Setting the Stage for a Showdown

In accordance with the policy of building up the army as the bulwark against the PKI, the U.S. government trained army ofﬁcers in the United States, donated and sold weapons, and provided ﬁnancial aid. General Nasution, the commander of the army, was America’s “golden

Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States t 183 boy”; his ﬁrm anticommunism had convinced policy makers in Wash-

ington that the army was indeed the best hope for containing the Com- munist Party. Nasution repeatedly assured U.S. ofﬁcials that the army would never allow the PKI to take power. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff justiﬁed aid to the Indonesian army in 1958 as encouragement to Nasu- tion to “carry out his ‘plan’ for the control of Communism.” 11 After Su- karno shunted Nasution aside in June 1962, promoting him to an administrative position as chief of the armed forces and thereby removing him from troop command, his successor, Lieutenant General Yani, con- tinued the same anti-Communist posture.

In August 1958 the United States began a military assistance program that supplied equipment to the military, especially the army, and trained officers in the United States. From 1958 to 1965 the United States annually spent between $10 million and $20 million on military assistance to Indonesia. 12 The program for training Indonesian army officers in schools such as those at Fort Bragg and Fort Leavenworth was extensive. From 1950 to 1965 about twenty-eight hundred Indone- sian army officers were brought to the United States for training—most of them after 1958. That number represented about one-fifth to one- quarter of all army officers. 13 Through this training the United States was able to develop extensive contacts within the Indonesian army. Of course, not all the officers trained in the United States became loyal partisans of the anti-Communist crusade. But such a large-scale program must have influenced the political orientation of some officers. In the early 1960s U.S. officials certainly thought they were enjoying some success with the program. Dean Rusk wrote a memo to President John- son in 1964 explaining that U.S. aid to the Indonesian military was of little significance in military terms but was “permitting us to maintain some contact with key elements in Indonesia which are interested in and capable of resisting Communist takeover” (emphasis in original). 14

In addition to training officers, the U.S. government promoted “civic action.” Although the United States had originally formulated civic action for militaries fighting guerrilla warfare, it wished to apply it in In- donesia as a prophylactic against the Communist Party’s political influ- ence. The U.S. government defined civic action as the use of a military “on projects useful to local population at all levels in such fields as edu- cation, training, public works, agriculture, transportation, communica- tions, health, sanitation and others contributing to economic and social development, which would also serve to improve the standing of the military forces with the population.” 15 It was a program, as the cliché

184 t Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States went, to win hearts and minds. Under civic action the Indonesian

army was to involve itself in activities normally reserved for civilians. Soldiers were to become ofﬁcials within the civilian government, such as village heads, and build infrastructure projects, such as bridges and roads. In 1962 the National Security Council endorsed the idea of strengthening the Indonesian army’s role in “economic and social development activities.” 16

Guided by Nasution’s conception of “territorial warfare,” the Indo- nesian army had in fact been inserting itself in civilian life since the early 1950s. What the Kennedy administration was proposing in the early 1960s was U.S. support for the Indonesian army’s existing pro- grams. 17 The Indonesian army’s newly christened civic action program was largely under the control of Colonel George Benson, whose ofﬁcial title from August 1962 to July 1965 was special assistant to the U.S. am- bassador for civic action. Benson enjoyed the full conﬁdence of the army commander, Yani, whom Benson knew from his days as U.S. military attaché at the Jakarta embassy (1956–59), and so was allowed a free hand to work within the Indonesian army. 18

One virtue of civic action was the cover it provided for covert operations against the Communist Party. The NSC committee on counter- insurgency agreed in December 1961 to spend money in Indonesia “to support civic action and anti-Communist activities” that would involve the “covert training of selected personnel and civilians, who will be placed in key positions in the [here the censor notes the deletion of ‘less than 1 line of source text’] civic action program.” 19 The many excised passages in this declassiﬁed document suggest that the civic action program involved sensitive covert operations in Indonesia.

