One of the most important new hires was Frank Wisner, who had a story he would tell every time he was trying to explain why he did what he did for the United States government. Wisner had flown into Romania in September 1944 to work as station chief for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the temporary spy agency that Washington set up during the war. Once there, he heard, and believed, that the Soviets were scheming to take control of the country, but his bosses back home were in no mood to hear that their allies were up to no good. In January 1945, Stalin ordered that thousands of men and women of German descent be taken back to the Soviet Union to be “mobilized for work.” Wisner knew some of them personally. As the forced evacuation began, he rode frantically around the city, as he told it, trying to save them. But he failed. Thousands of people were herded onto boxcars and sent to labor camps. According to his family, those scenes would haunt him for the rest of his troubled life.50
Wisner, sometimes just called “Wiz,” was born in 1909 to a wealthy family with a lot of land in Missouri, one of the states in the US South governed by Jim Crow laws, which discriminated against African Americans. He grew up in an insular, privileged household. As a child, he didn’t even put on his own clothes—he would lie down, raise his arms and legs, and his black maid would put his shirt and trousers on for him.51 Frank’s favorite book was Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, which told its story against the backdrop of the “Great Game” between the British and Russian Empires.52 Wiz was sent off to the aristocratic Woodberry Forest School in Virginia. He desperately lifted weights to add bulk to his wiry frame and was intensely competitive. At the University of Virginia, he was tapped to the join the Sevens, a secret society so baroque that it only revealed the names of its members at their death. He was intense, but could come alive, especially at parties liberally lubricated with alcohol. Wiz became a lawyer at a white shoe firm on Wall Street. Restless, and driven by an intense sense of moral purpose, he enlisted in the Navy a year before the Japanese attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor.53
The OSS liked to hire elite corporate lawyers from the best schools, and Wisner fit the bill. He got into the intelligence service with the help of an old professor, and took to the life like a fish to water. In Romania, he wasn’t only gathering information and attempting to save Germans. He was hobnobbing with royalty, drinking and dancing, living in a mansion, and doing magic tricks.54 He was also socializing alongside the more experienced Soviet agents. After he left Romania, it became clear that Russian spies had infiltrated his entire operation.55
Back on Wall Street after the war, Wisner was once more bored and listless. So he jumped at the opportunity to serve his country again, and to fight the communists.56 He took over a new covert operations organization innocuously named the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) and began activities in Berlin.
At the same time, a very different man named Howard Palfrey Jones, working in the opposite arm of the US foreign policy apparatus, arrived in Berlin along with Allen Dulles, Wisner’s old OSS boss. Jones was a diplomat and a veteran who had witnessed the brutality of German National Socialism early. On a trip to Germany in 1934, he was beaten by Nazi soldiers because he failed to salute the Nazi flag properly.57 He was already a grown man when World War II started, and served in Germany. Immediately after the war, he entered the State Department. Unlike Wisner, who was a die-hard crusader, Jones had an entirely different approach to the rest of the world. Rather than viewing every situation in terms of a black-and-white global struggle, he sought to engage deeply with the complexities of each situation. And he was having a great time.
In almost every picture taken of him, Howard Palfrey Jones looks like a big, good-natured goofball. He has a wide grin on his face, looking just very pleased to be there, whether among Javanese dancers or rubbing elbows with fellow diplomats. His contemporaries described him in similar terms. He would strut around the world in white sharkskin suits, doing his best to use the local language and make friends with everyone. Even those who considered him an enemy—that is, the communists—called him Smiling Jones, and warned comrades not to be taken in by his wholesome demeanor.58
Jones was born into a middle-class family in Chicago in 1899. The city was bustling and chaotic, and he grew up causing all kinds of trouble with a mix of kids—sons of immigrants from Poland, Italy, Bohemia, and Norway—in the neighborhood.59
By global standards, his childhood was an absolute dream. But compared to the likes of Wisner and Kennedy, he was just a regular guy. And when asked later in life to describe the experience he was most proud of, he went straight to the time he tried to take on racism in the US. After college at the University of Wisconsin, he became a newspaper editor in Evansville, Indiana. The paper found that the Ku Klux Klan, a brutal white supremacist organization, was running a web of criminal activities and controlled the police. The editors prepared an exposé, and the KKK grand eagle called to threaten Jones directly. He ran the story anyway, and the Klan burned crosses throughout the town. Half the paper’s advertisers pulled out of the paper.60
The State Department was different from the hard-charging outfits Wisner worked for. But even compared to most diplomats at State, Jones was especially engaged and empathetic. He was called, perhaps a bit dismissively, the master of the “soft sell,” which meant that he presented the official position of the US government as gently as possible. For him, foreign policy had to be based on deep knowledge of what the local people wanted, and this meant that no one-size-fits-all approach could work. He certainly believed it was acceptable for Washington to try to change the world and pursue its own interests. But how could you do so without understanding each culture on its own terms?
