Even as the United States ramped up its military mission in South Vietnam, a nightmare was taking shape in Indonesia. A sprawling Southeast Asian archipelago of more than seventeen thousand islands, Indonesia boasted the world’s fifth-largest population, divided into some three hundred ethnic groups speaking more than seven hundred different languages. The archipelago traversed the key strategic waterway linking the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and its constituent islands contained a wealth of natural resources. The largest Muslim-majority nation in the world, Indonesia was also home to the world’s third-largest Communist Party—after the Chinese and Soviet Communist Parties. Washington, Moscow, and Beijing all understood that the island nation represented a great prize in the struggle for influence in Southeast Asia and the wider Third World. Since the start of the Cold War, in the words of historian Bradley Simpson, U.S. officials had seen Indonesia as the linchpin of America’s containment strategy in the region. Into the mid-1960s, both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations considered Indonesia of greater strategic significance than even Vietnam. “More is involved in Indonesia,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk would observe in 1964, “than is at stake in Vietnam.”1 Indonesia also emerged as one of the most hotly contested nations in the Sino-Soviet competition for influence in the Third World. Further, its proximity to Vietnam placed it in the shadow of the escalating war.
From mid-October 1965 through mid-1966, Indonesian military forces, paramilitary groups, student organizations, and gangs of Muslim youth perpetrated one of the most concentrated campaigns of mass political violence in contemporary world history, massacring some five hundred thousand civilians suspected of supporting the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). This horrific violence established a brutal military regime aligned with the United States and transformed the strategic landscape of the Cold War in East Asia and the wider Third World. It also served as a harbinger of the collapse of the Communist movement in the Third World and the rise of a new set of revolutionary fighters who embraced the forces of religion and ethnicity thought by many to have all but disappeared from the Cold War world.
The events of late 1965 in Indonesia “significantly altered the regional balance of power [in Asia] and substantially reduced America’s real stake in Vietnam,” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara would later write. “The largest and most populous nation in Southeast Asia had reversed course,” he noted, dealing a devastating blow to China’s influence in the region.2 The reversal of which McNamara spoke entailed nothing less than the wholesale massacre of the world’s third-largest Communist Party.
SUKARNO’S INDONESIA
Since gaining independence from the Netherlands in 1949, Indonesia had been ruled by Sukarno, an ardent nationalist and champion of Third World solidarity.* Born to a minor aristocrat in East Java in 1901, Sukarno studied engineering at the Bandung Institute of Technology and worked as an architect. He began his political career as a young man, working with anticolonial activists and being arrested in 1929. Over the 1930s, Sukarno emerged as a prominent nationalist working to push the Dutch out of Indonesia. Yet Indonesia’s liberation from European imperialism would take an unexpected form. When Japan invaded the archipelago in 1942, Sukarno recognized an opportunity to weaken Dutch authority. He agreed to cooperate with the Japanese occupation forces while simultaneously pushing his vision of Indonesian national identity. As in French Indochina, Japan’s defeat in 1945 forced the end of the Japanese occupation but raised the prospect of European colonialism’s return. As Dutch officials scrambled to reestablish control of Indonesia, Sukarno and his fellow nationalist leaders confronted the prospect of going to war to fight for their independence. Sukarno remained hesitant. Japanese forces still occupied the islands, and Dutch forces would not abandon their colony without a fight. Frustrated with their leader’s lack of resolve, nationalist elements kidnapped Sukarno and forced their captive to issue a call for liberation. On the morning of August 17, 1945, Sukarno stepped out onto the front porch of his house in Central Jakarta to declare Indonesian independence.
In the following weeks, Indonesian independence fighters launched attacks on Europeans and on Western assets, leading to a series of bloody incidents. In October, British troops occupied major cities in the country and began preparations for the return of Dutch imperial forces. The following month, a major skirmish between British and Indonesian forces erupted in Surabaya while sporadic clashes broke out elsewhere. Through 1946, British officials hoping to withdraw their troops hurried to hand control back over to the Dutch. Under the auspices of the Netherlands Indies Civil Administration, Dutch officials moved to reestablish their authority over the islands while nationalist guerrilla forces organized to wage a liberation war. Fierce fighting killed thousands over the next three years. Dutch forces held the major cities, but the countryside belonged to the rebels. Meanwhile, international opinion turned against Dutch efforts to regain control of Indonesia. In early 1949, the U.S. government threatened to suspend Marshall Plan aid to the Netherlands if Amsterdam refused to grant sovereignty to Indonesia. In the face of mounting pressure, the Dutch relented and gave the archipelago independence at the end of the year.
