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

by Vincent Bevins

President Sukarno also distrusted Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, because that small city-state had cooperated with the CIA in the 1958 attacks on Indonesia.

The IMF demanded what amounted to a structural adjustment program in Indonesia, which dictated spending cuts, an increase in the production of raw materials for export, currency devaluation, monetary tightening, and an end to government subsidies.13 Sukarno’s ministers went along with the IMF’s demands, and they had a swift, severe, and widespread impact on the population, which saw prices double, triple, or even quintuple overnight.

Indonesia was one place where Lyndon Johnson took a different approach from his predecessor. He had a lot less time for Sukarno. Just three days before he died, Jack Kennedy had reiterated his clear, if slightly cynical, commitment to the strategy of ongoing engagement with Sukarno

JFK had agreed with Jones that a visit to Jakarta could have smoothed the whole thing over. Of course, the military counterinsurgency program Kennedy put in place was still underway. But Johnson was not going to fight any political battles for those one hundred million people and the resources under their feet.

Howard Jones remembers the shift, wistfully: “Regarding himself as the leader not only of the new Asian-African nations but all the ‘new emerging forces,’ I am sure [Sukarno] felt that an understanding, if not an alliance between himself and the man considered the leader of the Western world, was possible.

Jones believed Sukarno would back off on Malaysia as long as that didn’t mean national humiliation, and he had told Kennedy a presidential visit to Indonesia was probably just what was needed. Kennedy agreed, and planned to come.19 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.

Sukarno noticed a shift in the way the world’s most powerful country was treating him. He went so far as to speculate that JFK was killed in order to stop him from visiting Indonesia and cementing an alliance between Washington and Jakarta.

Whatever goodwill there was for Sukarno in Washington began to dissipate. 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.

Since the early 1960s, both the American and British governments had believed, and discussed often, that the ideal situation would be a “premature PKI coup” that could provoke an Army response. It’s possible that some version of this plan had been worked on secretly, under the cover of Kennedy’s civic action program, since 1962.32

As the CIA noted in May 1965, the PKI itself had “only limited potential for armed insurgency and would almost certainly not wish to provoke the military into open opposition.”

The Americans told Nasution that he should wait patiently; even if Sukarno dies [head of the Armed Forces, General Nasution] should be flexible rather than start a coup. He accepted the suggestion from the Americans.

As 1965 went on, rumors that right-wing generals were conspiring with the CIA or some foreign power began to spread like wildfire in Jakarta.

Suspicions held by Sukarno and many in the Indonesian government intensified when they found out who was coming from Washington to replace Howard Jones. Newly minted Ambassador Marshall Green, they learned, had been in Seoul when Park Chung Hee took power in a military coup that destroyed the short-lived parliamentary Second Republic.

In December 1964, Pakistan’s ambassador to Paris, J. A. Rahim, sent a letter to his foreign minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, reporting on a conversation he had with a Dutch intelligence officer working for NATO. He wrote that Western intelligence agencies were organizing a “premature communist coup.” Indonesia, the NATO officer told him, “was ready to fall into the Western lap like a rotten apple.

When she came home, in August 1965, she felt that things were different. Tense. The widespread rumors about an imminent right-wing coup were indeed everywhere. In her social circle, people were talking about the possibility of a right-wing Council of Generals working secretly to remove Sukarno or destroy the left.

At some point, a group of midlevel Army officers formed a group and decided to call it the Gerakan 30 September (“G30S” or “September 30th Movement”) and came up with a plan.

Very late at night on September 30, 1965—really, it was already the early hours of October 1—the Gerakan 30 September met at Halim Air Force Base, the same airport where Francisca and Zain had made their first modest home in a garage fourteen years earlier. The leaders of the September 30th Movement were from the Armed Forces: Lieutenant Colonel Untung, for example, was a stocky military man who had attacked Dutch troops in the fight for West New Guinea; and Colonel Abdul Latief was a distinguished commander who had fought in the revolution against the Dutch in the 1940s. They organized seven teams, made up of soldiers already under their official military command. Each had a similar mission. They would head to the homes of seven of the highest-ranking officers in the Armed Forces, arrest them, and bring them back. In the deep darkness of the morning, they set off toward the center of Jakarta in Army trucks. They were partially successful. Six of the teams brought back their men, including Lieutenant General Achmad Yani, the commander of the Army. However, the most important target, General Nasution—the friend of Washington and Howard Jones since 1958—got away. As they started the raid on his home, Nasution jumped over the back wall of his house, in the upscale neighborhood of Menteng, and hid in the home of his friend, the Iraqi ambassador. The September 30th Movement brought back his military assistant instead. During the raid, his five-year-old daughter was shot and kil...

