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

by Vincent Bevins

The term was used in the sense of the “Third Estate” during the French Revolution, the revolutionary common people who would overthrow the First and Second Estates of the monarchy and the clergy. “Third” did not mean third-rate, but something more like the third and final act:

Joe Kennedy understood one fundamental truth about political power in the United States. You can buy it.

He saw labor unions as self-serving and infiltrated by communists, and let their members know it in congressional hearings. And in 1954, when a special Senate committee recommended that Joseph McCarthy be condemned for breaking Senate rules, John F. Kennedy was the only Democrat not to vote against him.44

From the beginning the CIA had two basic divisions. On one side was the gathering of intelligence through espionage. Their job was something akin to providing a private news service for the president. On the other side was covert action—the rough stuff, the active attempts to change the world. That was Frank Wisner’s territory.

In Germany, the CIA had no problem recruiting former Nazis, including those who had run death squads, as long as they were anticommunist.

The Dulles brothers and the CIA got the green light. Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, whom Wisner had hired in 1950, took charge of the mission, which they decided to call Operation Ajax. He had a million dollars to spend in Iran as he pleased, a huge sum for the kind of help he wanted to buy. The CIA bribed every politician it could, and looked for a general willing to take over and install the Shah as dictator. Agents paid street thugs, strongmen, and circus performers to riot in the streets. When CIA station chief Roger Goiran argued the US was making a historic mistake by aligning itself with British colonialism, Allen Dulles recalled him to Washington. The CIA created pamphlets and posters proclaiming that Mossadegh was a communist, an enemy of Islam. They paid off journalists to write that he was a Jew. The CIA hired gangsters to pretend to be Tudeh Party members and attack a mosque. Two of Roosevelt’s Iranian agents, who were handling some of the hired muscle, tried to turn down further work at one point, saying the risk was becoming too great. But Roosevelt convinced them by saying that if they refused, he’d kill them.

The CIA supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to the new regime, which slaughtered untold numbers of people. A Baath Party member named Saddam Hussein, only twenty-five years old, took part in the US-backed anticommunist terror that followed the coup.43

In December, when Mao learned of D. N. Aidit’s death, he composed a poem: Sparse branches stood in front of my windows in winter, smiling before hundreds of flowers Regretfully those smiles withered when spring came There is no need to grieve over the withered To each flower there is a season to wither, as well a season to blossom There will be more flowers in the coming year.25