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

by Vincent Bevins

Mao’s tired and ragged Red Army mobilized to help the Korean communists, largely because they felt they owed the Koreans a debt for the assistance Kim’s insurgents had offered them against the Japanese in Manchuria. 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.15 In Korea, the CIA boys also tried out some of the same tools they had unleashed in Eastern Europe. Thousands of recruited Korean and Chinese agents were dropped into the North during the war. Once again, the infiltration was a total failure. Later, classified CIA documents concluded that the operations “were not only ineffective but probably morally reprehensible in the number of lives lost.”16 The CIA only found out later that all the secret information the Agency gathered during the war had been manufactured by North Korean and Chinese security services.