For reasons we still don’t fully understand, all six of the captured generals were dead by the time he arrived, their bodies at the bottom of an abandoned well near Halim Air Force Base. We don’t know if President Sukarno, or even the member of the September 30th Movement designated to meet him, knew this at the time.

The September 30th Movement’s leaders were from the Army. Neither the Air Force nor the Navy nor the police command were involved. However, when the leaders of the Air Force were informed of the movement and its success, they cheered. They believed that an internal military action, loyal to President Sukarno, had

prevented a right-wing plot. Reportedly, Sukarno himself was surprised by the nature of the radio announcement, but he was willing to wait and see what had happened and how the ...

The confusion lasted for no longer than one day: within twelve hours, the movement was crushed, and the Army, now led by right-wing General Suharto, was in direct control of the country.

More than fifty years later, we still don’t have a complete understanding of who planned the Gerakan 30 September, or what the real purpose of the night raid was. What we have is a range of credible theories.

One possible version of the story, put forward by historian John Roosa, is that Aidit helped to plan the raid through a Communist intermediary within the military. Because his conversations with the Army were secret and in...

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 “conse...

Benedict Anderson, perhaps the most famous

Indonesia expert of the twentieth century, and scholar Ruth McVey presented an account in 1966, in which the movement was largely what it says it was—an internal Army movement that the PKI did not help organize.48 As a result, Anderson was kicked out of Indonesia for twenty-six years. Just before his death in 2015, he said he still believed this to be the case.49

Then there are the entirely plausible assertions that General Suharto, the man who took over after the dust settled, planned or infiltrated the movement, perhaps with foreign assistance, to engineer his rise to power....

Suharto had a history of conflict with Nasution and Yani, and was the onl...

right-leaning Army official not targeted b...

Former Foreign Minister Subandrio, the same man who had to listen to Howard Jones deny that the CIA was bombing the country back in 1958, presents a credible insider’s account, in which Suharto was notified in advance by his friends leading the September 30th Movement; he pledged his support to them, but instead planned to hold back and use the rebellion as a pretext to seize p...

After the events of October 1, General Suharto seized control of the country, and told a set of deliberate, carefully prepared lies. These lies became official dogma in one of the world’s largest countries for decades.

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 anticommunist.53 The cable also put forward the idea of an anticommunist military-civilian coalition that could gain power in a succession struggle.

Suharto, a laconic forty-four-year-old major general from Central Java, was serving as head of the Army’s Strategic Command, or KOSTRAD. Suharto had studied under a man named Suwarto, a close friend of RAND Corporation consultant Guy Pauker and one of the Indonesian officers most responsible for implementing military-led Modernization Theory, “a state within a state,” and US-allied counterinsurgency operations.

Suharto had a checkered past within the Indonesian military. He had been caught smuggling in the late 1950s, and was fired by Nasution himself. According to Subandrio, Suharto’s flagrant corruption so angered Yani and Nasution that Yani personally gave him a beating, and Nasution almost put him on trial.55 During Konfrontasi, Suharto had made sure that troops along the border with Malaysia were understaffed and underequipped, using his power to minimize Indonesia’s conflict with the UK (and the US) at the time.

Curiously, General Suharto took command of the Armed Forces on October 1, not Nasution—the highest-ranking officer in the country—after Washington’s longtime friend was lucky enough to survive the events of the previous night. This was such an unexpected role reversal that it took several key actors weeks to understand that Suharto was actually in charge.

Everything Suharto did in October suggests that he was executing an anticommunist counterattack plan that had been developed in advance, not simply reacting to events.

On the morning of October 1, Suharto arrived at KOSTRAD, which for some reason had not been targeted or neutralized by the September 30th Movement, even though it sat directly across from Independence Square, which they occupied that morning. At an emergency meeting in the early morning, he took over as commander of the Armed Forces. In the afternoon, he told the troops at Independence Square to disperse and put an end to the rebellion or he would attack. He retook central Jakarta without firing a single shot, and went on the radio himself to declare the September 30th Movement had been defeated. President Sukarno ordered another major general, Pranoto, to meet him at Halim Air Force Base and assume temporary command of the Armed Forces. Contradicting a direct order from his commander in chief, Suharto forbid Pranoto to go, and gave Sukarno...

Once in command, Suharto ordered that all media be shut down, with the exception of the militar...

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. The fact that it was the only nonmilitary paper to come out that day might indicate that the Army published it so as to incriminate the party, or it may indicate that the party thought there would be nothing incriminating about going forward wit...