President Sukarno next set to work building the apparatus of the new Indonesian state. Few polities on earth rivaled Indonesia’s ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity, making the leader’s task all the more challenging. To meet this challenge, Sukarno proclaimed the nationalist ideology of Pancasila. Indonesians, he argued, were united by five core principles: religion, a sense of humanity, the unity of Indonesia, democracy, and social justice. Clashes between rival factions in Indonesian politics, together with a string of U.S.-backed rebellions, derailed the country’s initial attempts at parliamentary democracy. When rebels created a separatist government in Sumatra in 1958, U.S. officials saw a chance to challenge Sukarno’s hold on power. The CIA set up a short-lived covert program to aid the rebels. After the Indonesian military shot down a CIA B-26 and captured its American pilot, Washington chose to shut down the covert program and expand its aid program to the Indonesian armed forces. Meanwhile, Sukarno worked to consolidate power in his own hands. In 1957 he had announced a new policy of Guided Democracy. Three years later, he proposed the political philosophy of Nasakom, which looked to nationalism, religion, and communism as the cornerstones of the Indonesian state. In practice, Guided Democracy created a trilateral power structure, with Sukarno at the top and the army and the PKI representing competing, subsidiary legs.
This tenuous balance might have held had it not been for an array of international challenges. Even as he mapped out the structure of the state, Sukarno pushed to transform Indonesia’s standing in world affairs. Sukarno had risen to international prominence in 1955, when he hosted the Bandung Conference, which brought together prominent Third World leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru in a show of Afro-Asian solidarity. Sukarno, Nehru, and Nasser crafted Third World nonalignment as a deliberate rejection of Cold War influence: the postcolonial nations of the world would follow their own path, not the courses laid out by Moscow and Washington. At the same time, Sukarno pushed to expand the borders of Indonesia itself. In 1960, he staged a diplomatic and military offensive to establish dominion over the western half of New Guinea. Three years later, Sukarno launched a military campaign against British and Malaysian forces in a bid to block the creation of the Malaysian state. Sukarno’s policies increased Jakarta’s visibility in global affairs, but they also drew the attention of outside powers. In the years following the Bandung Conference, Sukarno made a series of well-publicized trips to Beijing, Moscow, and Washington, DC, and hosted Chinese, Soviet, and American emissaries in Jakarta. U.S. officials viewed Sukarno’s activities with growing concern. Indonesia was one of the largest nations in the developing world and arguably the most strategically important state in Southeast Asia.
