Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States

From our viewpoint, of course, an unsuccessful coup attempt by the PKI might be the most effective development to start a reversal of political trends in Indonesia.

Howard P. Jones, U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, March 10, 1965

For Aidit the covert use of progressive officers to dislodge the right- wing army high command must have seemed a clever strategy. Both the party and President Sukarno could be saved from the Council of Gen- erals with one swift, backhanded stroke. In its first stages the movement was on its way to success: it mobilized troops without being detected and achieved the element of surprise—the corpses of six generals are sufficient proof of that. The surprise, however, was short lived. Aidit was apparently unaware that others in the army leadership and the U.S. embassy had been patiently waiting for an event like the movement and had already prepared a plan for responding to it. While the generals and the embassy staff did not anticipate that the movement would erupt on October 1 and would kill half of Yani’s staff, they did anticipate some sort of dramatic action involving the PKI. They were waiting for a pretext for attacking the party and undermining Sukarno’s rule. Aidit un- wittingly played into their hands.

As declassiﬁed U.S. government documents reveal, in 1965 the generals realized that they could not stage an old-fashioned coup d’état against Sukarno—he was far too popular. They needed a pretext. The best pretext they hit upon was an unsuccessful coup attempt that could

Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States t 177

be blamed on the PKI. The army, in its contingency planning, had already drawn up a game plan: blame the PKI for an attempted coup, begin a full-scale war on the party, keep Sukarno as a ﬁgurehead president, and incrementally leverage the army into the government. The army kept the U.S. embassy abreast of its plan and knew that it could count on U.S. diplomatic, military, and economic support when the time came to implement it. The movement broke upon an army that knew exactly how to react. Even if the PKI had no involvement with the movement, it almost certainly would have been blamed for it.

When reading these documents about high-level army planning that was done before the outbreak of the movement, one is struck by how closely the events of 1965–67 followed the army’s game plan. I do not believe this tight correspondence between the events and the plan can be explained by arguing that certain army generals designed the movement themselves. Of course, it is tempting to interpret the movement as a fake coup attempt that was designed to fail. But such a “hidden hand” argument is not only difﬁcult to believe (given the complicated logistics required), it is impossible to square with the facts. As I argued in chapter 2, the movement would have been designed very differently if it had been meant to be a setup. When dealing with the covert operations of intelligence agencies, one should be careful not to push conspiracy theories too far. The U.S. embassy and the army generals were not controlling all the events through double agents. The movement origi- nated with Aidit, his Special Bureau, and a group of progressive ofﬁcers and was designed to succeed. It failed not because it was prepro- grammed to fail but because it was poorly organized and because the army had prepared for a counterattack. Even if Suharto had not known about the movement’s plans beforehand, he and his fellow generals would have reacted in a similar manner. The army might not have been able to defeat the movement so quickly and effortlessly, but it would have organized an anti-PKI and anti-Sukarno campaign all the same.

In rejecting extreme conspiracy theorizing, one should not jump to the other extreme and argue that U.S. ofﬁcials and army generals were surprised on October 1 and had to improvise all their responses. A point that has been obscured in much of the literature on the movement, es- pecially in accounts by U.S. ofﬁcials, is that the U.S. government had been preparing the Indonesian army for a showdown with the PKI and

a takeover of state power. 1 From 1958 to 1965 the United States trained, funded, advised, and supplied the army precisely so that it could turn

itself into a state within a state. Under Nasution and Yani the army

178 t Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States gradually expanded its powers, consolidated its ofﬁcer corps, and

made itself the government-in-waiting. In the months before October, the United States and the army wanted an incident like the movement to occur. They were busy creating the conditions for it and preparing themselves for dealing with it. The United States did not leave the contest between the army and the PKI to pure chance.

Within this one event of October 1, 1965, is embodied the lengthy, complex, global history of the competition between Communists and anti-Communists, extending from village-level rivalries to the high politics of U.S. foreign policy. This chapter is a brief analysis of the postcolonial contest in Indonesia between army ofﬁcers and the PKI and is largely based on U.S. government declassiﬁed documents. The analysis begins by examining how the United States developed a solid alliance with the army in the late 1950s and ends by examining how the army responded to the outbreak of the movement in 1965. Ultimately, this chapter is meant to explain how the army came to fetishize a rela- tively small-scale putsch into the greatest evil of Indonesian history, something requiring a response of mass arrests and massacres.

