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

by Vincent Bevins

do you know that today is a famous anniversary in that battle? On the eighteenth day of April, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, just one hundred and eighty years ago, Paul Revere rode at midnight through the New England countryside, warning of the approach of British troops and of the opening of the American War of Independence, the first successful anticolonial war in history. About this midnight ride the poet Longfellow wrote: “A cry of defiance and not of fear, A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, and a word that shall echo for evermore.” Yes, it shall echo for evermore.

As Howard Jones understood, the Bandung Conference put forward an entirely different type of nationalism from the type that existed in Europe. For leaders like Sukarno and Nehru, the idea of the “nation” was not based on race or language—it indeed could not be in territories as diverse as theirs—but is constructed by the anticolonial struggle and the drive for social justice.

The Syrian Republic, Libya, Iran (now under the Shah), and Iraq (still a kingdom) sent representatives, and Pakistani Prime Minister Mohammed Ali came along. Momolu Dukuly took a seat for Liberia, the country founded by former American slaves in the nineteenth century.

The “Afro-Asian” (AA) conference, Zain’s paper joked, made the imperialist powers desperate for Aspirin-Aspro (AA), because watching the unity of the independent young nations made their heads pound.

From the United States, the keenest observer of the conference was Richard Wright, the black novelist and journalist. The former communist and author of Native Son wrote an entire book on his experience there, which went on to influence much anticolonial and antiracist thought.

Before leaving for Bandung, Wright spoke to North Americans and Europeans aghast at the idea of the conference, certain that a meeting of those nations could only amount to “racism in reverse,” hatred of whites inspired by the Communists, or a global antiwhite alliance.

Wright met an Indonesian who had worked as an engineer for three months in New York, but barely left his apartment—he was too afraid of racist confrontations on the street.

Wright also realized just how little anticommunism there was in Asia, compared to his native United States.

Not everything went smoothly at Bandung. The Cold War hung over the conference, and not everyone could agree on how to mark themselves out from the major powers. Nehru, for example, resisted attempts by Western-oriented Third World states, such as Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, to condemn Soviet movements in Asia as colonialism.

In the end, they came up with ten basic principles that would come to govern relations between Third World states: 1. Respect for human rights and the United Nations Charter. 2. Respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations. 3. Recognition of the equality of all races and the equality of all nations large and small. 4. Non-intervention: abstention from interference in the internal affairs of another country. 5. Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself. 6. Abstention from the use of collective defense to serve the particular interests of any of the big powers, and abstention from exerting pressure on other countries. 7. Refraining from acts or threats of aggression against any country.

Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means. 9. Promotion of mutual interests and cooperation. 10. Respect for justice and international obligations.

Most famously, the Bandung Conference provided the structure that would grow into the global Non-Aligned Movement, which was founded in 1961 in Belgrade. But in Asia and Africa, Bandung led to changes that were felt immediately.

Collectives, communications networks, and international organizations sprung into existence.

In Washington, the attitude was very different. The response was racist condescension. State Department officials called the meeting the “Darktown Strutters Ball.”

But to Eisenhower, Wisner, and the Dulles brothers, Sukarno’s behavior was no joke. For them, by now, neutralism itself was an offense.

Anyone who wasn’t actively against the Soviet Union must be against the United States, no matter how loudly he praised Paul Revere.

The CIA spent a million dollars trying to influence the parliamentary elections in September of that year. The Agency’s chosen partners, the Masjumi, were solidly to the right of Sukarno. Nevertheless, Sukarno and his supporters did well.76 Even worse for the Americans, the PKI came in fourth place, with 17 percent of the votes cast. It was the best performance in the history of the Indonesian Communist Party.

In March 1956, the new leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, shocked the communist world. In an initially “secret speech” to the Communist Party, he issued a lengthy, unflinching denunciation of crimes committed by Stalin.1 Stalin had been unprepared for World War II, he claimed. He tortured his own comrades and forced them into confessing to crimes they had never committed, as an excuse to have them shot and secure his grip on power.

To hear him attacked, by the leader of the world’s foremost Marxist-Leninist party no less, was an unexpected blow to communists around the world.

Some leftists, especially in Western Europe, reacted by distancing themselves from the Soviet project altogether. Others, most notably Mao, accused Khrushchev of distorting or exaggerating Stalin’s misdeeds for his own benefit.

Under its new leader, the Soviet Union pursued peaceful coexistence with the West, warmed to nonaligned countries, and expanded its aid to Third World countries like Indonesia, Egypt, India, and Afghanistan.

Officially, the PKI went along with Khrushchev into a post-Stalinist, more moderate future. But in practice, the communist world was even more divided than it had been at the beginning of the Cold War. The Indonesian communists, confident in the importance of their country and growing in size and strength, were even more certain than before that they didn’t need to take orders from abroad.

With Aidit as its leader, the PKI transformed into a mass-based, legal, ideologically flexible movement that rejected the armed struggle, frequently ignored Moscow’s directions, stuck close to Sukarno, and embraced electoral politics.