As the United States escalated its military activities in South Vietnam, Sukarno denounced American intervention, moved closer to Beijing and Moscow, continued his undeclared war against Malaysia, and encouraged the growth of the PKI. Under Guided Democracy, he sought to play rival factions inside Indonesia off one another and thereby defend his position as the central figure in Indonesian politics. Outside Sukarno, the PKI and the military represented the country’s most powerful political factions. For its part, the Indonesian military remained a force to be reckoned with. In the years following 1949, the armed forces amassed extensive political, social, and economic power over Indonesian society. Viewing themselves as guardians of the nation, army officers maintained significant financial interests and remained willing to interfere in the civilian arena. A doctrine proclaimed in April 1965 explained that the military’s sphere of interest included “the ideological, political, social, economic, cultural, and religious fields.” Sukarno cultivated the PKI (which sought greater political power in addition to closer relations with Beijing) as a bulwark against the military’s political influence. In doing so, though, he polarized politics in Indonesia and threatened the army’s position.3 So long as he maintained this fragile balancing act, his grip on power remained firm. American officials increasingly saw Sukarno as a nuisance who was potentially soft on communism. Nevertheless, as the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, Averell Harriman, argued in 1964, Washington would continue to deal with the troublesome leader “unless, of course, some of our friends wished to try to overthrow him.” The army was not likely to move, however, without some sort of provocation. British officials, who nursed their own resentments over Sukarno’s undeclared war against Malaysia and vehement anticolonialism, suggested in November 1964 that “there might be much to be said for encouraging a premature PKI coup [against the government] during Sukarno’s lifetime.” Such a coup would provide the pretext for the army to crush the Communists.4
The PKI remained a major force in Indonesian society and politics throughout the early 1960s. The party claimed a membership of 3.5 million along with 23 million affiliated persons, many of whom were workers, peasants, teachers, and low-level government bureaucrats who rallied to the PKI’s calls for mass education and greater political mobilization of Indonesian society.5 The PKI also provided a foothold for Chinese influence in Southeast Asia’s largest country. Beijing’s power over the PKI was substantial but not controlling. “Peking indirectly holds the P.K.I.’s purse strings,” New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan wrote in 1965. “It is an open secret that most of the party’s operating funds are extorted from the large and wealthy Chinese business community [in Indonesia].”6 While Beijing bankrolled the PKI, Moscow provided aid and training to the Indonesian Air Force and Navy, and Washington expanded its ties to the Indonesian Army. As such, Indonesia represented a three-way battlefield among U.S., Soviet, and Chinese political forces.
In 1963, the PKI launched “Unilateral Action,” a quasi-Maoist campaign designed to mobilize Indonesian peasants in a bid to force the implementation of land reform programs. The program’s biggest achievement may have been to antagonize large landowners in Indonesia, many of whom were Muslim religious leaders and aristocrats. The party’s rapid growth and its increased militancy won enemies in the military and among Muslim organizations. Reports of sporadic attacks by unnamed assailants on PKI offices and clashes with the military circulated through the spring and summer of 1965. As the PKI gained strength through the first half of the 1960s, the party’s opponents began to mobilize, driving two of the PKI’s rivals, the Indonesian National Party (PNI) and the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), to the right. The growth of the PKI, then, fueled an increasing polarization of Indonesian society as the army, the PNI, and the NU grew increasingly wary of a Communist takeover. The PKI’s call for the creation of a people’s militia, coupled with CIA black propaganda (aimed at smearing the PKI and spreading disinformation) about Chinese arms shipments to the Communists, exacerbated these fears.7 So, too, did Sukarno’s statements about his plan to “drive all Indonesian politics to the left” and eradicate “reactionary” elements in the army.8
Indonesia’s leftward drift worried U.S. officials who already feared Communist advances in South Vietnam. A National Intelligence Estimate issued by U.S. agencies in 1964 explained that Sukarno maintained an iron grip over Indonesian politics and was using his power to wage a dangerous undeclared war against Malaysia, to strengthen the PKI, and to build closer ties with Communist China. “The road ahead for Indonesia is a troubled one of domestic deterioration, external aggression, and overall Communist profit,” the report warned.9 Jakarta’s decision to withdraw from the United Nations in protest of Malaysia’s ascension to a seat on the Security Council in January 1965 raised further concerns. In a letter to British prime minister Harold Wilson, President Lyndon Johnson worried that “Indonesia seems to be moving rapidly toward more aggressive policies externally and toward communist domination at home.” Though the president stressed the need for diplomacy to woo Sukarno away from this leftward drift, he was adamant that some action must be taken. “I feel strongly,” he continued, “that we cannot let Indonesia continue along its present path without exhausting every possible measure to turn it from catastrophe.”10
