No America was not complicit in Genocide in Indonesia
The left has been seriously embarrassed by the stories of communist atrocities, corruption and monumental failures that have been pouring out of Eastern Europe since the collapse of the communist regimes there. The carefully cultivated image of communists as honest humanitarians dedicated to helping the poor and downtrodden has been thoroughly demolished.
But American leftists are fighting back, trying to counter these stories by calling attention to the alleged sins and crimes of the United States. Hence the success of a recent disinformation operation that resulted in a spate of stories in U.S. newspapers and magazines charging that the our government had played a major role in the slaughter of up to a million people in Indonesia.
This was all started by a reporter named Kathy Kadane, a reporter from the late 80s early 90s for the States News Service, whose job was to provide papers in South Carolina with Washington stories with a Carolina angle. But the story that got her byline in papers from Washington to San Francisco was about events in distant Indonesia in 1965. She wrote that U.S. officials in Indonesia had played an important role in an anti-communist crackdown that she said has been “branded as one of the century’s worst massacres.”
The story first ran in The Spartanburg (S.C.) Herald-Journal, on May 19. The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, the Miami Herald, The San Francisco Examiner and other papers and the AP then picked it up. Some of the papers put it on the front page.”
Doug Ireland of the left-wing Village Voice was ecstatic. Putting the number killed in that Indonesian crackdown at between 250,000 and 500,000, he said Kadane had “revealed that the U.S. government supported and encouraged the butchery by supplying a hit list of at least 5,000 PKI (Communist Party of Indonesia) operatives to the Indonesian army…so that they could be hunted down and killed.” He said, “At the American Embassy in Djakarta and at the CIA’s intelligence directorate in Washington, body counters checked off the names of those who had been caught and murdered and added new targets.”
The New Yorker upped the ante, saying “credible estimates put the death toll at more than a million.” Noting that the “Soviet surrender in the Cold War” was being treated as “proof of the untarnished morality of the United States,” it concluded: “The unhappy truth is that in the history of the Cold War there is more than enough shame for both sides; the graveyards of Indonesia as well as Afghanistan, of E1 Salvador as well as Romania, are evidence of that.”
Boston Globe columnist Randolph Ryan said Kadane had found that embassy and CIA officials had prepared “a death list of 4,000–5,000 top party officials and then gave it to the Indonesian army.” He said, “Germans try to atone for the Holocaust. Soviet leaders rue the slaughter of Polish officers, and admit the invasion of Afghanistan was wrong. Fortunately, being American means never having to say you’re sorry.”
The People’s Daily World, the Communist Party paper, said “the State Department and the CIA didn’t actually slaughter thousands of Indonesians whom they suspected of being Communists or being associated with Communists” but it said, “The blood is on their hands.”
The Washington Post ran a long letter from England by Carmel Budiardjo, identified as an official of an Indonesian human rights group. (She was a British Communist who worked in Indonesia and married a member of the PKI.) She pointed out that a book by a left-wing historian, Gabriel Kolko, supported Kadane’s charges. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post, followed up with a column about Kolko’s claim that the U.S. was behind the murder of six top Indonesian generals. Kolko said this was “a pretext” for wiping out the Indonesian Communist Party. Rosenfeld wished a more mainstream historian would sift the evidence and provide an independent account of what transpired.
Blaming America
Rosenfeld’s wish had already been granted in an article in the December 1989 Journal of American History by Professor H.W. Brands of Texas A&M. Brands had studied declassified secret documents which showed that both the CIA and the embassy officials were taken by surprise when the six generals were murdered. He concluded, “The United States did not overthrow Sukarno, and it was not responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths involved in the liquidation of the PKI.” Brands made this comment on “bash-America” history, “The relative noninvolvement of the United States in the fall of Sukarno would be a nonstory except that the myth of American responsibility has proved so hardy.” After reading Brands’ article, Rosenfeld wrote a second column in which he said the subject was closed as far as he was concerned.
