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

by Vincent Bevins

What happened in Brazil in 1964 and Indonesia in 1965 may have been the most important victories of the Cold War for the side that ultimately won—that is, the United States and the global economic system now in operation. As such, they are among the most important events in a process that has fundamentally shaped life for almost everyone. Both countries had been independent, standing somewhere in between the world’s capitalist and communist superpowers, but fell decisively into the US camp in the middle of the 1960s. Officials in Washington and journalists in New York certainly understood how significant these events were at the time. They knew that Indonesia, now the world’s fourth most-populous country, was a far more important prize than Vietnam ever could have been.1 In just a few months, the US foreign policy establishment achieved there what it failed to get done in ten bloody years of war in Indochina.

Most shockingly, and most importantly for this book, the two events led to the creation of a monstrous international network of extermination—that is, the systematic mass murder of civilians—across many more countries, which played a fundamental role in building the world we all live in today.

for decades. The dictatorship established in its wake told the world a lie, and survivors were imprisoned or too terrified to speak out. It is only as a result of the efforts of heroic Indonesian activists and dedicated scholars around the world that we can now tell the story. Documents recently declassified in Washington have been a huge help, though some of what happened still remains shrouded in mystery. Indonesia likely fell off the proverbial map because the events of 1965–1966 were such a complete success for Washington. No US soldiers died, and no one at home was ever in danger. Although Indonesian leaders in the 1950s and 1960s had played a huge international role, after 1966 the country stopped rocking the boat entirely.

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. This book is for those who have no special knowledge of Indonesia, or Brazil, or Chile or Guatemala or the Cold War, though I hope that my interviews, archival research, and global approach may have delivered some discoveries that may be interesting for the experts too. Most of all I hope this story can get to people who want to know how violence and the war against communism intimately shaped our lives today—whether you are sitting in Rio de Janeiro, Bali, New York, or Lagos.

Bolsonaro walked up to the microphone in the congressional chambers and made a declaration that shook the country. He dedicated his impeachment vote to Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the man who oversaw Rousseff’s own torture as a colonel during Brazil’s dictatorship. It was an outrageous provocation, an attempt to rehabilitate the country’s anticommunist military regime and to become the national symbol of far-right opposition to everything.3

The story I tell here is based on declassified information, the consensus formed by the most knowledgeable historians, and overwhelming first-person testimony. I rely extensively on my own interviews with survivors, and of course I was not able to check every single one of the claims regarding their own lives, such as what things felt like, what they were wearing, or what date they were arrested. But none of the details I include contradict the established facts or the larger story that historians have already uncovered. To tell it as accurately as possible, to be faithful to the evidence and respectful to those who lived through it, I found it had to be done a certain way. First, the story is truly global; every life on Earth is treated as equally important, and no nations or actors are viewed, a priori, as the good or bad guys. Secondly, we’ve all heard the maxim that “history is written by the victors.” This is usually, unfortunately, true. But this story by necessity pushes back against that tendency—many of the people at its center were some of the biggest losers of the twentieth century—and we cannot be afraid to let the facts of their lives contradict accepted popular understandings of the Cold War in the English-speaking world, even if those contradictions may be very uncomfortable for the winners. And finally, I avoid speculation entirely, resisting any urge to try to tackle the many unsolved mysteries by myself. We have to accept there’s a lot we still don’t know.

As every American boy and girl learns, there was a strong element of religious fanaticism involved in the founding of the United States. The Puritans, a group of committed English Christians, did not travel across the Atlantic to make money for England. They sought a place for a purer, more disciplined version of the Calvinist society they wanted to build. 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.1

Throughout the Americas, from Canada down to Argentina, European colonization 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.2

In the 1930s, some Americans even sympathized with the Nazis, a hyper-militaristic, genocidal, and proudly racist authoritarian party governing Germany. In 1941, a senator from Missouri named Harry S. Truman said, “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”4 But when the US did join World War II, in an alliance with the British, French, and Russians against the Germans and Japanese, its troops fought to liberate prisoners from death camps and save Western Europe’s limited democracies from tyranny. Apart from five hundred thousand who tragically lost their lives, a generation of American boys came back from that war rightfully proud of what they had done—they had looked an entirely evil system in the face, stood up for the values their country was built on, and they had won. The end of World War II was the beginning of a new global order. Europe was weakened, and the planet was broken into pieces.