The situation grew worse over the following month, when PKI-led unions launched a campaign aimed at taking over American-owned plantations in Indonesia in response to Washington’s stepped-up bombing campaign in Vietnam. The party had also coordinated a number of attacks on U.S. Information Service offices and libraries in Jakarta and other cities and organized demonstrations against the screening of American films as part of a wider anti-Western movement. By seizing American estates, the Communists launched a direct assault on U.S. property throughout the country.11 The CIA suspected that Sukarno hoped to capitalize on the embattled U.S. position in Southeast Asia. His goal, the Agency predicted, was to split influence in the region between Indonesia and China. He would “continue his dalliance with Peiping” in what the Agency considered ill-conceived hopes of managing Chinese influence in the coming years. Although the threat of a Communist takeover did not appear imminent, the Agency explained, “there is sufficient chance of such developments over the next year or two to warrant especial US intelligence and planning attention.”12 Intelligence operations had already begun. In a partially redacted NSC memo from February 1965, the State Department reported that it had been working with an unnamed party on a clandestine aid program in Indonesia designed to strengthen pro-Western elements, counter the PKI, and reduce Beijing’s influence in the country. U.S. officials developed a plan for “black letter operations, media operations, including possibly black radio, and political action within existing Indonesian organizations and institutions,” all designed to paint the PKI as “ambitious, dangerous,” and an “instrument of Chinese neo-imperialism.” The aid program would also provide “covert assistance to individuals and organizations capable of and prepared to take obstructive action against the PKI.”13
Anti-Sukarno sentiment was mounting in Indonesia. In late April, U.S. ambassador Howard Jones told Washington that he had heard rumors of an impending coup against Sukarno. He warned that “important civil and military elements” in the country were considering an action in May or June, when Sukarno left the country. The ambassador warned that any hint of U.S. involvement could be “the kiss of death” to the coup and its participants. A month later, Jones followed up, reporting that the plans were “maturing slowly” and had been postponed.14 Not that Washington would have been upset to see Sukarno go. The U.S. consul general in Jakarta, Francis Galbraith, warned that the Indonesian government had become “deeply hostile” to U.S. foreign policy. “If [the Indonesian virus] is allowed to spread unchecked in [the Afro-Asian] world,” he argued, “it could be [a] particularly insidious front runner for international communism.” Perhaps the greatest threat, he continued, was that Sukarno’s vision, which blended religious, nationalist, and Communist elements, might serve as a stalking horse for Chinese ambitions and was sure to have a greater appeal in the Islamic Middle East. But there was still a chance to prevent this. “We believe,” Galbraith wrote, “that [the] US should begin energetically though quietly to tool up for [an] effective counter-propaganda effort and other counter-actions against Sukarno’s policies.”15
Through the steamy summer months of 1965, Sukarno continued to provoke Washington. In late July, he announced his intention to build a nuclear bomb in the near future. U.S. officials doubted Indonesia’s ability to accomplish such a feat on its own but noted the possibility of Chinese involvement. Beijing might consider aiding the development of Indonesian nuclear weapons or might be planning a test of one of its own bombs on Indonesian soil. Neither scenario would please Washington.16 Sukarno’s August 1965 proclamation of an anti-imperialist “Beijing–Pyongyang–Hanoi–Phnom Penh–Jakarta Axis” further inflamed U.S. fears about Indonesia’s drift toward the Chinese camp.17 U.S. officials kept a wary eye on the situation during the summer of 1965. Washington’s new ambassador in Jakarta, Marshall Green, wrote that Sukarno was “attempting to move all forces in Indo[nesian] society to [the] left or, more explicitly, to policy orientation similar to that [of the] PKI.” In the process, he continued, Indonesia had become “an almost completely closed society.” Public officials, radio, press, and television subjected the population to a “steady propaganda diet,” vilifying the United States and echoing anti-American rhetoric emanating from “Peiping, Pyongyang, Hanoi and Moscow.”18 In a meeting of top-level foreign policy advisors in late August, Undersecretary of State George Ball worried about the implications of Sukarno’s actions. “Isn’t Indonesia as important as all Indochina?” he asked. “Wasn’t it inexorably going Communist?” He then asked if the CIA was in a position to do anything about the situation. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy told Ball that it was not, and the meeting adjourned.19
On September 1, 1965, less than a month before the Indonesian political system would be overturned, U.S. intelligence agencies distributed a special estimate on the possibility and implications of a Communist takeover in Indonesia. They explained that Sukarno’s recent actions had brought Jakarta’s foreign policy into “close harmony with that of the Communist states of Asia.” The longer Sukarno remained in power, the more likely a Communist “takeover” became. “If Sukarno lives,” the report explained, “it is probable that in two or three years the Indonesian state will be sufficiently controlled by the Communists to be termed a Communist state.” However, if he died or became incapacitated in the near future, “the PKI drive to power would probably be slowed for a time.” The stakes in a “large, populous, rich in resources, and strategically situated” state such as Indonesia were high. Beijing and Hanoi would both “be encouraged in their struggle with the US in Vietnam, while the confidence of Laos, Thailand, and South Vietnam would be undermined.” Indonesia would be in a position to exert greater influence into South Asia as well. A Communist takeover in Jakarta would pose “a potential threat to the Western position in Southeast Asia and to important world sea and air lanes.” Malaysia and the Philippines would face particular dangers. At the same time, a Communist Indonesia “would become the object of more intense Sino-Soviet rivalry” as both Moscow and Beijing competed to win greater influence in Jakarta. Moreover, a Communist takeover in Jakarta was sure to have a “heavy impact on world politics. It would be seen as a major change in the international balance of political forces and would inject new life into the thesis that communism is the wave of the future.”20 U.S. officials hoping for a miracle that could reverse Jakarta’s drift toward Beijing were about to get their wish.