“In 1965, the State Department had virtually written Indonesia off as doomed to become a Communist dictator- ship, according to documents cited by Brands. With the complicity of the charismatic president, Sukarno, the Communists had taken over much of the government. The army was an obstacle in the path of total Communist control, but the State Department concluded that it would not take effective action to halt the Communists as long as Sukarno was alive. The situation changed suddenly on the night of Sept. 30-Oct. 1, 1965.”
Military officers aided and directed by the PKI murdered six of the top generals, including the chief of staff. Defense Minister Nasution was wounded but managed to escape. Maj. Gen. Suharto, who was not even known to the American embassy, defied Sukarno and took de facto control of the army. The CIA and the embassy did not know immediately what was going on, but they soon concluded that this was a “coup from above,” an effort on the part of Sukarno and the Communists in the government and the military to seize control of the army. Nasution and Suharto blocked efforts to put a pro-communist general in command.
“Communist-led military units seized critical installations in Jakarta and began broadcasting from the radio station they had seized, but they underestimated the availability of non-communist military units in the area. Suharto moved decisively to defeat the Communist4ed units and round up the top PKI leaders, executing the top three without trial. Suharto deposed Sukarno in March 1966 and took over the presidency, which he has held ever since”
Kathy Kadane’s story expressed doubt about the Communist role. She wrote, “The assassinations of the generals were generally believed to have been carried out by rebellious army factions who, according to the present Indonesian government were in league with the PKI. Whether the PKI was in fact involved in the assassinations of the generals, however, has been a matter of controversy among Asian scholars.”
Hugh Tovar, the CIA station chief at the time, says that abundant evidence of the PKI role surfaced in the trials of the PKI leaders, including confessions. He points out that the PKI paper had quickly endorsed the creation of”Revolutionary Council” to take control of the government, ostensibly in Sukarno’s name. In his 1969 book, The Collapse of Communism in Indonesia, veteran UPI reporter Arnold Brackman devotes several pages to PKI calls for violence before the murders of the generals. A PKI leader named Sudjarwo declared that the time was ripe to liquidate “subversives,” saying, “If necessary, the big calibre manipulators and their ring. Leaders must be shot.” Communist youth demanded that corruptors be “shot in public.”
There was no wave of revenge killings immediately in the wake of the brutal murder of the generals, but after three weeks the PKI made a move to take control, attacking police stations and other installations in Central Java. The leaders of the army and Indonesia’s largest political party, the PNI, realized that they would have to destroy the PKI and round up its leaders and cadres or be destroyed them- selves. This led to a wave of killing of Communists in the rural areas. No one knows how many died. The American officials who were in the country at the time all agree that the figures bandied about are at best wild guesses, not based on any actual body counts.
The New Yorker put the death toll at “more than a million,” while In These Times used 500,000. Kathy Kadane’s story said, “In a 1968 report, the CIA estimated there had been 250,000 deaths and called the carnage ‘one of the worst mass murders of the 20th Century.’” What the CIA report actually said is that the estimate of deaths ranged from “87,000, the official Indonesian government estimate, to 500,000.” It added: “The U.S. Embassy estimated the figure to be closer to 250,000. It would be a mistake to put too much faith in any of the various estimates. It was impossible even at the time, to get accurate figures of the number of people killed in one neighborhood…. Thus, there never was and never will be a reliable figure of the numbers dead as a result of the Indonesian coup.”
For Kadane to attribute the 250,000 figure to the CIA and to ignore the caution that all the estimates were unreliable was not simply careless. It was dishonest because she had been told how the embassy in Jakarta had arrived at an estimate of the number killed in response to the State Department’s insistence that it come up with a number.