The Indonesian army was following its own version of a Gramscian strategy: contesting strategic sites in civil society before launching a bid for state power. The army had its own “functional group” (Golkar), which was similar to a political party; trade union (Sentral Organisasi Karyawan Sosialis Indonesia, the Central Organization of Socialist Employees of Indonesia); newspapers (Angkatan Bersenjata and Berita Yudha); and a group of cultural ﬁgures who worked closely with anti- Communist ofﬁcers (such as the writer Wiratmo Sukito, the initiator of the Cultural Manifesto that set off a storm of controversy in 1963). By sprouting a great variety of wings and fronts, the army was transforming itself into a mirror image of the PKI. The martial law declared in March 1957 in response to the PRRI/Permesta rebellions allowed the army extraordinary powers to intervene in civilian politics. As Daniel Lev

Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States t 185 noted, “Martial law was to become the army’s political charter.” 20 Re-

gional army commanders restricted the press, arrested politicians, and imposed their own unwritten laws. The nationalization of Dutch busi- nesses in December 1957 provided an opportunity for the army to enter the economy. Many army commanders became businessmen, turning handsome proﬁts from plantations, factories, import and export ven- tures, and illegal smuggling. 21 They accumulated sizable funds to bank- roll their efforts to invade strategic sites of civil society. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the army under Nasution pushed for a corporatist, military state in which political parties would be abolished and the public sphere evacuated of political contestation. 22 The veteran politician Sjahrir warned in 1958 that Nasution’s ofﬁcers harbored “a militaristic and fascist ideal” for the Indonesian government. 23

Many in the Kennedy administration believed that political order and economic development in certain Third World countries could be best achieved through military governments. These U.S. ofﬁcials as- sumed that the military was often the best-organized institution and thus the most deserving of running the government. The political sci- entist Lucien Pye of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sug- gested that armies in preindustrial countries could be “modernizing agents” since they tend “to emphasize a rational outlook and to cham- pion responsible change and national development.” Army ofﬁcers ap- preciated “technological advancement,” could promote “a sense of citi- zenship,” and were capable of “strengthening essentially administrative functions.” 24 Walt Rostow headed a team at the State Department that wrote a report in January 1963, “The Role of the Military in the Under- developed Areas,” that endorsed the idea of encouraging the militaries of some countries to take over the functions of the state and disregard the principle of civilian supremacy. 25 The Kennedy administration looked to the Indonesian army as a state within a state.

The high command of the Indonesian army viewed itself in the same way. In the early 1960s it was preparing itself for taking state power. Guy Pauker, a key U.S. specialist on the Indonesian army who was afﬁliated with both the Rand Corporation and University of California–Berkeley, noticed that Nasution was following a clever long- term strategy “in making the Indonesian Army into the organization which could eventually stabilize and develop the country.” 26 Nasution did not want to take state power until the army was tightly knit as a centralized institution and “capable of governing Indonesia.” The general had realized that the army could not stage a coup d’état against

186 t Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States President Sukarno because he was too popular: “Any direct political at-

tack on him is doomed to fail.” 27 It could not depose Sukarno without provoking an uncontrollable civil war. Pauker was not optimistic about

the success of Nasution’s long-term strategy—both Sukarno and the PKI stood a chance of foiling it—but Pauker noted that the army was the only real hope for defeating the Communists. The army was “the rallying point of anti-Communist elements” in the civil society. 28

Pauker struck up an alliance with the vice director of the army’s staff college, Colonel Suwarto, who was grooming his fellow officers for their future role as rulers. 29 Suwarto, a 1959 graduate of a training program at Fort Leavenworth, was known as a personal enemy of President Sukarno’s. Only with Yani’s protection was Suwarto able to continue to hold influential positions within the army and continue to scheme against Sukarno. 30 The army, of course, could not openly discuss plans for taking state power. Suwarto and his like-minded colleagues at the college, which was known as Seskoad (for Sekolah Staf Komando Ang- katan Darat), worked in subtle fashion. For instance, they arranged for U.S.-trained economists at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta to come to Bandung and teach seminars for the officers. These economists had been educated largely at Berkeley, courtesy of the Ford Foundation.

A Berkeley professor who chaired the project, Bruce Glassburner, spent three years in Indonesia (1958–61) and later recalled that the army ofﬁ- cers at Seskoad wanted to learn about economics so they could rule wisely once they took state power: “Given the parlous state of the Indo- nesian economy in the early and mid-1960s, the military readily recog- nized that in the event of a political shift which would bring them to power, prompt solution of the worst of the economic problems would

be of highest priority.” 31 The economists who taught at Seskoad, such as Muhammad Sadli, later became the so-called technocrats and Berke-

ley maﬁa of the Suharto regime. 32 Among the ofﬁcers participating in Seskoad seminars was Suharto.