THE SEPTEMBER 30 COUP
Ninety minutes past midnight on October 1, 1965, seven squads of armed men left Halim Air Base on the outskirts of Jakarta. The trucks carrying them rumbled through the deserted streets of the capital and took positions outside the residences of seven of the Indonesian Army’s top generals. At 4:00 a.m., the men sprang into action, forcing their way into the homes, overwhelming security guards, and insisting that the generals had been summoned for a meeting with Sukarno. The kidnappers managed to capture three of their targets and kill three others, along with two bystanders. Gen. Abdul Haris Nasution managed to escape, although his five-year-old daughter was mortally wounded. The attackers returned to the air base with their three captives and the bodies of the three slain generals. Soon after, the prisoners were beaten, stabbed, and shot. The executioners then threw the six corpses down an unused well, which they then sealed.21 The operation’s engineers were a shadowy group calling itself the September 30 Movement. Its leadership included the commander of the presidential guard, an army colonel, a major from the air force, and two members of the Special Bureau of the PKI. At 7:15 a.m., Indonesian radio broadcast a statement from the movement announcing the arrest of several generals and warning of more actions to come. The movement took control of Jakarta’s radio station and moved approximately one thousand troops into Merdeka Square, in the center of the capital. Representatives also visited the presidential palace to inform Sukarno of the operation and place the president under their “protection,” but they were unable to locate him.22
The group’s precise motivations have remained a matter of historical controversy. The leaders of the September 30 Movement claimed that they had launched the operation to preempt a military coup against Sukarno. However, what would become the official Indonesian version of events argued that the PKI had staged a coup aimed at seizing control of the state. This theory gained support after state authorities forced confessions from the movement’s leaders. Two leading Indonesian scholars at Cornell University, Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey, argued that the so-called coup was in fact an internal army affair aimed at eliminating complacent top brass. Others speculated that Sukarno himself masterminded the operation as part of his campaign to move Indonesian politics to the left. Yet another theory argues that conservative military leaders engineered the operation that simultaneously removed more moderate generals at the head of the army and provided a pretext for an assault on the PKI. Likewise, the full scope of U.S. involvement in the affair remains unclear. The execution of the key participants and the continued classification of U.S. documents have ensured that the full story remains hotly contested,23 but the events that followed did little to support the Indonesian government’s account.
