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September 2 - October 13, 2023
I fear that the truth of what happened contradicts so forcefully our idea of what the Cold War was, of what it means to be an American, or how globalization has taken place, that it has simply been easier to ignore it.
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.
killed between fifty million and seventy million indigenous people, around 90 percent of the native American population. Scientists recently concluded that the annihilation of these peoples was so large that it changed the temperature of the planet.
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.
“Politics is like war. It takes three things to win. The first is money and the second is money and the third is money.”
British policies created a famine that took the lives of four million people. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill blamed the Indians for the famine his own government caused, saying it was their fault for “breeding like rabbits,” and asked why Gandhi—whom Churchill loathed—hadn’t died yet.48
One of these Communists, Kim Il-sung, took over in the North in 1945.13 In the South, the occupying US forces plucked up Syngman Rhee, a Christian and anticommunist who had lived in the US for decades, and installed him as leader. His authoritarian government targeted leftists and massacred tens of thousands of people on Jeju, an island that had been controlled since the war by independent “people’s committees,” using the threat of communism as justification.
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.
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.
CIA agents spread the rumor that an aswang, a bloodsucking ghoul of Filipino legend, was on the loose and destroying men with evil in their hearts. They then took a Huk rebel they had killed, poked two holes in his neck, drained him of his blood, and left him lying in the road.21
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.
“I love America, but I’m a disappointed lover.”29
“We just don’t understand America. You were once a colony. You know what colonialism is. You fought and bled and died for your freedom. How can you possibly support the status quo?”
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.
Edward Lansdale, the same man who had created vampire victims in the Philippines, discussed spraying civilian sugar workers in Cuba with biological warfare agents, as well as faking the Second Coming of Christ.
Wtf
America promptly embarked upon a policy of explicit branqueamento, or whitening. The idea was to bring in white immigrants, and to breed the African blood out of the population through “miscegenation.”
On July 30, however, Kennedy had a meeting with Ambassador Gordon, which was recorded. The two men agreed to spend millions on anti-Goulart plans for elections that year, and to prepare the ground for a military coup to, as Gordon put it, “push him out, if it comes to that.”
In the fall of 1963, President John F. Kennedy ordered his ambassador in South Vietnam to facilitate the removal of President Diem. As an ally, Diem was now causing Washington more trouble than he was worth. The CIA passed the word along to a local general, and on November 1, 1963, Diem was kidnapped along with his brother, and they were both shot and stabbed in the back of an armored personnel carrier. Kennedy hadn’t actually wanted Diem killed, but he knew that he was responsible for his death, and the assassination shook and badly depressed the young president.
A threat to democracy is when you pounce on the people, exploiting their Christian beliefs; and the mystifications of an anticommunist industry—they are a threat to democracy.”
As the coup began, the US State Department began an operation it dubbed Brother Sam, and made tankers, ammunition, and aircraft carriers available to the conspirators.
“Just as in a Hollywood film, there was a happy ending (for the plotters, that is). The communist bad guys and their sympathizers were deposed. The good guys were in power. And best of all: this was achieved without the United States needing to appear as a visible agent of the conspiracy.”
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.
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.”
Locals in Central Aceh understood, they recall, that they were being instructed to help kill the communists, or be killed themselves.
As far as we know, this was at least the third time in history that US officials had supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to allies, so that they could round them up and kill them. The first was in Guatemala in 1954, the second was in Iraq in 1963, and now, on a much larger scale, was Indonesia 1965.
The country’s largest Muslim organization had a youth wing and an armed wing, the Ansor and Banser. These were acronyms, but the founder of the Banser said that he wanted the word to sound like Panzer, Hitler’s famous tanks. He also said he had been studying Mein Kampf, starting in 1964, in order to learn how to deal with the Communists.
So a few years after the violence ended, Agung went with his family to find his father’s body, and give him an honorable funeral and cremation. They walked four kilometers to the site where someone told them they could find his remains. They found a field of bodies.
