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

by Vincent Bevins

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.

The violence that took place in Brazil, and Indonesia, and twenty-one other countries around the world, was not accidental, or incidental to the main events of world history. The deaths were not “cold-blooded and meaningless,” just tragic errors that didn’t change anything.5 Precisely the opposite. The violence was effective, a fundamental part of a larger process. Without a full view of the Cold War and US goals worldwide, the events are unbelievable, unintelligible, or very difficult to process.

The remarkable film The Act of Killing, by Joshua Oppenheimer, and its sequel, The Look of Silence, smashed open the black box surrounding 1965 in Indonesia, and forced people in the country and around the world to look inside.

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.

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.”

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.

Vietnamese man named Ho Chi Minh, who had previously worked as a photo retoucher in Paris and as a baker in the United States, embraced revolutionary Marxism after he blamed the Western capitalist powers for refusing to acknowledge Vietnamese sovereignty at the Versailles Peace Conference following World War I.13 He became an agent for the Communist International before he led the Viet Minh resistance movement against the Japanese occupation in the 1940s. But when he arrived at the Ba Đình flower garden in downtown Hanoi after the two nuclear strikes on Japan by the US to declare independence on September 2, 1945, he opened with the following words: “‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.”14

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. Fighting a right-wing government that wanted to annihilate them was more important to them than any loyalty to the Soviet Union. Similarly, the Soviet leader told the Italian and French Communists to lay down their arms (they did), and asked Yugoslavia’s communist forces to stop supporting their Greek comrades, cede control of their country, and merge with Bulgaria (Yugoslavia’s leader, Josip Tito, did not, causing such a huge rift that Stalin tried to kill him).21 The leaders of Iran’s Tudeh Party thought their country was ripe for revolution after World War II, but the Soviets told them to try no such thing, and the USSR had already decided by 1946 that Turkey was not worth the trouble. The Soviet leader had no plans to invade Western Europe. Stalin of course did not back off in those parts of the world out of some generosity of spirit or his deep respect for the right of national self-determination. He did so because he had made a deal with the Western powers at Yalta, and he was too afraid of antagonizing the United States to violate it. He was surprised to see that Washington acted as if he had antagonized them anyway.22

The right-wing Greek government got the backing of the United States, which far preferred a British ally over leftist guerrillas, and employed a new chemical called napalm, only recently developed at a secret Harvard lab, to crush rebels who had fought against Hitler’s forces.

In Eastern Europe, Stalin took a very different approach, as he considered this area his rightful sphere of influence, because his troops had taken it from Hitler, and an important buffer against possible invasion from the West. After the announcement of the Truman Doctrine and the beginning of the Marshall Plan, Moscow engineered a communist coup in Czechoslovakia. The Western powers did not play fair in the territory their armies had occupied, either. 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. In Paris, the government, which was heavily dependent on US financial aid, ousted all its Communist ministers in 1947.29 In Italy the US funneled millions of dollars to the Christian Democratic Party and spent millions more on anticommunist propaganda. Big stars like Frank Sinatra and Gary Cooper recorded spots for the US government’s Voice of America radio station. Washington organized a huge writing campaign from Italian Americans to friends and relatives back in the home country, with form letters including messages such as “A communist victory would ruin Italy. The United States would withdraw aid and a world war would probably result” and “If the forces of true democracy should lose in the Italian election, the American Government will not send any more money to Italy.”30 The Communists lost.

Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, whose party remained popular for decades, said that the United States was a nation led by ignorant “slaveholders” who now wanted to buy entire nations just as they had bought human beings.

But in China, Mao decided to ignore Stalin’s directives this time, continuing to wage a civil war after the end of World War II. In 1949, he finally defeated the Nationalists, whose venality, brutality, and incompetence had long troubled their backers in Washington. Like Ho Chi Minh in August 1945, Mao had also been under the illusion that he could have good relations with the United States. He was wrong, of course.33 After his victory, the emergency of “Red China” led to violent recriminations back in the United States.

