Exploiting the September 30th Movement

Before the outbreak of the movement, U.S. officials and their allied Indonesian officers had already written a script that contained the fol- lowing plot elements: blame the PKI for a coup attempt, launch a gen- eral repression of the PKI throughout the country, retain Sukarno as a figurehead president while eroding his authority, and establish a new army-dominated, corporatist government. This was their ideal scenario. Events unfolded in such a way that they were able to turn this scenario into reality. Although the movement had come as a surprise, they knew immediately how to take advantage of it. The movement was not a straightforward coup attempt by the PKI, but it was similar enough to serve their purposes. The movement allowed U.S. officials

194 t Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States and their Indonesian generals to set in motion their long-standing plan

for displacing Sukarno and attacking the Communist Party. In the early days of October the U.S. embassy and policy makers back in Washington were concerned that the Indonesian army would not take full advantage of the opportunity to attack the PKI. Even before the United States had solid evidence that the PKI was responsible, it was blaming the PKI and encouraging the army to destroy the party. An embassy report of October 4 observed that the army had not “reached a decision on whether to maintain its drive for complete vic- tory over the PKI.” 65 While U.S. officials were confident that their old ally Nasution would push for a full-scale attack, they fretted that other elements in the army would stymie him. The CIA station in Jakarta noted the next day that “the Army must act quickly if it is to exploit its opportunity to move against the PKI.” 66 The CIA station (presumably its head, B. Hugh Tovar) again worried on October 7 that there was a danger the army would not unleash an assault on the PKI but would settle for only limited action “against those directly involved in the mur- der of the Generals.” 67 The very next day all the CIA’s worries disap- peared when it discovered that the army generals had already met on October 5 and agreed to “implement plans to crush the PKI.” 68 The movement would be put to its proper purpose as the justification for the planned repression of the PKI—repression that turned out just as Nasu- tion promised: it made the 1948 repression of the PKI look mild.

Although the army generals did not need further assurances that the United States would support them during their anti-PKI drive, the embassy gave them such assurances nonetheless. Ambassador Green cabled Washington on October 5 to propose that he “indicate clearly to key people in army such as Nasution and Suharto our desire to be of assistance where we can.” In response the State Department agreed with the proposal but noted that the army generals must have already felt certain that they could rely on the United States: “Over past years inter- service relationships developed through training program, civic action program and MILTAG [Military Assistance Group], as well as regular assurances to Nasution, should have established clearly in minds Army leaders that U.S. stands behind them if they should need help.” 69 One assurance that the embassy conveyed to an aide of Nasution’s in mid- October was that the British troops massed in Malaysia would not exploit the chaos in Jakarta and attack Indonesian troops involved in Confrontation. The army could proceed with its drive against the PKI without fretting about an offensive from Malaysia. According to the

Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States t 195 embassy, Nasution’s aide offered his thanks: “He [the aide] commented

to the effect that this was just what was needed by way of assurances that we (the army) weren’t going to be hit from all angles as we moved to straighten things out here.” 70

As the death squads fanned out across the country to hunt down PKI members, the embassy was delighted. Ambassador Green observed in early November that even the “smaller fry” in the PKI were “being systematically arrested and jailed or executed.” In Central Java the army was mobilizing and arming militias of Muslim youths to “keep them out in front against PKI.” Green noted in the same memo that the embassy had “made clear” to a contact in the army “that Embassy and USG [U.S. Government] generally sympathetic with and admiring of what army doing.” 71 Green’s only lingering worry was that the army would compromise with Sukarno and allow the PKI to retain some vestiges of its former power. Green assured Washington that the army was never- theless “working hard at destroying PKI and I, for one, have increasing respect for its determination and organization in carrying out this cru- cial assignment.” 72

The United States backed up its words of encouragement with material aid. The army needed communications equipment to link its vari- ous headquarters around the country so that it could better coordinate the drive against the PKI. 73 Sometime in late 1965 the United States ﬂew in state-of-the-art mobile radios from Clark Air Base in the Phil- ippines and delivered them to Kostrad. An antenna was brought in and erected in front of Kostrad headquarters. The investigative journalist Kathy Kadane discovered from her interviews with former ofﬁcials in the late 1980s that the United States had monitored the army’s communications over those radios: “The CIA made sure the frequencies the Army would use were known in advance to the National Security Agency. NSA intercepted the broadcasts at a site in Southeast Asia, where its analysts subsequently translated them. The intercepts were then sent on to Washington.” The United States thus had a blow-by- blow account of the army’s assault on the PKI, overhearing, for instance, “commands from Suharto’s intelligence unit to kill particular persons at given locations.” 74