Kadane interviewed Robert J. Martens, a political officer in the embassy in Indonesia from 1963 to 1966, at length. His tapes of these interviews show that he told her, “Nobody really knows the numbers. Nobody has the slightest idea how many people were killed.” He said the embassy had come up with an estimate of 300,000 because Washington insisted on having a number. He said the country team sat around a table in the embassy. “Most of these people didn’t have any knowledge,” he said. And (Amb.) Green asked each one what his estimate was. Each one popped up with a figure, and they took an average and sent it in.” Kathy Kadane exclaimed, “Oh, no!”
Martens told her of exaggerated rumors circulating of how the Brantas River was “choked with bodies” or “red with blood.” He said American consul Henry Heymann went to the sites and never saw a body. A British diplomat who lived on the bank of the Brantas “saw two or three” bodies that washed ashore. Martens personally saw no casualties. As U.S. reporters arrived, “each was trying to get a bigger and better story, and so they kept upping the figure.” Martens told journalists, “‘If you want to tell an honest story, you will say that nobody knows, including the heads of the Indonesian government, because they told us that they don’t have any idea.’ And the reply I got was, ‘If I don’t have a bigger number than my rival, my editor will fire me.’” “Oh, you’re kidding!” said Kadane. But he wasn’t.
The Death List Myth
The bloodbath, whatever the numbers, is an old story. Kadane only added the charge that the United States through the State Department and the CIA shared responsibility for the bloodbath because it provided what were tantamount to death lists to the Indonesian army.
We talked to all of the primary sources named by Kadane in the article. Each said unequivocally that Kadane either misquoted or distorted what they told her, that her thesis is an outright lie. Wines wrote that the tapes “appear ambiguous on the central accusation” that U.S. officials approved giving the Indonesian military the lists of PKI members.
Martens told Kadane that his assignment in Indonesia was to analyze and report on left-wing parties and organizations. He said that in two years he had accumulated thousands of names of PKI cadre, based on the names appearing in the Communist Party newspaper. He also browsed in Communist bookstores and picked up names to add to his list. This enabled him to develop the organizational charts needed to understand the structure of the party. He had done the same thing in the Soviet Union when he served there. Martens said there was nothing secret about this. The names were gleaned from open sources, and his card files were kept in an unlocked desk drawer.
This didn’t serve Kadane’s purposes, and so she embroidered it, saying: “Martens, an experienced analyst of communist affairs, said he headed an embassy group of State Department and Central Intelligence officials that he said spent two years compiling the lists. He said he later delivered them to an army intermediary.”
“No such group existed,” Martens says. Hugh Tovar, the CIA station chief, agrees, saying he would have known if the CIA had been involved. Tovar said he knew the embassy kept books on the communists, but he was unaware of Martens’ card files or the use made of them.
Martens told Kadane that the Indonesian army had not compiled systematic lists such as those he kept. An aide approached him to Adam Malik, an anti-communist Indonesian statesman, who said they were in a life and death struggle and needed information on the PKI. He decided to turn his lists of names over to Malik’s aide; he didn’t know what he did with them, but he assumed that they found their way to the army. He told Kadane that this was an action that he took on his own, without the knowledge or approval of his superiors.
Despite that, Kadane wrote, “Approval for release of the names came from the top U.S. embassy officials, including former ambassador Marshall Green; his deputy, Jack Lydman and political section chief Edward Masters, the three acknowledge in interviews.”
Amb. Green had denied even knowing of the release of any names to the Indonesians, much less approving it. But he told Kadane that with the event so distant he “could not swear to it.” He says Kadane then stated, “Well, Mr. Martens said that you did, and so did Mr. Masters.” Green replied, “Well, if they said it, I can’t contest it.”
Edward Masters said that Kadane pulled the same trick on him, telling him that the others had said he had approved turning over the list. He said he didn’t recall the matter at all, and, like Green, if others said he had approved, he couldn’t dispute it. Later, when he realized what she was up to, he told her that it was absolutely false to suggest that he had approved giving a hit list to the Indonesian army. He said Kadane’s response was that she didn’t care what he said, that her article was already written and would be run in Spartanburg and then be picked up by The New York Times. (The Times owns the Spartanburg paper).