The military spread the story that the PKI was the mastermind of a failed communist coup. Suharto and his men claimed that the Indonesian Communist Party had brought the generals back to Halim Air Force Base and begun a depraved, demonic ritual. They said members of Gerwani, the Women’s Movement, danced naked while the women mutilated and tortured the generals, cutting off their genitals and gouging out their eyes, before murdering them. They claimed that the PKI had long lists of people they planned to kill, and mass graves already prepared.59 They said China had secretly delivered arms to People’s Youth Brigades.60 The Army paper, Angkatan Bersendjata (Armed Forces), printed photos of the dead generals’ bodies, reporting they had been “cruelly and viciously slaughtered” in acts of torture that were “an affront to humanity.”

Soon after the initial confusion, the US government assisted Suharto in the crucial early phase of spreading propaganda and establishing his anticommunist narrative. Washington quickly and covertly supplied vital mobile communications equipment to the military, a now-declassified October 14 cable indicates.63 This was also a tacit admission, very early, that the US government recognized the Army, not Sukarno, as the true leader of the country, even though Sukarno was still legally the president.

Every part of the story the Indonesian Army told is a lie. No Gerwani women participated in any killings on October 1.65 More than three decades later, Benedict Anderson was able to prove not only that the account of the torture of the generals was false, but that Suharto knew it was all false in early October. He himself ordered an autopsy that showed all the men were shot except one, who may have been stabbed with a bayonet in a fight at his home.66 But by 1987, when Anderson’s proof was published, not much of that discovery mattered anymore. The story of a demonic communist plot to take over the country by mutilating good, God-fearing military men in the dark of night had become something like part of the national religion under the Suharto dictatorship.

Not long after he took over, Suharto erected a monument to the men killed that night, just like the Brazilians erected a monument at Red Beach in Rio de Janeiro celebrating their fallen heroes. The two structures are even similar—at both, steps lead up to a white marble slab, with a bronze figure, or figures, of the military victims standing in front. Just as with the Intentona Comunista in Brazil, Indonesians celebrated the anniversary of the event each year as a kind of anticommunist national ritual. But the Indonesian monument is bigger.

And Suharto took this propaganda a bit further than statues and annual speeches—he ordered the production of a gruesome, three-hour film depicting his version of events, which was broadcast on September 30 each year on public television. The Army still screens it. The story spread by Suharto hits on some of the darkest fears and prejudices held by Indonesians, and indeed men in general—around the world. A surprise night raid on your home. Slow torture with blades. The inversion of gender roles, the literal assault on strong men’s reproductive organs carried out by demonic, ...

The similarities with the Brazilian legend of the Intentona Comunista are striking. Just a year after a coup in the most important nation in Latin America was inspired partly by a legend about communist soldiers stabbing generals to death in their sleep, General Suharto tells the most important nation in Southeast Asia that communists and left-wing soldiers whisked generals away from their homes in the dead of night to be murdered slowly with knives, and then both Washington-align...

Sukarno refrained from attending, out of fear for his safety. The president now had to publicly back the new military leadership or appear to support the defeated and discredited, indeed apparently demonic, September 30th Movement.

Washington, DC—The State Department received a cable from the US embassy in Jakarta on October 5, signed by Ambassador Marshall Green. Green outlined the situation in Indonesia: Following guidelines may supply part of the answer to what our posture should be: A. Avoid overt involvement as power struggle unfolds. B. Covertly, however, indicate clearly to key people in army such as Nasution and Suharto our desire to be of assistance where we can, while at same time conveying to them our assumption that we should avoid appearance of involvement or interference in any way. C. Maintain and if possible extend our contact with military. D. Avoid moves that might be interpreted as note of nonconfidence in army (such as precipately [sic] moving out our dependents or cutting staff). E. Spread the story of PKI’s guilt, treachery and brutality (this priority effort is perhaps most needed immediate assistance we can give army if we can find way to do it without identifying it as solely or largely US effort).

The new ambassador sent another, more direct summary of what lay before Washington in Indonesia that same day. He wrote, “The Army now has the opportunity to move against Communist Party if it moves quickly,” he wrote. “It’s now or never.”

According to interviews with Acehnese peoples at the time, the PKI did not have a bad reputation, even among very conservative Muslims, until the anticommunist propaganda started arriving after October 1.

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 assembled crowds. “The PKI are kafir [infidels],” he announced, according to eyewitness reports. “I will destroy them down to their roots! If in the village you find members of the PKI but do not kill them, it will be you who we punish!”