US strategy since the 1950s had been to try to find a way to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party, not because it was seizing power undemocratically, but because it was popular. In line with Frank Wisner’s early strategy of covert direct confrontation, the US government launched secret attacks and murdered civilians in 1958 in the attempt to break up the country, and failed. So American officials adopted Howard Jones’s more subtle on-the-ground insights, turning to a strategy of building deep connections with the Armed Forces and building an anticommunist military state within a state.