Jack Lydman did not even arrive in Jakarta until December 1965, two and a half months after the trouble began. Kadane’s statement that he approved release of the names is “absolutely incorrect,” he says. Martens says flatly, “I did not seek anyone’s permission to pass the names; the last thing I desired was to bureaucratize the matter or create a policy issue.”
Kadane wrote that Martens had told her, “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.” Martens, does not remember using the phrase, “blood on my hands.” In a letter to the Washington Post replying to Kadane’s story he said, “If I said anything like (the alleged statement) it could only have been a wry remark as to what might appear in the press if Ms. Kadane insisted on pursuing the line she had come to…” As to the “strike hard” comment, Martens said he did note that the Indonesian army had to “strike hard” at the communists when the issue was in doubt, but his reference was not to any “massacre.”
No doubt the Martens list of PKI names was of help to the Indonesian army in its efforts to root the Communists out of their positions of power and influence throughout the government and the country. The Communists came within a hair of winning, and that would have been a disaster for Indonesia and the world. The army struck hard and dealt the Communists a quick and decisive defeat.
South Vietnam faced a similar problem, but it did not strike as hard, and in the end the victory went to the Communists, after over 1.5 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians and over 60,000 American and allied servicemen had died. North and South Vietnam combined have less than half the population of Indonesia. Indonesia was spared not only a Communist victory, but a prolonged bloodletting as well. While Communists charge that Gert. Suharto has blood on his hands, in comparison with other leaders who tried to put down Communist insurrections with less success; he has come up smelling like roses.
Kathy Kadane focused on the blood, not the roses, and tried to smear it on the hands of Uncle Sam. To do this, she had to fabricate, exaggerate and ignore much of what she was told. The only new revelation in her story was that an embassy official, acting on his own, gave the Indonesians less than 5,000 names of PKI cadre when the army was engaged in smashing the PKI at a considerable cost in human life. To get a story that had any chance of causing ripples she had to show, in the words of the Village Voice, that “the U.S. government supported and encouraged the butchery by supplying a hit list of at least 5,000 PKI operatives to the Indonesian army led by Gen. Suharto…so that they could be hunted down and killed.”
She did this by (1) falsely asserting that the compilation of the list was done by a team of CIA and embassy officers, and (2) claiming that the release of the names had been approved by the ambassador and other top embassy officials. She lied to both Amb. Green and to Edward Masters to get them to say that they had approved the transfer when in fact they had no knowledge of it.
Joseph Lazarsky, former deputy CIA station chief in Indonesia, agreed to talk to Kadane off the record. He was outraged when she violated a basic rule of journalism and named him in her story. He says she attributed statements to him that he never made. She claimed he told her the Indonesian army had a “shooting list” of 4,000 to 5,000 names. He says that’s false and that he had never heard the term “shooting list.” He denies telling her that CIA headquarters was checking off the names of the Communists killed in Indonesia. Kadane told The New Yorker that Lazarsky had said of the killings, “We knew what they were doing. We knew they would keep a few and save them for the kangaroo courts, but Suharto and his advisers said, ‘If you keep them alive, you have to feed them.’” Lazarsky says she made that up. Tens of thousands of Communists were imprisoned, and some still are.
William E. Colby, the former director of Central Intelligence, was equally upset by Kadane’s misrepresentations. The New Yorker said she told them that Colby had said “the hit-list campaign in Indonesia was ‘exactly’ like the Phoenix program he himself organized in Vietnam two years later.” Colby says that is false and misrepresents the Phoenix program.
She got help on her Indonesia project from Ralph W. McGehee, a former CIA officer now associated with far-left groups dedicated to undermining the agency. McGehee published an article in 1981, charging that the Indonesia affair was a “CIA operation.” He never served in Indonesia. She has received grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, originally funded by the leftist philanthropist Philip Stern, and from Essential Information, a Nader spin-off.