After Lenin died in 1924, his ruthless successor, Joseph Stalin, forcefully collectivized agricultural production, built a centrally planned economy, and used mass imprisonment and execution to deal with his real and perceived enemies. Millions died as a result in the 1930s, including some of the original architects of the revolution, and Stalin shifted the official ideology of the international Communist movement back and forth to suit his own political needs. But much of the worst of this remained secret. Instead, the Soviet Union’s rapid industrialization and subsequent defeat of the Nazis—as well as the fact that it was communists who often resisted both fascism and colonialism earliest and most forcefully around the world—gave it significant global prestige in 1945.6 The Soviets became the world’s second “superpower,” but they were far weaker than the United States in every way that counts. By the late 1940s, the US produced a full half of the world’s manufactured goods. By 1950, the US economy was probably as big as all of Europe and the Soviet Union combined.7 As for military strength, the Soviet population had been decimated, and this was especially true for those who could be called on to fight in any war. Even though hundreds of thousands of Soviet women bravely fought the Nazis, the gender imbalance in 1945 drives home the devastation. By 1945, there were only seven men for every ten women between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine.8 The US had superior military...

Washington took over Hawaii after a group of businessmen overthrew Queen Liliuokalani in 1893, and gained control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The Philippines, the second-largest country in Southeast Asia, remained a formal colony until 1945, while Cuba moved into the informal US sphere of influence in Central America and the Caribbean—where US Marines intervened a dizzying twenty times, at least, by 1920—and Puerto Rico remains in imperial limbo to this day.10

And then there was the “Third World”—everyone else, the vast majority of the world’s population. That term was coined in the early 1950s, and originally, all of its connotations were positive. When the leaders of these new nation-states took up the term, they spoke it with pride; it contained a dream of a better future in which the world’s downtrodden and enslaved masses would take control of their own destiny. 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: the first group of rich white countries had their crack at creating the world, as did the second, and this was the new movement, full of energy and potential, just waiting to be unleashed. For much of the planet, the Third World was not just a category; it was a movement.11

In 1945, it was still possible to believe they could be friendly with both Washington and Moscow.

Washington’s anticommunist crusade had actually started well before World War II. Just after the Russian Revolution, President Woodrow Wilson chose to join the other imperial powers in helping the White forces attempt to retake control from the Bolshevik revolutionaries. For two reasons. First, the core, foundational American ideology is something like the exact opposite of communism.15 Strong emphasis is placed on the individual, not the collective, and an idea of freedom that is strongly linked to the right to own things. This had been, after all, the basis for full citizenship in the early American republic: only white men with property could vote. And secondly, Moscow presented itself as a geopolitical and ideological rival, an alternative way that poor peoples could rise into modernity without replicating the American experience.16

President Truman had much less patience for the Soviet Union than his predecessor, and he was looking for a way to confront Stalin. Greece and Turkey gave it to him. In March 1947, he asked Congress for civilian and military support to those countries in a special address that outlined what would be known as the Truman Doctrine. “The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists,” he said. “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”18 Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had given some advice to Truman—in order to get what they wanted, the White House had to “scare the hell out of the American people” about communism. Truman took that advice, and it worked wonders. The anticommunist rhetoric only intensified, as the nature of the US political system provided clear incentives for its escalation. After Truman was re-elected in 1948, it just made political sense for the defeated Republican Party to accuse him of being “soft on communism,” even though he was nothing of the sort.19

There was widespread belief that Stalin wanted to invade Western Europe. It became accepted as fact that the Soviets were pushing for revolution worldwide, and that whenever communists were present, even in small numbers, they probably had secret plans to overthrow the government. And it was considered gospel that anywhere communists were acting, they were doing so on the orders of the Soviet Union, part of a monolithic global conspiracy to destroy the West. Most of this was simply untrue. Much of the rest was greatly exaggerated. The case of Greece, the conflict Truman used essentially to launch the Cold War, is an important example. Stalin actually instructed the Greek communists to stand down and let the British-backed government take control after the Nazis left.20 The Greek communists refused to heed his instructions.