A member of the embassy’s political affairs section, Robert Martens, helped the army by providing lists of the names of PKI members. 75 Martens admitted in a letter to the Washington Post that he handed over the names of “a few thousand” members, whom he disin- genuously termed “leaders and senior cadre”—as if a list of that many names could include only the hard-core leadership. 76

196 t Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States The embassy also transferred a large sum of money to the army-

created civilian front called Action Front for Crushing the September 30th Movement (Kap-Gestapu). The actions of this organization were, as Ambassador Green noted, “fully consonant with and coordinated by the army.” To help this front hold demonstrations and carry out its “cur- rent repressive efforts targeted against PKI,” Green authorized in early December the granting of 50 million rupiah to the front’s representa- tive, Adam Malik. 77

Although Suharto was not part of Yani’s brain trust, Suharto was fa- miliar with its game plan. As scripted, Suharto kept Sukarno as a figurehead president. Sukarno was not officially removed from office until March 1967. Ambassador Green recognized in early November 1965 that Suharto’s strategy was to “assert carefully applied army pressure and control government but will not, if he can avoid it, take over in name so long as Sukarno is alive.” 78 The continued presence of Sukarno as president lent credibility to Suharto’s actions, as if they came with the president’s approval. The army was able to concentrate its repression on the PKI while the other pro-Sukarno organizations either remained neutral or joined in the violence. For their part, the PKI leaders themselves still counted on Sukarno’s using his presidential powers to save the party from the army’s repression.

Green was also cognizant by early November that Suharto was not displacing Sukarno in order to restore democracy and reestablish a civilian government. In accordance with Nasution and Suwarto’s teachings, Suharto was laying the foundations for a thoroughly army-dominated polity. Green informed Washington: “Army is not thinking purely in military terms or intending turn political future of Indonesia over to civilian elements. Army is moving its people into all aspects of government and organizational framework with view [to] keeping control on political trends and events.” 79 Before he was unexpectedly thrown into command of the army in October 1965, Suharto was aware of the army’s blueprints for creating its own dictatorship. Nasution and other generals would have ﬁlled him in on whatever details he did not know. Tak- ing advantage of the outbreak of the movement, Suharto gradually im- plemented the preexisting plan for turning the army, already the shadow government, into the real government.

From the start of his takeover of state power in October 1965, Su- harto wished to ally Indonesia with the United States and end Sukarno’s nonaligned foreign policy. Suharto aimed to achieve economic growth, the prerequisite for a durable dictatorship, through a tight integration

Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States t 197 with the Western economies. He signaled his strong support for

Western private investment quite early. Aware of the U.S. hostility to Sukarno’s moves to nationalize the oil industry, Suharto personally intervened in a meeting of cabinet ministers in December 1965 that planned to discuss the issue. Sukarno’s third deputy prime minister, Chairul Saleh, chaired a meeting on December 16 to decide upon the nationalization of the oil companies Caltex and Stanvac. Soon after Saleh opened the meeting, Suharto suddenly arrived by helicopter, en- tered the chamber, and peremptorily announced, as the gleeful U.S. embassy account has it, that the military “would not stand for precipitous moves against oil companies.” Faced with such a direct threat, Saleh in- deﬁnitely postponed the discussion of nationalizing the oil industry. 80

For its power grab to be successful, the army needed to show that it could improve economic conditions. The army could gain legitimacy only if the public felt that it was bringing tangible, material beneﬁts. 81 This is where the U.S. government and the U.S.-trained Indonesian economists played important roles. Representatives of the army began approaching the embassy in November 1965, asking for covert deliveries of rice. 82 Since the United States did not think any large-scale delivery of supplies could be kept secret and kept solely within the army’s hands, the embassy turned down the requests. The United States wanted to wait until the army was more fully in control of the government. 83 Once Suharto decommissioned Sukarno’s cabinet in mid-March 1966, im- prisoning ﬁfteen ministers and appointing his own replacements—all the while keeping Sukarno as the president—the United States opened the taps of economic aid: concessionary sales of 50,000 tons of rice in April, and 75,000 tons of cotton and $60 million in emergency foreign exchange credits from Germany, Japan, Britain, and United States in June. 84 Suharto appointed the U.S.-trained economists to the ministries related to economic affairs. They laid out the welcome mat for foreign investment and oriented the country’s economy around export produc- tion for Western markets. 85

Exploiting the September 30th Movement