Six of the army’s top generals lay dead at the bottom of a well. The seventh, Nasution, was deeply traumatized. Curiously, however, the September 30 Movement made no attempt to capture the army officer most likely to lead the counterattack, Major General Suharto. Nor did the movement take steps to neutralize the army’s elite Para-Commando Regiment (RPKAD), which would spearhead the campaign. Forty-four-year-old Suharto led the Army Strategic Reserve Command (Kostrad) and often stood in for higher-ranking brass when they were traveling. After the September 30 plotters returned to Halim Air Base, Suharto began to regroup, calling on RPKAD commander Sarwo Edhie Wibowo to assemble his forces and retake Jakarta’s radio station on the night of October 1, and then ordering the troops assembled in Merdeka Square to disperse. The next day, RPKAD forces pushed their way into Halim, giving Suharto control over most of the area around Jakarta.24 While his soldiers took positions around the capital, Suharto and his comrades launched a propaganda campaign against the September 30 Movement, dubbing the group “Gestapu,” a play on words (from the Indonesian name for the movement) designed to evoke Nazi connotations. The culprits, according to Sukarno, were the PKI and elements of the Indonesian Air Force. The discovery of the generals’ bodies and the spectacle of their state funeral (over which Suharto himself presided) on October 5, 1965, provided more fodder for the army’s propaganda campaign. The army issued radio broadcasts and newspaper stories praising the generals as “heroes of the Revolution” and spreading false rumors that female PKI members had sexually mutilated the corpses.25
State Department officials appear to have been caught off guard by the developments in Jakarta. On October 2, George Ball, acting secretary of state, noted that Suharto seemed to be in control and that the situation “doesn’t look too bad.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk even suggested that the upheaval in Indonesia “could work out advantageously” for the United States.26 As Ball told James Reston of the New York Times two days later, “This is a critical time for the Army. . . . If the army does move they have [the] strength to wipe up [the] earth with PKI and if they don’t they may not have another chance.”27 Writing from Jakarta, Ambassador Green recommended that Washington take this opportunity to “extend our contact with the military” in Indonesia and to signal to Nasution and Suharto “our desire to be of assistance where we can,” provided that U.S. involvement remained covert. The “most needed immediate assistance we can give [the] army,” he argued, would be to help “[s]pread the story of PKI’s guilt, treachery and brutality.”28 These efforts were already under way. American radio stations had begun broadcasting “material pointing [the] finger at PKI and playing up [the] brutality of September 30 rebels . . . from Radio Djakarta and Indo press.”29
Meanwhile, journalists and observers suggested that the U.S. government had played at least an indirect role in the coup. Late in October, columnist Andrew Tully reported that it was common knowledge in Washington that “CIA agents forced the Reds’ hand.” Over the last several years, Tully wrote, the Agency had promised U.S. support “for any movement designed to undermine the partnership between Sukarno and communism,” channeling some fifteen million dollars to Indonesian Army officers through Swiss bank accounts. These efforts to build the Indonesian Army, Tully insisted, forced the PKI into launching a premature coup that ultimately failed. “And so,” he explained, “the U.S. won the first round in its underworld battle with Peking.”30
MASSACRE OF THE PKI
While the army’s propaganda fueled growing outrage against the PKI, Suharto consolidated his military forces. In the coming days, Suharto forced a severely compromised Sukarno (who would officially remain president until 1967) to name him head of Indonesia’s armed forces and ordered Sarwo Edhie’s RPKAD troops to prepare for an attack on the PKI in Central Java. On October 19, RPKAD units made a show of force in the city of Semarang in northwest Java. Sarwo Edhie’s soldiers rounded up one thousand suspected subversives and incited Muslim youth affiliated with the NU to vandalize PKI and Chinese-owned buildings in the city. These actions would become a pattern in other areas as the RPKAD carried out a campaign to destroy the PKI’s infrastructure. PKI branches put up resistance in some villages, cutting telephone lines, blocking roads, and attacking anticommunists, but they were generally overwhelmed by the better-armed soldiers. Nevertheless, RPKAD forces were still severely outnumbered. Realizing the enormity of his task, Sarwo Edhie decided to enlist the help of youth, religious organizations, and nationalist groups in late October. “We gave them two or three days’ training,” he recalled, “then sent them out to kill the communists.” RPKAD forces began organizing anticommunist youth into a “home guard” armed with “bamboo spears, farm implements, swords, daggers, slingshots, and bows and arrows.” Muslim youth wrapped scarves emblazoned with “God is great” across their foreheads while nationalists sported red-and-white colors. These vigilante gangs abducted suspected Communists, interrogated them, and then staged summary executions of those found guilty.31