In total, at least 5 percent of the population of Bali was killed—that is, eighty thousand people, probably the highest proportion in the country.
Some Balinese were indeed asked if they wanted to nyupat or not. But those who said no were killed anyway, rendering the question meaningless.
F. Without becoming directly involved, promote arrangements between the [Government of Indonesia] and the American oil companies.… H. Within the limits of prudence, give open or covert advice and assistance to responsible and competent anti-communist groups for worthwhile activities.
The US government was intentionally destabilizing the economy.
Howard Federspiel, at the State Department, summed up the answer perfectly. “No one cared,” he recalled, “as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered.”
The Vietnamese communists did eventually win against the Americans, but at tremendous cost. Three million Vietnamese people were killed in that war, and two million of them were civilians.5 Many more were killed in Cambodia and Laos. In Indochina, Washington’s anticommunist crusade erased human life on a truly colossal scale, with no appreciable positive results.
The Agency pumped $3 million into that election. That came out to almost a dollar per vote for Eduardo Frei, more than Lyndon Johnson spent in his own 1964 campaign.42 In addition to funds, the CIA also delivered a crude “scare campaign” to the Chilean people.43 The Agency made extensive use of the press, radio, films, pamphlets, and posters, and painted the walls of the cities. One red-baiting radio ad featured the sound of a machine gun operated by murderous communists, followed by a woman declaring, “They have killed my child!” There were up to twenty radio spots of this kind per day.
Now “Jakarta” meant something very different. It meant anticommunist mass murder. It meant the state-organized extermination of civilians who opposed the construction of capitalist authoritarian regimes loyal to the United States. It meant forced disappearances and unrepentant state terror. And it would be employed far and wide in Latin America over the next two decades.
The men behind Operation Condor often considered the nonviolent democracy and human rights activists operating abroad to be even more dangerous than armed guerrillas at home.19 Most infamously, this logic led US citizen, known CIA contact, and Condor operative Michael Townley to murder former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in the heart of Washington, DC. A car bomb placed on Embassy Row blew Letelier’s legs off, killing him instantly; his twenty-five-year-old American assistant, Ronni Moffitt, staggered from the car and slowly drowned in her own blood.20 Townley is now in FBI
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In 1983, D’Aubuisson summed up the actually existing anticommunist ideology very well. “You can be a Communist,” he told reporter Laurie Becklund, “even if you personally don’t believe you are a Communist.”51
Salvadoran troops executed more than nine hundred men, women, and children with US-made assault rifles. The next day, Reagan appointed a Harvard-trained former liberal named Elliott Abrams to serve as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs. Put simply, his job was to defend US-allied right-wing regimes to the press, and shield them from criticism coming from appalled human rights groups.
From 1978 to 1983, the Guatemalan military killed more than two hundred thousand people.
Anticommunist extermination had spread all across Latin America, always with the assistance of the United States.
Immediately after the end of the Cold War, US officials, especially President George H. W. Bush, had talked about a “Peace Dividend.” The idea was that, with Soviet Communism gone, Washington would cut back on military spending and violent foreign engagements. The exact opposite happened. There was a small decrease in spending in the ’90s, and then the Pentagon budget exploded again after the turn of the century. Barack Obama ran as an antiwar candidate, yet when he finished his term in 2016, the United States was actively bombing at least seven countries.
How did we win, I asked. Winarso stopped fidgeting. “You killed us.”
Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported—what the rich countries said, rather than what they did. That group was annihilated.
In Indonesia, being communist marks you for life as evil, and in many cases, this is seen as something that passes down to your offspring, as if it were a genetic deformity. Children of accused communists were tortured or killed.
He told me that whether or not the CIA overestimated the strength of the Soviet Union, and despite what the outcome might have been, his father truly thought that he was fighting communism. He didn’t think he was doing it to help his business buddies back in New York; he thought it was about the cause. For what it is worth, I believe that he believed that.