In 1947, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been hugely influential in creating and disseminating the anticommunist consensus, addressed HUAC and gave voice to some of the fundamental assumptions of that ethos.35 He said that communists planned to organize a military revolt in the country, which would culminate in the extermination of the police forces and the seizure of all communications. He said: One thing is certain. The American progress which all good citizens seek, such as old-age security, houses for veterans, child assistance, and a host of others, is being deployed as window dressing by the Communists to conceal their true aims and entrap gullible followers.… The numerical strength of the party’s enrolled membership is insignificant… for every party member there are ten others ready, willing, and able to do the party’s work.… There is no doubt as to where a real Communist’s loyalty rests. Their allegiance is to Russia.36 Hoover had presented a logical death trap. If anyone accuses you of being communist, or communist-adjacent, no defense is possible. If you are simply promoting mild social reform, well, that is exactly what a communist would do, in order to conceal their true motives.

As one Brazilian historian puts it, the USA had not invented the ideology, but in the years after World War II, the country was transformed into the global “fortress of anticommunism,” expending considerable resources on promoting the cause, and serving as a reference and source of legitimacy for like-minded movements around the world.38

After the Truman Doctrine and the beginning of McCarthyism, there was no question that communists, and communist governments, were the enemy of Washington. No matter what they hoped for in 1945, Ho Chi Minh and Mao were not going to be welcomed onto the world stage. It was not so clear, on the other hand, what the men running the US government would do with the growing wave of radical Third World movements that were opposed to European imperialism, were not communist, but resisted forming an explicit alliance with Washington against Moscow. This was a very common phenomenon.

Jack certainly had no time for the reds. During his first campaign, he said, “The time has come when we must speak plainly on the great issue facing the world today. The issue is Soviet Russia.”43 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 However, perhaps because he was so well traveled, or perhaps because he was Irish, and knew in some very small way what it felt like to come from a people who had been oppressed somewhere, JFK viewed the Third World differently from most of the Washington elites. While so many others saw any deviation from an explicit alliance with the US as communist subversion of the global order, JFK believed that emerging nations were insisting on their right to forge their own path, and that this was entirely understandable.

Wisner, sometimes just called “Wiz,” was born in 1909 to a wealthy family with a lot of land in Mississippi, one of the states in the US South governed by Jim Crow laws, which discriminated against African Americans. He grew up in an insular, privileged household. As a child, he didn’t even put on his own clothes—he would lie down, raise his arms and legs, and his black maid would put his shirt and trousers on for him.51 Frank’s favorite book was Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, which told its story against the backdrop of the “Great Game” between the British and Russian Empires.52

The OSS liked to hire elite corporate lawyers from the best schools, and Wisner fit the bill. He got into the intelligence service with the help of an old professor, and took to the life like a fish to water. In Romania, he wasn’t only gathering information and attempting to save Germans. He was hobnobbing with royalty, drinking and dancing, living in a mansion, and doing magic tricks.54

Unlike Wisner, who was a die-hard crusader, Jones had an entirely different approach to the rest of the world. Rather than viewing every situation in terms of a black-and-white global struggle, he sought to engage deeply with the complexities of each situation. And he was having a great time. In almost every picture taken of him, Howard Palfrey Jones looks like a big, good-natured goofball. He has a wide grin on his face, looking just very pleased to be there, whether among Javanese dancers or rubbing elbows with fellow diplomats. His contemporaries described him in similar terms. He would strut around the world in white sharkskin suits, doing his best to use the local language and make friends with everyone. Even those who considered him an enemy—that is, the communists—called him Smiling Jones, and warned comrades not to be taken in by his wholesome demeanor.58

By 1951, Wisner’s OPC had been absorbed into a newly formed, permanent organ called the Central Intelligence Agency, and his title had become deputy director of plans. Wiz was the man in charge of clandestine operations. His team—often called his “gang of weirdos” elsewhere in Washington—started looking for ways to fight the Cold War, in secret around the world, however they could. Wisner was a real blue blood. But most of the ranks of the early CIA were from an even higher strata of American society. Many were Yale men, of the type who would look down on other Yale men if they didn’t come from the right boarding school or enter the right secret society. But when it came to anticommunism, Wiz had most of them beat. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was an OSS sergeant in Germany, said, “I myself was no great admirer of the Soviet Union, and I certainly had no expectations of harmonious relations after the war. But Frank was a little excessive, even for me.”63