Even if he had known about the worst tragedies of the 1930s in the Soviet Union, it would be hard to blame Nehru for distrusting the Western powers. During World War II, 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

When JFK asked Nehru about Vietnam, the Indian leader dismissed the French war as an example of doomed colonialism, and said the US was pouring its aid money down a “bottomless hole.” He gently lectured the Kennedys, as if he were speaking to children, and Bobby wrote down in his notes, in an exasperated tone, that Nehru told them communism offered the people of the Third World “something to die for.” Bobby continued jotting down Nehru’s comments in his journal: “We [Americans] have only status quo to offer these people.”

Afterward, Jones was sent to work in Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists had set up a government. Because they refused to recognize Mao’s communist government on the mainland, the US government recognized this as the “real” China, even though Taiwan had its own population and identity before they arrived. This was no democracy. In February 1947, the new government massacred thousands of people opposed to Nationalist rule, beginning another period of White Terror and intermittent repression of dissidents, often justified on anticommunist grounds, that continued for years.62

In Germany, the CIA had no problem recruiting former Nazis, including those who had run death squads, as long as they were anticommunist. Then Wisner looked for a way to penetrate Soviet territory. He recruited desperate, homeless Ukrainian refugees, many of whom had fought with the Nazis, to parachute into communist territory and revolt against the Russians. None of them survived.68 But that didn’t stop Wisner. The Agency sent hundreds of Albanian agents back to their homeland. Almost all were captured or killed. It almost seemed as if the Soviet-aligned government was waiting for them. They were. Kim Philby, a British agent who worked closely alongside Wisner and the rest of the CIA, had been a Soviet mole the whole time. Almost every single one of Wisner’s early operations had been compromised somehow. Wisner sent more men into Albania even after he found this out. They were caught and put on trial. 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

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, or even that the Soviets might invade.

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.

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

This was no small task. 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 The CIA again asked Kermit Roosevelt to oversee operations. He refused this time, telling his superiors that future coups wouldn’t work unless the people and the army in the country “want what we want.”28 Frank Wisner chose Tracy Barnes instead. Washington made three coup attempts, and it was the third one that worked.29 In November 1953, Eisenhower removed the ambassador in Guatemala City and sent in Joh...

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 Eisenhower was elated. Even though Wisner had been anxious throughout the operation, this was another triumph for his approach. After he and Barnes met with the president, they burst back into Barnes’s living room in Georgetown and “did a little scuffling dance.”36

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.

Something else happened in 1956. Or rather, it didn’t happen. The division between North and South Vietnam was supposed to be resolved by an election that would unite the country under a single government. But Ngo Dinh Diem, the Catholic leader of majority-Buddhist South Vietnam whom the United States had handpicked before he turned out to be hopelessly corrupt and dictatorial, knew that he would lose badly to Ho Chi Minh. So Diem decided to cancel the vote. Washington went along with this, just as it did when Diem fraudulently declared he had won an election in 1955 with 98.2 percent of the vote.7 From that moment on, the government in North Vietnam, and many communists in the South, believed they had the right to directly oppose Diem’s US-backed regime.

The vice president at the time, Richard Nixon, gave voice to the general feeling in Washington when he said that “a democratic government was [probably] not the best kind for Indonesia” because “the Communists could probably not be beaten in election campaigns because they were so well organized.”11 And most importantly, Jones recognized that the PKI was going into the countryside, delivering the kind of programs that spoke directly to the people’s needs. The party was “working hard and skillfully to win over the underprivileged,” he worried.12

Broadly speaking, all these Communist-affiliated organizations supported President Sukarno, though not uncritically. The Indonesian Women’s Movement, or Gerwani, opposed the traditional practice of polygamy, which Sukarno embraced very publicly while president. Gerwani became one of the largest women’s organizations in the world. It was organized along feminist, socialist, and nationalist lines, and focused on opposing traditional constraints put on women, promoting the education of girls and demanding space for women in the public sphere.

Just days after Smiling Jones presented his credentials in March 1958, Sukarno’s foreign minister asked to speak with him. Subandrio, a thin, bespectacled, and thoughtful diplomat who had tried to rally international support from London during Indonesia’s independence struggle, asked the new US ambassador, as politely as possible, to explain a cache of weapons that had been air-dropped to the rebels. There were machine guns, STEN guns, and bazookas, and the weapons bore the mark of a manufacturer in Plymouth, Michigan.