He had recently been dismissed from his position as army commander in Central Java on charges of corruption, but his superiors had decided that his smuggling operations at the port of Semarang were not serious enough to warrant prosecution. They did not publicly announce the reason for his dismissal. The charges were hushed up, and he was sent off to Seskoad in late 1959. There he came under the inﬂuence of Su- warto. A historian of the Indonesian military, Ulf Sundhaussen, noted that at Seskoad Suharto was “involved in the formation of the Doctrine of Territorial Warfare and the Army’s policy on Civic Mission (that is,

Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States t 187 penetration of army ofﬁcers into all ﬁelds of government activities and

responsibilities).” 33 Suwarto taught the ofﬁcers to think of the army as an institution that had the right and ability to involve itself in govern-

ing the country. Although Suharto did not go to the United States for training, he would have known about U.S. hopes for the army as both an anti-Communist bastion and a shadow government.

Yani and his staff later recruited Suharto to play a crucial, covert role in their efforts to undermine Confrontation, Sukarno’s anti-Malaysia campaign. The army generals did not at ﬁrst object to the campaign, launched in September 1963, since it resulted in increased funding. But as the hostilities intensiﬁed in mid- to late 1964, they wished to prevent it from leading to a full-scale war with the British military, which was protecting Malaysia. To avoid a clash with Sukarno, who was known to meddle with army appointments if displeased, the generals retained a public face of support for Confrontation. Meanwhile, they devised sev- eral hidden methods for sabotaging it. They lobbied Sukarno to reor- ganize the military command for Confrontation. Sukarno saw the need for change after the humiliating failure of covert raids into Malaysia in mid-1964 and agreed to the army’s proposal, renaming the multiservice command Kolaga (Komando Mandala Siaga) in September 1964. He also authorized the insertion of Suharto as vice commander of Kolaga on January 1, 1965. 34

From his position as second in command, Suharto proceeded to assert greater authority than the commander of Kolaga, Air Force Vice Marshal Omar Dani. 35 Suharto determined the deployment of the army personnel and weaponry brought into the anti-Malaysian campaign. At the time Suharto’s base of operations was Kostrad, the army’s reserve troops, of which he had been commander since May 1963. Su- harto slowed down the deployments and kept the forces stationed near the Malaysian borders constantly understaffed and underequipped. Dani, as commander of the air force, could not force the army to com- ply with the targets he set. The troops stationed in Sumatra under the command of Colonel Kemal Idris, an old enemy of Sukarno’s whose ap- pointment was another tactic to sabotage Confrontation, were denied transport ships, which prevented them from invading Malaysia. 36

Suharto and his intelligence agents at Kostrad also sabotaged Con- frontation by secretly contacting representatives of Malaysia and Britain and assuring them that the army was opposed to the hostilities and would try to limit them. Perhaps Yani and his intelligence chief, Par- man, entrusted Suharto with this sensitive task so that they could enjoy

188 t Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States plausible deniability if the plot became exposed. In July or August 1964

Suharto ordered his intelligence ofﬁcer at Kostrad, Major Ali Moer- topo, to inform the enemy of the army’s real intentions. 37 To facilitate

communication with Malaysian ofﬁcials, Moertopo used Indonesian civilians who had been involved in the PRRI/Permesta revolts of 1957–

58 and had opted for exile in Singapore and Malaysia. 38 In January 1965 Suharto summoned his old friend Colonel Yoga Sugama from Bel-

grade, where he was military attaché, to return to Indonesia precisely so that he could help “put the brakes” on Confrontation. 39 Yoga took over

Moertopo’s work. Additionally, Major Benny Moerdani, a Kostrad of- ficer since January 1965, was sent to Bangkok to make contact there with pro-Western officials. For cover he worked as a sales manager in the In- donesian airlines office. 40

One reason that Suharto and his Kostrad ofﬁcers were opposed to Confrontation was that it was diverting the army’s resources from the campaign against the Communist Party. The intelligence section at Su- harto’s Kostrad wrote a secret report in mid-1964 arguing that Con- frontation was jeopardizing the army’s efforts to keep the PKI under control. 41 Too many troops were concentrated along the border with Malaysia instead of being stationed within Indonesian, especially Java- nese, civil society. A later conﬁdential U.S. government report noted that the military preferred to end Confrontation so that the troops could be returned to their home bases “to be prepared for a future confrontation with the PKI and other extremists.” 42

Setting the Stage for a Showdown