Paul Nitze, the man who wrote the so-called blueprint of the Cold War, described the upper-class imperial values that children soaked up at the Groton School, a private institution which was modeled on elite English schools and gave the CIA many of its key early members. “In history, every religion has greatly honored those members who destroyed the enemy. The Koran, Greek mythology, the Old Testament. Groton boys were taught that,” said Nitze. “Doing in the enemy is the right thing to do. Of course, there are some restraints on ends and means. If you go back to Greek culture and read Thucydides, there are limits to what you can do to other Greeks, who are a part of your culture. But there are no limits to what you can do to a Persian. He’s a Barbarian.” The communists, he concluded, “were barbarians.”66

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

Slowly but surely, Wiz and the CIA boys realized that actual Soviet territory was mostly rock solid. They were certainly failing to penetrate it. If they wanted to fight communism—and they did, very badly—they had to look elsewhere. The Third World offered that opportunity. The problem these men overlooked, according to a mostly sympathetic history written by journalist Evan Thomas, was “the fact that they knew almost nothing about the so-called developing world.”69

the capital, which was then called Batavia. The larger island of Java is one of the world’s most densely populated pieces of land, with a dazzling constellation of cities, many of which are thousands of years old, but Batavia was never an important city for any of its local kingdoms. It was an outpost of the major pepper port of Banten when the Dutch East India Company, one of the most important organizations in the development of both global capitalism and colonialism, took over in 1619.2 The mega-city that exists now was largely a Dutch construction, and it still feels different from the rest of Java.

Under Emperor Hirohito, the Japanese had become an aggressive imperialist power allied with the Nazis, and were sweeping through much of Southeast Asia, setting up occupation governments. At first, some Indonesians welcomed them, including the leaders of the country’s small independence movement, which had been bubbling up for decades. At least the Japanese were Asians, the thinking went. Their victory had proved whites were not invincible, and they might treat locals better than the Dutch had. The day after their invasion, Francisca’s father came home and announced to the family, “They are our liberators.”3 But young Francisca saw, before most of the country, that this was an illusion. Just days later, the family was going for a walk in their quiet leafy neighborhood, called Menteng, when a Japanese guard nearby started screaming at her father. He, of course, didn’t understand Japanese, and he didn’t know he was supposed to bow. So he didn’t. The guard came up to him and struck him hard, on the face, in front of his whole family. “After that, we hated the Japanese,” Francisca would say later. “We knew their true purpose.” Others got it much worse. By the thousands, Indonesian women were forced into sexual slavery, made to work as “comfort women” for the occupying Japanese troops. The Dutch were put into concentration camps. Francisca was put into a different school.

Soon after the Japanese left in 1945, a man named Sukarno declared independence very close to Francisca’s house.6 He had been hesitant to do it. So three youth leaders in the independence movement, impatient with his decision, kidnapped him and fellow independence leader Hatta—this was considered a brusque but broadly acceptable way of forcing someone’s hand at the time—until Sukarno committed to proclaiming the creation of independent Indonesia.

Somewhat ironically, direct contact with Europe had always been important for fomenting revolutionary movements in the Third World. The Indonesian independence movement had early roots in Holland, and it was in Paris that Ho Chi Minh got his political education. When studying or working back in the imperial capitals, colonial subjects often came into contact with ideas that were never allowed to reach their territories. Much of colonialism had relied on the logic of “Do as I say, not as I do.” Or in practice, “Do as white say, not as white do.” So while Europeans themselves were extending education to their entire populations, and their intellectuals were debating the merits of socialism and Marxism, much of this was banned in the colonies. The natives might get ideas. For example, in the Congo, brutally controlled by the Belgians since King Leopold II established the Free Congo State in 1885 (and the United States rushed to be the first country in the world to recognize the colony), authorities banned left-leaning publications and liberal lifestyle magazines that circulated freely back in Europe, and were scared even by the fact that working-class blacks lived together in urban areas. Wouldn’t this lead to subversion, or worse, Bolshevism? Congolese pupils learned about the Belgian royal family, but not the American civil rights movement, and the French Revolution was explained very carefully, so as not to make that whole affair seem too attractive in African editions of ...

Francisca heard a little bit about socialism at the student meetings, and she liked what she heard, but she didn’t get too involved in any of the more intricate ideological battles. She didn’t take part in debates over the so-called “Madiun Affair” and the clashes between communists and Sukarno’s republican forces within the revolutionary movement. It was much easier to take sides when the Netherlands launched a second attempt to reconquer Indonesia. In protest, all the students with Dutch scholarships returned them, and Francisca joined them in walking out of their classes.