In Berlin in 1948, Jones and Wisner were both working on the big issue of the day in Germany—financial affairs in the divided country. Wisner pressed hard for an adversarial stance toward Moscow. He supported the creation of a new currency in the Western-occupied areas. In June 1948, the Allied governments decided to unilaterally issue a currency for West Germany, the deutsche mark, catching the Soviets off guard and likely forcing the long-term split of the country into two.61
Afterward, Jones was sent to work in Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists had set up a government. Because they refused to recognize Mao’s communist government on the mainland, the US government recognized this as the “real” China, even though Taiwan had its own population and identity before they arrived. This was no democracy. In February 1947, the new government massacred thousands of people opposed to Nationalist rule, beginning another period of White Terror and intermittent repression of dissidents, often justified on anticommunist grounds, that continued for years.62
By 1951, Wisner’s OPC had been absorbed into a newly formed, permanent organ called the Central Intelligence Agency, and his title had become deputy director of plans. Wiz was the man in charge of clandestine operations. His team—often called his “gang of weirdos” elsewhere in Washington—started looking for ways to fight the Cold War, in secret around the world, however they could.
Wisner was a real blue blood. But most of the ranks of the early CIA were from an even higher strata of American society. Many were Yale men, of the type who would look down on other Yale men if they didn’t come from the right boarding school or enter the right secret society. But when it came to anticommunism, Wiz had most of them beat. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was an OSS sergeant in Germany, said, “I myself was no great admirer of the Soviet Union, and I certainly had no expectations of harmonious relations after the war. But Frank was a little excessive, even for me.”63
The CIA boys and their wives built a lively social life around Washington, DC. More urbane and liberal than most people in that city at the time, they would organize spirited dinner parties at their houses in Georgetown. They’d invite over CIA agents, defense officials, and influential journalists. After the meal, the women would retire to one room, while the men talked politics in another, which was the style at the time.64 They also l
iked to get very drunk, just like James Bond. As a matter of fact, they looked up to the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, the British agency that had accumulated so much expertise in spycraft while maintaining the British empire for centuries. And some of them loved James Bond himself. Tracy Barnes, one of the Agency’s founding figures, loved the character created by Ian Fleming in 1953, and would pass out copies of the novels to his family at Thanksgiving.65
Paul Nitze, the man who wrote the so-called blueprint of the Cold War, described the upper-class imperial values that children soaked up at the Groton School, a private institution which was modeled on elite English schools and gave the CIA many of its key early members.
“In history, every religion has greatly honored those members who destroyed the enemy. The Koran, Greek mythology, the Old Testament. Groton boys were taught that,” said Nitze. “Doing in the enemy is the right thing to do. Of course, there are some restraints on ends and means. If you go back to Greek culture and read Thucydides, there are limits to what you can do to other Greeks, who are a part of your culture. But there are no limits to what you can do to a Persian. He’s a Barbarian.” The communists, he concluded, “were barbarians.”66
From the beginning the CIA had two basic divisions. On one side was the gathering of intelligence through espionage. Their job was something akin to providing a private news service for the president. On the other side was covert action—the rough stuff, the active attempts to change the world. That was Frank Wisner’s territory.
Wiz started out by building a network of spies and “stay-behind” agents in Western Europe, whose job was to rise to action if the Soviets ever did invade.67 In Germany, the CIA had no problem recruiting former Nazis, including those who had run death squads, as long as they were anticommunist. Then Wisner looked for a way to penetrate Soviet territory. He recruited desperate, homeless Ukrainian refugees, many of whom had fought with the Nazis, to parachute into communist territory and revolt against the Russians. None of them survived.68 But that didn’t stop Wisner. The Agency sent hundreds of Albanian agents back to their homeland. Almost all were captured or killed. It almost seemed as if the Soviet-aligned government was waiting for them. They were. Kim Philby, a British agent who worked closely alongside Wisner and the rest of the CIA, had been a Soviet mole the whole time. Almost every single one of Wisner’s early operations had been compromised somehow. Wisner sent more men into Albania even after he found this out. They were caught and put on trial.
