not only tainted Washington’s image worldwide—they had undermined the efficacy of the states they installed when they were victorious. Guatemala’s government fell apart quickly after the CIA-backed coup, as did the Shah’s government in Iran, eventually.
Sukarno was again talking about the unity of Marxism, Islam, and nationalism, and repackaged it into one of his trademark acronyms—NASAKOM, for Nasionalisme, Agama (Religion), and Komunisme. He talked of forming a NASAKOM cabinet, but the right wing of Indonesian politics blocked the Communists.
In reality the three political forces in the country were not nationalism, religion, and communism but rather the PKI, Sukarno, and the military.
“For the first time in my life, I became aware that I didn’t actually come from an uncultured or backwards people, and the other peoples of Africa and Asia weren’t backwards either. I had always been told, and even thought, that we were very stupid Indonesians who didn’t know what we were doing, trying to build a country without any education or resources,” she said. She was now almost forty years old. “We played our own sports, put on our own dances. This was really an awakening for us. It felt like this was what the
West had been trying so hard to keep down, for centuries, and it was finally revealed.”
In the 1960s, the PKI had increasingly moved closer to China’s side in the Sino-Soviet split, partly because Beijing was more supportive of Indonesia in its territorial conflicts. But technically the PKI was still ideologically committed to the Soviet Union’s anti-Stalinist line.
More importantly, the PKI didn’t think it had to take orders from anybody.7 It was now the third-largest communist party in the world, the largest outside China and the Soviet Union, and its strategy of nonviolent, direct engagement with the masses had led to impressive results. The PKI now had three million card-carrying members.
This added up to nearly a quarter of Indonesia’s population of one hundred million, including children, and nearly a third of the country’s adult registered voters were PKI affiliates.8 They operated openly, in every corner of the country. But at the national level, they relied almost entirely on Sukarno for their influence over policy. They had no other choice.
On the other side of the political divide, the military was allied with Muslim groups, and increasingly relied on the enthusiastic support of the United States. The Indonesian military had already radically increased its influence during the CIA’s attempt to break up the country in 1958, and Kennedy and Johnson’s “civic action program,” or CAP, had delivered them the resources and training to emerge as a political and economic force to be reckoned with. The political lines were clear to anyone paying attention—communists and Sukarno on one side; Army and the West on the other.
And Sukarno no longer felt any shyness about taking on the West. His revolution had bested the CIA in 1958; he had gotten Kennedy and the Netherlands to back down on West New Guinea. With interventions in Brazil and escalating interventions in Vietnam apparently confirming his view of Washington as an imperialist aggressor, he felt he was on the right side of history. So he overestimated his strength, and took on the United Kingdom while problems grew at home.
The British did not want to create a country that was majority Chinese, since too much of Malaya’s population, especially in Singapore, sympathized with communism for their liking. As a solution to this “problem,” London added its
possessions on the top half of the huge island of Borneo into what would become Malaysia, and excluded the island of Singapore. This move would combine the entirely distinct peoples of Sarawak, Borneo, and Sabah into the new Malaysia, which would dilute the proportion of ethnic Chinese to levels the British considered acceptable.