Upon returning to a new, independent Indonesia, Francisca started working as a librarian—a dream job, because she could be surrounded once more by books. It wasn’t hard for her to land a position. The new republic was starving for qualified workers, and was still relying on Dutch librarians to work alongside her. As a result of intentional Dutch neglect, the Indonesian people were badly deprived of education. By the time the Dutch withdrew, only around 5 percent of the Indonesian population of sixty-five million could read and write.11 Francisca said, “I think this was one of the worst crimes of colonialism. After three and a half centuries of Dutch occupation we were left with almost no knowledge of our own people, and our own culture.”

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.

Mossadegh and the Iranians had a lot of reasons to resent the British. During their period of imperial glory, Iran suffered a famine that took the lives of two million people. And after World War II, the British set up an arrangement in which they took twice as much income from petroleum as Iran, while local oil workers lived in shanties without running water. When Mossadegh and Iran’s elected parliament maneuvered around the Shah the British had put in place, London began looking for a way to claw back what it considered its own. The Americans, Wisner included, were wary of getting tied up in British imperial affairs. But their allies from across the pond appealed to their anticommunism. Mossadegh had legalized the well-organized, Communist-led Tudeh Party (along with all other political parties), and the Brits suggested to the Americans that, perhaps, the Tudeh could take over if they weren’t careful,

Newly elected Republican President Dwight Eisenhower appointed John Foster Dulles to serve as secretary of state and tapped his younger brother, Allen Dulles, to lead the CIA. John Foster had two lifelong obsessions, according to historian James A. Bill: fighting communism and protecting the rights of multinational corporations. These came together in Iran. “Concerns about communism and the availability of petroleum were interlocked. Together, they drove America to a policy of direct intervention,” Bill wrote.17

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.

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.

the Shah was not convinced any of this was a good idea. He took off to Rome at one point, infuriating the Americans who wanted to make him king. But he returned to the palace in August 1953, rigged parliamentary elections, and served both the CIA and international oil companies well as ruler of the country. The Soviets did not rush to intervene in the country in which they were supposedly so powerful. In Washington, there were celebrations all around, and Kermit Roosevelt was declared a hero. Wisner had finally proved to the men upstairs that there was a real use for his gang of weirdos.18

The US helped the Philippines devise and implement a counterinsurgency operation, and made considerable progress, including the use of more napalm.20 In a bit of bizarre psychological warfare, Lansdale also collaborated closely with Desmond FitzGerald—a Wisner recruit at the CIA—to create a vampire. As part of a range of psychological operations alongside the war on the guerrillas, 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 After years of conflict, the Huks gave up, and the Philippines settled into right-leaning pro-American stability that would last decades. With special privileges granted to US corporations, the woeful condition of the Filipino people described by Lansdale remained entirely unchanged.

Zain’s newspaper and the global left-wing press were often closer to getting the story of Washington’s interventions right than US newspapers, which largely saw it as their duty to peddle the official line that Wisner and his team passed on to them.23

For a communist newspaper in a heady postrevolutionary environment, The People’s Daily was a remarkably lighthearted read. There were cartoons poking fun at the bumbling Western imperialists, original works of fiction published every day, a children’s section, and educational inserts with explanatory essays on global left-leaning figures like Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin. International news, the area that Zain oversaw, was a huge part of the coverage, and the paper paid special attention to events in the rest of the Third World.

1953 was the end of the Jakarta Axiom; independent countries were no longer tolerated just because they had left-wing forces in check. With the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, the new rule under Eisenhower was that neutral governments were potential enemies, and Washington could decide if and when an independent Third World nation was insufficiently anticommunist. Wiz and his boys, emboldened by the success in Tehran, turned their attention to Central America, where they would score the victory that would serve as a template for future covert interventions into the next decade.

