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

by Vincent Bevins

Although ultimately without direct Agency participation, this is what happened.

Troops loyal to Joseph Mobutu, the CIA-backed Army chief of staff and former friend of Lumumba, caught up with Lumumba, kidnapping him and delivering him to the Belgian-backed rebels in Katanga. Working with four Belgians, Katangan rebel forces stuffed Lumumba into the back of a car, then unloaded him near a shallow well. They shot him three times, and shoved him into the hole.23

Lumumba’s death made waves all around the world.

Washington responded to Castro’s agrarian reforms and nationalizations by imposing severe trade restrictions, which led Cuba to turn to the Soviet Union for badly needed fuel imports.

the Bay of Pigs failure was so spectacular, and so obvious, that their hands were tied. The United States had shot its shot, and couldn’t try anything so public again.

Kennedy himself related that it was the worst experience of his life.26 He said he felt personally guilty for those who had died in the invasion. And it was a national humiliation. After the Bay of Pigs, two things changed for the JFK presidency, which had started with such idealism. From then on, he would have to deal with the CIA Wisner had created and with the problems it had bequeathed to him, and he would now govern while being accused of being soft on communism himself.

Even Khrushchev ridiculed Kennedy for the failure in Cuba. Although Castro is not a Communist, “You are well on the way to making him a good one,”

Secret American plotting was exposed in Cambodia, badly undermining US credibility in the region.

The CIA had already sanctioned outlandish attempts on Castro’s life. Under Eisenhower, they tried poisonous cigars, and attempted to make his beard fall out (they apparently thought that Cubans would respect him less clean-shaven).

They created a scuba diving suit contaminated with spores, but couldn’t get it to the Cuban leader.

One plan revolved around an exploding seashell.

The Miami CIA station became the largest in the world, and offered cash bounties for dead communists. 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.

Bobby Kennedy, whom Bowles considered “aggressive, dogmatic, and vicious,” was willing to employ even more drastic measures to shape Latin America as he thought fit. After the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, the Kennedy brothers debated the merits of sending in the Marines. Because this would not look good, Bobby suggested they simply blow up the US consulate themselves. That could provide the rationale for the invasion.

But Washington backed a successful coup by the anticommunist Baath Party, which immediately moved to crush the ICP. 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.

In Kansas, the Indonesian officers kept pouring into the country, and pouring into Benny’s dining room. Presumably, they were now studying counterinsurgency strategies in addition to soaking up US anticommunist ideology more generally. But that’s not what Benny remembers about those days.