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

by Vincent Bevins

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.”

“You see, the Communist Party in the United States never grew because it didn’t have the right roots,” he concluded. “But in Indonesia we have so much injustice and exploitation. There’s a relation between the material conditions of our society and the ideology which flowers here. And injustice is very fertile soil for its roots to grow.”

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.

US officials, however, could usually only see reactions like this as irrational paranoia, a view shared by Modernization Theorist Lucian Pye, who went as far as to see anti-Americanism in postcolonial states as a psychological pathology.

As far as we know, this was at least the third time in history that US officials had supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to allies, so that they could round them up and kill them. The first was in Guatemala in 1954, the second was in Iraq in 1963, and now, on a much larger scale, was Indonesia 1965. “It really was a big help to the army,” said Martens, who was a member of the US embassy’s political section. “I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.”