The party was doing things very differently from the Russian or the Chinese communist parties. The PKI’s goal, both publicly and privately, was to form an antifeudal “united national front” with the local bourgeoisie, and not to worry about implementing socialism “until the end of the century.”4

As 1956 progressed, the communist world was divided further, when Khrushchev sent tanks into Hungary to crush an uprising and reassert Soviet control. The violence of October and November 1956 was a public relations debacle for Moscow.

Though the US denied this publicly, the CIA had been encouraging the Hungarians to revolt, and many did so thinking they would receive support from Washington.

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.

The 1958 operation in Indonesia was one of the largest in the CIA’s history, and it was patterned on the successful coup in Guatemala—in other words, it was exactly what the People’s Daily writers such as Zain had been worried about four years earlier, as they carefully reported on the events in Central America.28

“This was the all too common weakness of Americans—to view conflict in black and white terms, a heritage, no doubt, from our Puritan ancestors. There were no grays in the world landscape. There was either good or evil, right or wrong, hero or villain.”

Jones stressed that the Indonesians only turned to the Communist Bloc for economic and military aid after they had exhausted their attempts to get the same kind of help from America.

1955, the Soviet Union had offered substantial aid, but Indonesia, pursuing a strictly neutral position, said it wouldn’t take any more than the Americans offered.

Even then the government hesitated, unsure if it should take anything from the Soviet Union at all—until 1958, the year Allen Pope and other CIA operatives burned Indonesians alive, when they took it.

But behind the scenes, the CIA boys dreamed up wild schemes. On the softer side, a CIA front called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which funded literary magazines and fine arts around the world, published and distributed books in Indonesia, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the famous anticommunist collection The God That Failed.33 And the CIA discussed simply murdering Sukarno. The Agency went so far as to identify the “asset” who would kill him, according to Richard M. Bissell, Wisner’s successor as deputy director for plans.34 Instead, the CIA hired pornographic actors, including a very rough Sukarno look-alike, and produced an adult film in a bizarre attempt to destroy his reputation.

Around them in Jakarta, a whole generation that had been raised on the values forged in 1945 was coming up. Students, workers, and regular people of all stripes had been rallying against “imperialism,” in all its forms. Jones was dealing with them right in front of his home.

The people were standing up for themselves, and demanding full independence. They weren’t asking the Western powers. They were telling them.

He recounts that locals came to him, time and time again, and asked, with genuine mystification: “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.

At school in Jakarta, even the right-leaning students felt real sympathy for the great leader of the revolution, and were intensely proud of their young democracy. But in 1959, as Benny was finishing his undergraduate studies, the nature of Indonesian democracy changed: it took a big step backward. A few months after the regional rebellions backed by the CIA were defeated, Sukarno declared that the country would be moving to a system he had been discussing for a few years called “Guided Democracy.” As he put it, the system was a national response to the weakness of liberal democracy.

The PKI had no interest in ending elections in Indonesia for one simple reason—it was doing better and better in them. In Singapore, British intelligence concluded in 1958 that if votes were held, the Communist Party would have come in first.4

It was the military, the most anticommunist force in the country, now building an increasingly intimate partnership with Washington after Ambassador Jones’s recommendations, that forced the cancellation of the vote that was planned for 1959.

The military was to the right of the president, the Communists were on the left, and Sukarno provided a delicate balance by playing political forces against each other.

Washington took Howard Jones’s advice, and moved closer to the Indonesian Armed Forces to construct an anticommunist front. In 1953 and 1954, there were about a dozen Indonesian officers training in the United States, and that number dropped to zero in 1958, the year Allen Pope bombed Ambon. In 1959, zero became forty-one, and by 1962, there were more than one thousand Indonesians studying operations, intelligence, and logistics, mostly at the Fort Leavenworth Army base.7

Modernization Theory was prodemocracy when possible, but its proponents increasingly came to the conclusion that it might be better to just have some determined elite, say US-friendly generals, provide the crucial force for the difficult jump to “modernity.”

The recent history of Latin America, the study claims, “indicates that authoritarianism is required to lead backward societies through their socio-economic revolutions.… The trend towards military authoritarianism will accelerate as developmental problems become more acute.”

In Indonesia especially, they began to view the Army as they viewed themselves: as a bulwark against communism, and a modernizing political and economic force.

At the same time, young Indonesians were brought to study in universities in the United States through various scholarship and funding programs. The idea, as with similar programs around the Third World, was to show the young intellectuals how things worked in the US, which would hopefully inspire them to take pro-American ideas back home. Since 1956, the Ford Foundation had been providing fellowships that brought young Indonesian economists to the US.

Patrice Lumumba, the young, energetic, and popular leader of the Congo, was executed.

He was an economic nationalist, not a committed internationalist revolutionary. Khrushchev observed that “Mr. Lumumba is as much a communist as I am a Catholic.”15

But just months after his election, the young, inexperienced politician made a serious mistake, at least given the rules of the global Cold War.

On August 25, the White House gave the order, and the CIA drew up plans to have him killed.

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.21 That operation fizzled, so the Agency ran an operation to lure Lumumba out of United Nations protection, where he could be killed by local rivals.