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

by Vincent Bevins

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