Though most of the killing took place in rural areas, news of the slaughter made its way back to the U.S. embassy in Jakarta. Muslim groups in Aceh had “apparently put all but [a] few PKI out of action,” embassy officials wrote in late October. “Atjehnese have decapitated PKI and placed their heads on stakes along the road. Bodies of PKI victims reportedly thrown into rivers or sea as Atjehnese refuse to ‘contaminate Atjeh soil.’” The army was working with youth organizations in a “systematic drive to destroy [the] PKI in northern Sumatra with wholesale killings reported,” a November cable read. Local police estimated that anticommunist groups working with the “blessing of the Army” were killing between fifty and one hundred PKI members every night in East and Central Java. Meanwhile, a missionary working in Surabaya reported the massacre of nearly four thousand people in nearby areas in early November. As news of atrocities poured into Jakarta, embassy officials realized that they were witnessing a nationwide massacre of the Indonesian left. A long-standing “tradition of blood feuds” helped fuel the violence, officials concluded in February 1966; “many of the killings that are taking place under a political cover are actually motivated by personal and clan vendettas.”32
Far from sparking outrage in Washington, reports of the army’s role in coordinating the massacre of thousands of Indonesian civilians encouraged U.S. officials to expand military aid packages. “We should try to fortify their confidence that Indonesia can be saved from chaos, and that [the] Army is the main instrument for saving it,” Rusk argued. “We should get across that Indonesia and Army have real friends who are ready to help.” He went on to suggest that the United States could provide weapons and equipment to help the army “deal with the PKI.” Indeed, the secretary of state suggested, Suharto’s campaign against the left might give Washington an opportunity to eliminate Moscow and Beijing’s influence from the army.33 On October 30, officials in the State Department and the Pentagon resolved to establish a “covert plan of assistance in which [the] DOD would work [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] to insure [sic] the minimum risk of exposure.” In particular, the army needed tactical “short-range communications equipment to support sustained operations against PKI guerrilla[s].”34 State Department officials concluded, “In the life and death struggle which has finally been joined with the PKI, the Army deserves our support.” Though Indonesia would likely remain leery of the United States, a November 3 report argued, Washington now had an opportunity to undermine Jakarta’s relationships with Moscow and Beijing.35
While Washington rushed to establish a closer relationship with the Indonesian Army, Suharto’s forces continued to direct the wholesale massacre of Indonesian civilians. Having ravaged large areas of Java and Sumatra through October and November, the RPKAD began moving into Bali in early December. Although violence had already broken out on the island, the largest massacres coincided with the soldiers’ arrival. RPKAD troops played a key role in providing logistical support to civilians who performed most of the killing. Suharto’s forces gave weapons and ammunition to anticommunist groups, aided in communications, and used army trucks to transport alleged PKI members. A local historian described “a river of blood in which several thousands were killed in [the regency of] Jembrana alone.” Entire villages participated in the killing. “One man would stab a victim while another would hit him on the head with a rock,” a witness recalled. Other victims were shot. Some were tortured before they were killed. The executioners threw thousands of corpses into the sea or into mass graves. While local hatreds fueled the slaughter, one scholar concluded, Suharto’s military forces provided the pretext, coordination, and logistical support that made it possible.36
The number of those killed remains a mystery. RPKAD commander Sarwo Edhie claimed that three million people had been killed under his watch. The most systematic attempt to count the dead suggested that one million people had been killed. But the most common figure cited by scholars is five hundred thousand. The nature of the killings reinforced their obscurity. The killers carried out their gruesome work in small groups, under the cover of darkness. While the army orchestrated many of the massacres, local people seem to have been responsible for most of the actual killing. They used simple weapons such as knives and clubs. Victims were killed near their homes, and their bodies were left nearby. The archipelago contained no shortage of potential grave sites. The killers dumped bodies into the country’s abundant rivers, in lush forests, in limestone caves, and in remote fields. Indonesia’s humid, tropical climate ensured that corpses decomposed rapidly. Unlike other states that had sponsored mass killing, such as Nazi Germany and Democratic Kampuchea, Indonesia kept few records. What surviving documents there are make for macabre reading. In East Java, gangs of Muslim youth working with army engineers brought suspected PKI members to prepared holes outside the village of Sentong. Victims were led to the graves, choked, and then beaten to death with iron rods. The executioners then decapitated the bodies, filled in the graves, and planted banana trees on the fresh earth. Other reports told of victims being hacked apart or dragged to death behind jeeps. The killers often raped female victims before executing them. In the village of Ngasem, Muslim youth captured a teacher and paraded him through the streets before cutting off his head and placing it on a stake planted alongside an intersection.37
