By Jonathan Marshall
October 19, 2017
Fifty-four years after the assassination of President
Kennedy, historians are still waiting to see whether
President Trump will approve the final release of secret records related to
that crime by the Oct. 26 deadline set by a unanimous Congress in 1992 with the
JFK Records Act.
Lyndon Johnson sworn in as U.S. President after John F. Kennedy’s
assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. (Photo Credit: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library)
Senior Republicans in both the House and Senate have called on the
President to “reject any claims for the continued postponement” of
declassification. “Transparency in government is critical not only to ensuring
accountability; it’s also essential to understanding our nation’s
history,” said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who
chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Just days before the scheduled release of JFK records, the National
Archives — with much less fanfare — declassified nearly 30,000 pages of
documents from the U.S. embassy in Jakarta from 1964 to 1968. That might seem
in contrast like an obscure matter of interest only to a handful of
specialists, but the period covers what the CIA once called “one of the worst mass murders
of the 20th century”: the massacre of half a million
Indonesians, and the arrest of a million more, by the country’s army and its
supporters in the name of wiping out Communism.
Whether and how the U.S. government abetted that bloodbath is as
“essential to understanding our nation’s history” as learning what transpired
two years earlier on the streets of Dallas. Indeed, the two events are related,
as the murder of Kennedy prompted a hardline shift in U.S. policy to support a
military coup in Indonesia. Yet despite the worthy new release of documents,
Washington has been neither transparent nor accountable when it comes to the
Indonesia massacre of 1965-66.
In particular, the U.S. government has yet to declassify any but a
handful of operational files from the CIA or Defense Department. As a result,
“we have only the barest outlines of what covert campaigns the CIA was
undertaking and what assistance the United States was providing,” historian
Bradley Simpson, founder and director of the Indonesia and East Timor
Documentation Project, told me.
The Prelude to a Slaughter
The frightful massacres in Indonesia followed years of growing
social, economic and political strife. Following a disastrously botched CIA
coup attempt in 1958, Indonesia’s leader and independence hero, Sukarno,
treated Washington with deep suspicion. All through the early 1960s, Sukarno
adopted an increasingly strident nationalist stance. He flirted with Soviet
Russia and even with Communist China while he threatened military
confrontations with the Dutch and British, legacy colonial powers. At home, he
encouraged the rising influence of Indonesia’s communist party, the PKI.
Indonesian President Sukarno.
President Kennedy tried to work with Sukarno. One of JFK’s first
acts as president was to invite the Indonesian leader to the White House.
Kennedy’s assassination, however, “unquestionably changed the direction of U.S.
policy toward Indonesia,” writes Simpson in his authoritative account of
U.S.-Indonesia relations, Economists With Guns. Whereas Kennedy was
willing to expend political capital to work with Sukarno, President Lyndon
Johnson dismissed him as a “bully” who, if appeased one day, would “run you out
of your bedroom the next night.”
Administration leaders increasingly looked to Indonesia’s
U.S.-trained-and-supplied army as a political alternative to Sukarno.
In the fall of 1964, as relations with Jakarta soured, the CIA proposed a covert action program to “build
up strength” among anti-communist groups and instigate “internal strife between
communist and non-communist elements.” The Agency raised the possibility of
fomenting riots or other disorders that “might force the Army to assume broad
powers in restoring order.”
U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies began planting stories
about PKI plots to assassinate army leaders and import weapons from Communist
China, elements of a “strategy of tension” that the Agency would later use in
Chile to provoke the 1973 military coup.
The Johnson administration curbed economic aid — intensifying the
country’s economic crisis — while continuing to train and assist the military.
“When Sukarno leaves the scene, the military will probably take over,” one
senior State Department official told a congressional committee in executive
session. “We want to keep the door open.”
Bitter Fruit
In the fall of 1965, Washington’s strategy bore fruit when several
junior Indonesian military officers, apparently with the support of certain PKI
leaders, killed six Indonesian army generals in a bungled power play that remains poorly understood. The
military struck back decisively. It rounded up the alleged plotters, accused
them (falsely) of sexually mutilating the murdered generals, and then unleashed
a nationwide campaign to murder PKI cadre and sympathizers.
General Suharto attending the funerals of murdered Indonesian
generals in October 1965.
The U.S. ambassador, Marshall Green, was thrilled by the
opportunity to crush the communists. “It’s now or never,” he told Washington.
Green proposed fanning anti-communist violence
by a covert propaganda campaign to “spread the story of PKI’s guilt, treachery
and brutality (this priority effort is perhaps most-needed immediate assistance
we can give army if we can find way to do it without identifying it as solely
or largely US effort).”
He instructed to U.S. Information Agency to use all its resources
to “link this horror and tragedy with Peking and its brand of communism;
associate diabolical murder and mutilation of the generals with similar methods
used against village headmen in Vietnam.”
As reports filtered in of the execution or arrest of thousands of
PKI supporters by the army and allied Muslim death squads, Green said he had
“increasing respect for [the army’s] determination and organization in carrying
out this crucial assignment.”
The killings occurred on such a vast scale that “the disposal of
the corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in East Java and Northern
Sumatra where the humid air bears the reek of decaying flesh,” reported Time magazine
in December 1965, in one of the first U.S. stories on the massacre.
“Travelers from these areas tell of small rivers and streams that
have been literally clogged with bodies. River transportation has at places
been seriously impeded.”
Previously classified documents from the U.S. embassy in Jakarta
released this week add details to this story.
We learn, for example, from one cable that as prison overcrowding
became a problem, “Many provinces appear to be successfully meeting this problem
by executing their P.K.I. prisoners, or by killing them before they are
captured, a task in which Moslem youth groups are providing assistance.”
By December 1965, the embassy was reporting on the “striking Army success”
in taking power, noting its killing of at least 100,000 people in just 10
weeks.
Yet we also learn that U.S. officials had reliable information that the PKI as an
organization had no advance knowledge of or involvement in the murder of the
six generals that triggered the nationwide bloodbath. A senior embassy officer
also reported on the army’s “widespread
falsification of documents” to implicate the PKI in various crimes.
We owe these and other revelations to the persistent efforts of
human rights activists, scholars, and politicians like Senators Tom Udall, D-New Mexico, and Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, to promote full
disclosure of U.S. involvement in Indonesia’s mass killings.
Following in their footsteps, Steve Aftergood, head of the Project
on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, contacted the
National Declassification Center (established by President Obama), to urge the
release of more Indonesia records. Historian Bradley Simpson and the
non-profit National Security Archive then teamed with the U.S. National Archives to
digitize 30,000 pages of decades-old embassy files to facilitate public access
to the documents.
But without CIA and military operational files, the full, ugly
story of Washington’s complicity will remain obscured. Previous administrations
have released deeply troubling CIA files on coups in Chile, Guatemala and Iran.
Those files cast a terrible stain on our history but their release powerfully
demonstrated the commitment of at least some American leaders to learn from the
past. In that spirit, the time has come to open up our history with Indonesia
as well.
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