Origins of the U.S. Alliance with the Army

Until the late 1950s it did not seem that the U.S. government and the Indonesian army had a bright future together. Key ofﬁcials in the Ei- senhower administration (1952–60) were thinking about how to break up Indonesia into smaller states. For them, President Sukarno was an anathema. His nonaligned foreign policy (on assertive display at the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference), repeated denunciations of Western imperialism, and willingness to include the Communist Party as an inte- gral component of Indonesian politics were construed in Washington as proof of his allegiance to Moscow and Beijing. Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers—Allen at the head of the CIA and John Foster at the head of the State Department—viewed all nationalist Third World leaders who wished to remain neutral in the cold war as Communist stooges. In full conﬁdence of their right to handpick the leaders of foreign countries, Eisenhower and the Dulleses repeatedly used CIA covert operations to overthrow such leaders: Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and Souvanna Phouma in Laos in 1960. The Dulles brothers viewed Sukarno as yet another irritating character who needed to be removed from the world stage. 2

Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States t 179 After the PKI’s gains in the mid-1957 provincial elections, the Dulles

brothers thought it was time to move against Sukarno. His softness on communism and support for democratic elections appeared to be giving the Communist Party a direct path the presidential palace. The brothers rejected the sober advice of the U.S. ambassador in Jakarta, John Al- lison, who counseled that the Communist threat was not severe enough to warrant overthrowing Sukarno. In the wildly overheated imagina- tions of the cold warriors in Washington, the PKI had won an “absolute majority” of the Javanese votes in the 1957 regional elections. 3 (It had won only 27 percent.) The Dulles brothers became convinced that Java had fallen to the Communists and that it was best to separate it from the rest of Indonesia. When facing Communists in Asia, the guiding principle of the Eisenhower administration was the division of a country into Communist and non-Communist zones. The lesson from the loss of China in 1949 was that it was better to cut one’s losses and allow some territory to fall to the Communists than to sustain a protracted ﬁght for the whole country. The United States was thus willing to di- vide Korea and Vietnam into northern and southern halves. By late 1957 the Eisenhower administration thought that the rise of the PKI, espe- cially in Java, meant that it was time to break the Indonesian archipel- ago up into smaller units.

Rebellions by regionally based army colonels in Sumatra and Sula- wesi appeared to the Eisenhower administration as the perfect vehicles for isolating Java. Lieutenant Colonel Ahmad Husein, the commander of West Sumatra, seized power from the civilian governor on Decem- ber 20, 1956. Colonel Simbolon, the commander of the entire northern half of Sumatra (headquartered in Medan), proclaimed himself the governor of his region two days later. Lieutenant Colonel Barlian, the commander of the southern half of Sumatra (headquartered in Palem- bang), followed suit by ousting the governor there in March 1957. All three colonels demanded greater autonomy for the provinces vis-à-vis the central government, the dissolution of the existing cabinet, and the return to power of Muhammad Hatta, a Sumatran politician who had resigned from the vice presidency on December 1, 1956.

For similar reasons the military commander for the entire eastern half of the country (including Sulawesi, Maluku, and the Lesser Sun- das) usurped the civilian government and declared martial law in March 1957. Lieutenant Colonel Sumual, based in the city of Makassar, announced what he called a “universal struggle” (Perjuangan Semesta

180 t Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States Alam, known by its acronym, Permesta), which reiterated the demands

of the three Sumatran colonels. All these rebel ofﬁcers were essentially looking for a reformed central government in Indonesia, not for rump, breakaway independent states.

Back in Washington, the signiﬁcance of these rebellions was greatly exaggerated. Allen Dulles stated at a National Security Council meeting in March 1957 that “the process of disintegration has continued in Indo- nesia to a point where only the island of Java remains under the control of the Central Government. The armed forces of all the outlying islands have declared their independence of the Central Government in Ja- karta.” 4 Such an inaccurate assessment convinced the policy makers that the United States should turn against Indonesian nationalism.

Sukarno was initially receptive to the rebels’ demands. The forma- tion of a new cabinet in April, the holding of a reconciliation conference soon afterward, the dispatch of more funds to the regions, and the continued prospect for the colonels’ own career advancement within the national army were all factors mitigating the intransigence of the rebels. But the Eisenhower administration, through its covert contacts with the dissident colonels, insisted that they resist Sukarno’s blandishments. An

ad hoc committee on Indonesia within the National Security Council concluded in September 1957 that the United States should “strengthen the determination, will and cohesion of the anti-Communist forces in the outer islands” so that they could serve as a “rallying point if the Communists should take over Java.” 5 U.S. material support gave the rebels the conﬁdence to reject any negotiated resolution. The CIA gave Colonel Simbolon in North Sumatra a down payment of $50,000 in early October 1957 and began transferring weapons the following month.