On May 18, 1958, the Indonesians managed to shoot down one of the planes, and a single figure floated slowly toward a coconut grove. His white parachute got caught in the branches of a tall palm tree, where he was stuck for a moment—then he fell to the ground and broke his hip. He was quickly found and captured by Indonesian soldiers, who probably saved him from being killed on the spot by furious locals. His name was Allen Lawrence Pope; he was from Miami, Florida; and he was a CIA agent.23 Howard Jones didn’t know it, but Frank Wisner’s boys had been actively supporting the rebels since 1957.24 The two men, and their differing approaches to fighting communism, had come into direct conflict.

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.31 In 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.

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.

Howard Jones traveled throughout the entire country, asking Indonesians if they really cared about the issue of Papuan independence from the Dutch. The answer was unequivocal. Yes, they really did. But that wasn’t going to change Washington’s position. 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. How can you possibly support the status quo?” After over a decade representing the United States in Asia, Jones had no answer. The behavior of the United States lent weight to the charge, he realized, “that we had become an imperial power ourselves.”

by 1962, there were more than one thousand Indonesians studying operations, intelligence, and logistics, mostly at the Fort Leavenworth Army base.

Lumumba’s death made waves all around the world. People marched in the streets in Oslo, Tel Aviv, Vienna, and New Delhi. Belgian embassies were attacked in Cairo, Warsaw, and Belgrade. Moscow named a university after him. Mobutu took over the second-largest country in sub-Saharan Africa, staged public executions of his rivals, built a dictatorship, and became one of Washington’s closest Cold War allies in Africa.

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,” the Soviet leader told JFK. Privately, Khruschev told Communist allies he feared Kennedy was no match for the huge military-industrial complex in the US, and worried the young president couldn’t keep the “dark forces” of his country at bay.

Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Agency’s actions had been felt viscerally. Secret American plotting was exposed in Cambodia, badly undermining US credibility in the region. For years, Norodom Sihanouk had railed against Eisenhower’s anticommunism, believing the Americans were trying to get rid of him for maintaining a neutral stance. His claims were dismissed as far-fetched or absurd at the time. But he was right. In 1959, a CIA agent was instructed to liaise with Sihanouk’s interior minister to organize a coup, which never succeeded.

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.

With CIA assistance, white South African authorities arrested Nelson Mandela in 1962.

Outside Indonesia, the largest Communist Party in the Bandung countries was the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), which had grown in opposition to dictator Abd al-Karim Qasim. The ICP thought of making a bid for revolution—and the Soviets advised against it. 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.43 Some communists were shot in their homes, while others were taken to prison; those who survived jail said Hussein had a reputation for being the worst of the torturers—they prayed to be taken in for interrogation on his nights off. The new Baath regime overturned the land reform that Qasim had passed.44

Brazil imported almost five million human beings from Africa, far more than the United States did, and equal to almost half of all slaves brought to the Americas. Just as in the US, enslavement in Brazil was unimaginably cruel. In addition to the whip, stocks, and iron collars studded with spikes to prevent escape, slave owners affixed iron masks, which prevented the slaves from committing suicide by shoving earth into their own mouths.

Soon after the liberation of African-descendant Brazilians, in 1888, the largest country in South 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.” Newly freed slaves were intentionally left languishing in poverty, rather than paid to work in the new system. This approach was also what brought Ing Giok’s Japanese classmates to São Paulo. Brazilians deemed the Japanese, which they categorized as the “whites of Asia,” the most desirable Asian immigrants.7 This racism remained public and paramount, with cultural organizations producing posters to “show” that a Japanese man and a Brazilian woman would produce “white” offspring.

And Goulart backed land reform, despite the fact that he—like much of Brazil’s political class—was actually a latifundista, or large landowner, himself. Even he knew this was a gamble. Sustaining this kind of a program meant relying on support from grassroots movements, unions, and the organized left.25 Goulart also alienated the military high command with reforms that would affect them more directly. He wasn’t just proposing to extend the vote to illiterates—he also wanted to allow lower-ranking soldiers to cast ballots. Current law dictated that they could not do so while serving. The idea that he was appealing directly to the lower ranks made the high-ranking officers, who tended to be more conservative than their left-leaning subordinates, very suspicious. If he was ignoring their authority over the lower orders, they could convince themselves, perhaps he wanted to overturn their authority entirely. In Brazil, the threat of rebellion from below had terrified elites for five centuries, and they always responded—successfully—with violence. It didn’t take Kennedy’s White House long to respond, either. Jango went to visit Washington in early 1962, and it seemed to go OK, though he failed to get any concessions on aid or trade. 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 o...