Continued reports of the atrocities did nothing to deter U.S. support for the Indonesian Army. Ambassador Green alerted Washington on November 18 that the army was slaughtering the PKI. “RPKAD is not taking prisoners,” he wrote in November. “I gather this means they are shooting the PKI on sight.”38 Nevertheless, Green voiced support for a proposal to send financial aid to KAP-Gestapu, the “army-inspired but civilian-staffed action group,” he wrote, that “is still carrying [the] burden of current repressive efforts targeted against PKI.”39 Moreover, at least one U.S. official helped Suharto’s forces hunt down PKI members. On December 17, 1965, a political officer in the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, Robert Martens, transmitted a list of PKI political leaders to Indonesian military authorities. He sent another list in March 1966 and a third in August. In all, Martens later reported, the cables contained the names of thousands of people. It is a near certainty that it was anticommunist forces that slaughtered many of them.40 Ambassador Green argued in December that the new order in Indonesia “will be infinitely more healthy and more promising than what we had before Oct. 1 [emphasis added].” Green’s cable contained no hint of irony.41 The following day, the Australian embassy in Jakarta estimated that Indonesia had experienced approximately “1,500 assassinations per day since September 30th.”42
THE MASSACRE OF THE PKI PROVED TO BE ONE OF THE pivotal events of the middle Cold War. “It is hard to overestimate the potential significance of the army’s apparent victory over Sukarno,” argued Robert Komer, a key member of Johnson’s national security staff.43 “Of all China’s recent reverses abroad,” a 1966 CIA report noted, “probably the most serious has been the elimination of pro-Communist elements” in Indonesia. The loss of the PKI, “the largest Communist party supporting Peking in the Sino-Soviet dispute,” represented a “major diplomatic debacle” for the Chinese. The CIA predicted that “Communists abroad sympathetic to Peking may begin to have second thoughts about too close identification with the Chinese.”44 The PKI’s destruction, historian Odd Arne Westad has argued, was “perhaps the greatest setback for communism in the Third World in the 1960s.”45 The Indonesian killings occurred at a critical juncture in the Cold War as the U.S. war in Vietnam was escalating and the PRC was heading into the social turmoil and political purges of the Cultural Revolution. The massacres, moreover, ended Sukarno’s leftward drift and placed his pro-Western military regime in power over the largest country in Southeast Asia and the most populous country in the Muslim world. The massacre, in the words of one scholar, led to the “reorganization of social forces and reintegration of Indonesia into the capitalist world economy.”46 That the new order in Indonesia was built on the graves of perhaps half a million civilians barely registered. “No one cared,” one State Department official later wrote, “as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered.”47
In July 1966, Time magazine praised the purge of the PKI and Sukarno’s demise as the “West’s best news for years in Asia.” Certainly, the most hardened U.S. officials could celebrate the grisly annihilation of the world’s largest nongoverning Communist Party. The new regime removed Sukarno from power and placed him under house arrest, where he remained until his death from kidney failure in 1970. In the coming years, the Suharto regime would emerge as a model for a new breed of pro-Western authoritarian regimes that served to shore up American defenses along the hotly contested Cold War borderlands of southern Asia. But the massacre of the PKI also served as a turning point in the politics of warfare during the Cold War. Prior to 1965, the greatest battles of the era focused on clashes between political ideologies. Although the Indonesian killings touched on these same disputes, they also pulled religious groups into the killing fields in unprecedented numbers. While the struggle between Communist and noncommunist factions lay at the heart of the Indonesian killings, the army’s mobilization of civilian death squads made up of Muslim youth from the NU served as a harbinger of sectarian violence in the postcolonial world. In the following decades, religious zeal and ethnic rivalries would supplant secular political ideology as a driving force in many of the bloodiest episodes of the late Cold War. Ignoring these troubling dimensions of violence, pro-Western forces around the world hailed the turn of events in Indonesia as a major victory in the struggle for Southeast Asia.48