Although these rebellions did not begin with the intention of overthrowing the Jakarta government, they acquired that intention by early 1958, largely because of the inﬂuence of the U.S. government. The colonels, ﬂush with dollars and guns from the CIA, became more ambi- tious. On February 15, 1958, Colonel Husein announced a new national government, the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indo- nesia (shortened to its initials, PRRI). He demanded that foreign countries freeze Jakarta’s assets abroad and relocate their embassies from Jakarta to West Sumatra. Faced with a virtual declaration of war, Su- karno’s government decided that its only option was to respond with military force. The Indonesian military’s offensive began one week after Husein’s announcement.

Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States t 181 The air force bombed key PRRI targets and airlifted Javanese bat-

talions into Sumatra. Lacking planes, antiaircraft weapons, and subma- rines, the rebel colonels in Sumatra were vulnerable to aerial and naval bombardments. An added liability was morale: many troops under the colonels were unwilling to ﬁght against the Indonesian military. The main cities of Sumatra fell one by one in March and April until the cap- ital of PRRI, the hill station of Bukittinggi, was retaken on May 4. Al- though scattered remnants of rebel troops moved into the forests and waged a sporadic guerrilla war for another three years, the PRRI in Su- matra was effectively ﬁnished at that point.

Jakarta’s victory in eastern Indonesian took longer because the CIA provided airpower to the rebels. Operating from airports in Menado, the city on the northern tip of Sulawesi close to U.S. air bases in the Philippines, the CIA ran a ﬂeet of about eight or nine planes piloted by Americans, Taiwanese, and Filipinos. This small ﬂeet severely ham- pered the military by bombing ships and airports throughout eastern Indonesia. The CIA abruptly removed its air support in late May 1958 when an American pilot, Allen Pope, was shot down and captured alive after his bombing raid on the city of Ambon—a gratuitous raid that killed about seven hundred civilians. Once the CIA’s planes were out of commission, Jakarta was able to quickly defeat the rebels in Menado.

The Eisenhower administration started reassessing its strategy as the rebel colonels were going down to defeat. The adventure-filled dream world of covert U.S. action began to crumble. Seeing that the In- donesian officers who were suppressing the rebel colonels were anti- Communists (such as Nasution and Yani), Washington realized that sabotaging the national army was counterproductive. The U.S. backing of the rebellions pitted anti-Communist officers against one another. The PKI emerged with greater popularity because its line about U.S. imperialism became confirmed by experience. With U.S. arms found in Sumatra and a U.S. pilot shot down over Ambon, Indonesians could see that the United States was indeed trying to break up the country.

The result of the reassessment was a policy reversal in Washing- ton. Instead of trying to dismember Indonesia, the United States would support the anti-Communist army ofﬁcers in Jakarta and rely on them to keep the PKI in check. This new policy received systematic formu- lation in a National Security Council (NSC) document, the “Special Report on Indonesia,” written in January 1959. 6 The NSC saw the army as the “principle obstacle to the continued growth of Communist strength.” The civilian non-Communists in the political parties “could,

182 t Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States with the backing of the Army, turn the tide against the Communist

party in the political ﬁeld.” The NSC document urged Eisenhower to strengthen U.S. ties to the military so that it could “combat Communist activity.” To ensure that the army leadership was willing and able to ful- ﬁll its role as the vanguard of the anti-Communist forces, the White House donated massive amounts of equipment. 7

The new U.S. strategy for combating the PKI was sophisticated, es- pecially in light of the crudeness of the former U.S. strategy. The NSC realized that the Communist Party had already acquired unimpeachable nationalist credentials. The party was well organized, highly disci- plined, and extremely popular. In the NSC’s assessment the PKI “would probably have emerged as the largest party in Indonesia” if Sukarno had not canceled the election scheduled for 1959. 8 The army could not simply attack the Communists in pit-bull fashion: “Open measures of repression against the PKI would be difﬁcult to justify on internal political grounds, and would expose any government undertaking them to charges of truckling to Western pressure.” 9 The army would have to approach the PKI with the subtlety of a fox. Any attack on the party would have to be justiﬁed in the very terms of Indonesian nationalism that the party itself championed.

The trick was to keep provoking the Communist Party into taking some sort of rash action that would make it appear antinational. The NSC document of 1959 emphasized that the United States, in providing aid to the Indonesian army, should prioritize “requests for assistance in programs and projects which offer opportunities to isolate the PKI, drive it into positions of open opposition to the Indonesian Govern- ment, thereby creating grounds for repressive measures politically jus- tiﬁable in terms of Indonesian self-interest.” 10 The consistent U.S. strategy from 1959 to 1965 was to help the army ofﬁcers prepare themselves for a violent attack upon the PKI. Howard Jones, the ambassador in Jakarta for seven years (1958–65) and one of the main architects of the policy, supplied an important element of continuity for three adminis- trations (Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson).

Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States