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.

In reality the three political forces in the country were not nationalism, religion, and communism but rather the PKI, Sukarno, and the military. The president would use his personal influence to play rivals against each other, and maintain a delicate balance. Unlike in Brazil, fanatical anticommunism did not have widespread support in Indonesian society. Despite what military leaders said to Americans in private, they were not opposed to the left in general, and they often echoed Sukarno’s revolutionary language in their literature and public statements. The entire country was essentially anti-imperialist, by definition.

At the end of 1963, Jakarta served as host for the GANEFO, or the “Games of the New Emerging Forces” (characteristically, Sukarno gave them an acronym). This was an Olympic Games for the Third World, and its slogan was “Onward! No Retreat!” The games originally came about because of a fight that broke out when Indonesia excluded the Republic of China (Taiwan) and Israel from the 1962 Asian Games. The Western-led International Olympic Committee suspended Indonesia from its games in retribution, so he turned around to put on an anti-imperialist games, which the IOC didn’t like one bit. But that’s not what Francisca remembered about the “Games of the New Emerging Forces.” She was struck, for life, by seeing an event organized entirely by people from the Third World, and by the athletic and cultural performances put on that week in Jakarta.

Malaya, a colonial possession covering the Malaysian peninsula from the Thai border down to the tip of Singapore, was one of Britain’s last and most important territories in Asia. When London finally decolonized the region and began to create the new country of Malaysia, Sukarno became adamantly opposed to the form it took. He believed that the English were employing imperial trickery to weaken revolutionary forces in Asia. He was mostly right. And Howard Jones knew it.10

Sukarno had dedicated a huge portion of national resources since 1958 to the military, and to the pursuit of disputes over West New Guinea and now Malaysia. Second, Indonesia had begun to rewrite the regulations governing its oil industry after expelling the Dutch, greatly concerning US officials. The New York Times published an editorial warning that Sukarno was “inexorably addicted to nationalistic excess” and adding: “How he deals with the oil companies will be a major test of his intentions.”12 The IMF demanded what amounted to a structural adjustment program in Indonesia, which dictated spending cuts, an increase in the production of raw materials for export, currency devaluation, monetary tightening, and an end to government subsidies.13 Sukarno’s ministers went along with the IMF’s demands, and they had a swift, severe, and widespread impact on the population, which saw prices double, triple, or even quintuple overnight. The PKI denounced the measures as an attack on the poor, but the government pressed forward anyway, seemingly committed to securing the next aid package from Washington.

Suspicions held by Sukarno and many in the Indonesian government intensified when they found out who was coming from Washington to replace Howard Jones. Newly minted Ambassador Marshall Green, they learned, had been in Seoul when Park Chung Hee took power in a military coup that destroyed the short-lived parliamentary Second Republic. Just as the Guatemalans had been suspicious of John Peurifoy’s aggressive past when he was sent to interact with Jacobo Árbenz, Green’s arrival was widely seen as a signal that Washington had abandoned the soft, diplomatic Howard Jones approach and was now fully committed to regime change.

The confusion lasted for no longer than one day: within twelve hours, the movement was crushed, and the Army, now led by right-wing General Suharto, was in direct control of the country. More than fifty years later, we still don’t have a complete understanding of who planned the Gerakan 30 September, or what the real purpose of the night raid was. What we have is a range of credible theories.

On October 1, 1965, most Indonesians had no idea who General Suharto was. But the CIA did. As early as September 1964, the CIA listed Suharto in a secret cable as one of the Army generals it considered to be “friendly” to US interests and anticommunist.53 The cable also put forward the idea of an anticommunist military-civilian coalition that could gain power in a succession struggle.

Suharto had studied under a man named Suwarto, a close friend of RAND Corporation consultant Guy Pauker and one of the Indonesian officers most responsible for implementing military-led Modernization Theory, “a state within a state,” and US-allied counterinsurgency operations.