She has emulated Walter Duranty, the famed New York Times correspondent in the Soviet Union who helped misinform Americans about Stalin and especially the terrible famine he created in 1932–33 that caused millions of deaths. The Washington Post and all the others that ran her story or wrote about it without bothering to check it out share the dishonor. The New York Times deserves kudos for rejecting the story and running an article exposing its flaws.
Original Report from AIM:
In Light of Newly Declassified documents, Leftist media outlets and leaders are claiming the US was involved and aware of the massacres. Notably Kyle Kulinski and Glenn Greenwald.
The US was unprepared for the crisis and refused to supply weapons for mass murder. H. W. Brands (Journal of American History, Dec. 1989)
The first reports of the strike against the army leadership that began September 30, 1965, caught the embassy and the administration by surprise. When Edward Masters, the counselor of the embassy, drove to work on the morning of October 1 and encountered roadblocks and a flurry of unusual military activity, he at first thought Sukarno had died or become incapacitated. For several hours that remained the impression of the American country team. Only gradually did the Americans discover what had really happened: a group of junior officers, led by a lieutenant colonel named Untung, had attempted to liquidate the high command, succeeding in killing six generals and wounding Nasution. When it became clear that the coup had failed, and that the army, under Suharto, was striking back, American officials remained in doubt as to who Suharto was. Green’s military attache, Col. Willis Ethel, knew Suharto’s military aide, but there was more than one Suharto among the upper echelon of the army, and at first the country team fixed on the wrong one.
In other words, the US was not behind the events and initially — at the beginning of October 1965 — did not understand what was taking place. The learning process was a slow one.
See also https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v26/d162
Brands went on to state, with respect to an Indonesian aid request in early December 1965:
The Johnson administration refused to put a price tag on the Communists’ heads. Indeed American officials were taken aback by such pushiness, not to mention the violence of the purge. Rusk commented that the Indonesians had received American assistance for so long they had come to believe it was theirs for the asking. “A cargo-cult mentality has developed,” the secretary said, “and they appear to see fully loaded ships ready to arrive when they consent to aid and press the button.” Moreover the Indonesians insisted that American assistance be kept secret. Secrecy made sense from their perspective, but it would put the administration in an awkward position. Rusk doubted that aid could be kept hidden, and remembering the administration’s previous troubles with Congress over assistance to Indonesia, he was wary of traveling that route again. (p. 803)
The only documented covert US aid was a collection of walkie-talkies supplied to the Indonesian army in mid-December 1965. Thus Chomsky was indeed lying when he claimed (several years after the Brands paper had been published) that the US facilitated “the flow of arms and other military equipment to implement the announced policy ‘to exterminate the PKI.’” So are other leftists who also claim the US aided Indonesia
Now let’s look at the new documents. Judging from the examples posted by the Natonal Security Archive presumably the most “devastating” finds in the entire cache there is nothing here that establishesany US “role” in the coup or in the subsequent massacres. We already knew that on November 1, 1965 US Ambassador Green suggested enabling the army to purchase weapons, but there is no evidence that any US arms supplies followed this suggestion. We already knew that from mid-December 1965 US staff in Indonesia were keeping Washington informed of the fate of the PKI leaders. And we already knew about the controversy over the US Embassy’s so-called “PKI death list” (which was the subject of the AIM report I mentioned): see https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v26/d185
If there had been even a single sentence in these 30,000 pages of declassified documents showing that the US organised the events or armed the Indonesian army in order to carry out massacres of civilians, it certainly would have been highlighted by the National Security Archive and quoted in every news report about the documents. Instead we hear the familiar claim that US embassy staff had “detailed knowledge” of the massacres as they were taking place. Yes they did, and so did every other embassy and everyone else in Indonesia, including all of the foreign journalists in the country.