When his government passed a 1952 land reform, this effort ran up against very powerful interests. The government began to buy back large, unused land holdings and distribute them to indigenous people and peasants. Processes of these kind were seen by economists around the world as not only a way of benefiting regular people, but of putting the whole country to productive use and unleashing the forces of market enterprise. But the law stipulated that Guatemala would make payments based on the land’s official value, and the United Fruit Company—a US firm that basically controlled the country’s economy for decades—had been criminally undervaluing its holdings to avoid paying taxes. The powerful company howled in protest. United Fruit was extremely well connected in the Eisenhower administration, and started a public relations campaign denouncing Árbenz as a communist in the US, and brought US journalists on press junkets, which were successful in getting deeply critical stories published in outlets like Time, U.S. News & World Report, and Newsweek.27

In November 1953, Eisenhower removed the ambassador in Guatemala City and sent in John Peurifoy, who had been in Athens since 1950 and had thrown together a right-wing government favorable to both Washington and the Greek monarchy. Leftists there called him the “Butcher of Greece.”30

Enno Hobbing—former Time bureau chief in Paris—sat him down. “Let me explain something to you,” said Hobbing. “You made a big mistake when you took over the government.” Hobbing paused, then made himself very clear. “Colonel, you’re just not convenient for the requirements of American foreign policy.” Díaz was shocked. He asked to hear it from Peurifoy himself. According to Díaz, when Peurifoy came over, at four in the morning, he backed up Doherty and Hobbing. He also showed Díaz a long list of Guatemalans who would need to be shot immediately. “But why?” Díaz asked. “Because they’re communists,” Peurifoy responded.34 Castillo Armas, the US favorite, took over. Slavery returned to Guatemala. In the first few months of his government, Castillo Armas established Anticommunism Day, and rounded up and executed between three thousand and five thousand supporters of Árbenz.35

The People’s Daily paid very close attention to the events in the small country, half a world away. Day after day, the situation in Guatemala was at the top of the front page, and the headlines were clear and precise: “Amerika Menjerang Guatemala” (America threatens Guatemala), and then a long explanatory article, “This Is Guatemala,” featuring a map of the faraway region, and then referring to “American aggression.”37 The US press covered it differently. The New York Times referred to the coup plotters as “rebels,” while calling the Árbenz government “reds” or a “Communist threat,” and saying that the US government was “helping” mediate peace talks, rather than organizing the whole thing. Most historians today would quickly recognize that this small Indonesian communist newspaper reported the events more accurately than the New York Times.38 There is a reason for that. Sydney Gruson, an enterprising Times correspondent, was planning to launch an investigation of the “rebel” forces. Frank Wisner wanted him stopped. He asked his boss, Allen Dulles, to speak with the New York Times higher-ups, which he did. Believing he was performing a patriotic act, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger ordered Gruson to stay away.39 There’s also a reason that Zain and his colleagues paid so much attention to Guatemala. A front-page story in The People’s Daily on June 26 said that what was happening in Guatemala “threatens world peace, and could threaten Indonesia as well.”40

According to Louis J. Halle in a note to the director of the policy planning staff, the risk was not that Guatemala would act aggressively. The risk was that Árbenz would provide an example that inspired his neighbors to copy him. The note reads, “The evidence indicates no present military danger to us at all. Although we read public references to the facts that Guatemala is three hours’ flying time from the oil-fields of Texas and two hours’ flying time from the Panama Canal, we may console ourselves that Guatemala’s capability for bombing either is nil. The recent shipment of arms makes no difference to this conclusion, nor would repeated shipments…” The real risk, Halle said quite clearly, was that communist “infection” could spread through the example of independence of the U.S. that Guatemala might offer to nationalists throughout Latin America. It might spread through the example of nationalism and social reform. Finally and above all, it might spread through the disposition the Latin Americans would have to identify themselves with little Guatemala if the issue should be drawn for them (as it is being drawn for them), not as that of their own security but as a contest between David Guatemala and Uncle Sam Goliath. This latter, I think, is the danger we have most to fear and to guard against.41

The Dulles brothers had worked on Wall Street, and both had actually done work for the United Fruit Company. To this day, there is a debate as to whether or not the CIA engineered the coups in Iran and Guatemala for cynical economic reasons—to help business buddies and American capitalism more generally—or if the Agency really felt threatened by “communism.” There can be more than one explanation.

when he met Sukarno for the first time, he was blown away by just how complicated things were. Jones himself, like everyone else in the US government, was an anticommunist, and thought it was his job to fight that system. But he thought the major failure of US diplomacy at the time was a persistent inability to understand the differences between Third World nations, and the nature of Asian nationalism. He believed that after World War II, the US was “too involved in the complexities of intimate relations with our allies of that war, to hear the cry of peoples halfway around the word.” He wrote, “We didn’t understand and made little attempt to comprehend the political, economic and social revolution that was sweeping Asia.”46