Slowly but surely, Wiz and the CIA boys realized that actual Soviet territory was mostly rock solid. They were certainly failing to penetrate it. If they wanted to fight communism—and they did, very badly—they had to look elsewhere. The Third World offered that opportunity. The problem these men overlooked, according to a mostly sympathetic history written by journalist Evan Thomas, was “the fact that they knew almost nothing about the so-called developing world.”69
2
Independent Indonesia
A New Life for Francisca
In 1951, Francisca came back to her home country. At twenty-four years old, she and her new husband moved into what was basically a garage at the Air Force airport, ten miles outside the center of town. This was much rougher than what she was used to, but they had a cousin who hooked them up with the space, and they took it. Every day, she woke up at six in the morning, rode her bicycle to the nearest station, caught a bus, then jumped on the back of a little six-seater car with a motorcycle engine, and rode in to work. There was only a little bit of traffic in those days, and almost no Muslim women covered up in hijab, but with heavy humidity and temperatures around ninety degrees almost every day of the year, commuting in Jakarta has always been a sweaty, difficult affair.
She didn’t mind any of this one bit. Francisca, like so many other Indonesians, was overcome with excitement. After hundreds of years of exploitation and slavery, she had her own country, and it was just one year old.
As she made her way across town every day, she didn’t think about the comfortable life she had given up. The only thing she cared about was that she was building up Indonesia from nothing. “We have to live life to the utmost, to do everything we can,” she thought. “When you’re working toward a cause like this, one that’s so much bigger than you, it hardly feels like work at all.”1
Francisca Pattipilohy was born in 1926, and she was technically royalty. Indonesia has often been governed by numerous small kingdoms (and some large kingdoms), and her family were members of the upper class on Ambon, a quiet and comfortable little island surrounded by white sand and bright blue ocean, 1,500 miles northeast of Jakarta. Those aristocracies were often granted special privileges within the Dutch colonial structure, but her father chose to forgo them and make his life as an architect in the capital, which was then called Batavia. The larger island of Java is one of the world’s most densely populated pieces of land, with a dazzling constellation of cities, many of which are thousands of years old, but Batavia was never an important city for any of its local kingdoms. It was an outpost of the major pepper port of Banten when the Dutch East India Company, one of the most important organizations in the development of both global capitalism and colonialism, took over in 1619.2 The mega-city that exists now was largely a Dutch construction, and it still feels different from the rest of Java.
Francisca’s father thrived as an architect, and was able to afford a nice home in the city. He did so well, in fact, that Francisca was able to attend colonial school with Dutch children. At home, she loved to spend time in her father’s library, reading the children’s books he had bought for her. She was the only little girl in the family, so she was alone in the house a lot. Almost all the children’s stories then were in Dutch, telling tales of white children back in Holland or Germany. She dove so deeply into Grimm’s Fairy Tales, books about cowboys and Indians, and Hans Christian Andersen that she truly believed they referred to her own country. She thought that the Rhine flowed through some part of Indonesia until she was a teenager. But she read nothing about other Indonesians. At home, she would speak both the colonial language, Dutch, and some of the tongue her family had brought from Ambon. Her family was Protestant, as plenty of Indonesians in the “outer islands” are, and she studied at a private Christian school nearby. She was intensely smart and fiercely curious. When she spoke about the fun of learning something new, the pitch of her voice would always rise with excitement.
She also learned very quickly what it meant to be a brown girl in a colony run by white people. There were only five “native” students in her class, and the hierarchy of status was obvious. But it was outside school one Sunday that the brutal reality of her condition was driven home. It was especially hot. She went along with a friend from school and her Dutch family to the local pool, to spend the day swimming. As they handed their tickets to the man at the gate, he stopped her. Indonesians were not allowed. Her relative wealth didn’t matter, nor did the fact that the other girls protested. She was a native.
In 1942, when she was just sixteen, the Japanese arrived. Under Emperor Hirohito, the Japanese had become an aggressive imperialist power allied with the Nazis, and were sweeping through much of Southeast Asia, setting up occupation governments. At first, some Indonesians welcomed them, including the leaders of the country’s small independence movement, which had been bubbling up for decades. At least the Japanese were Asians, the thinking went. Their victory had proved whites were not invincible, and they might treat locals better than the Dutch had. The day after their invasion, Francisca’s father came home and announced to the family, “They are our liberators.”3
But young Francisca saw, before most of the country, that this was an illusion. Just days later, the family was going for a walk in their quiet leafy neighborhood, called Menteng, when a Japanese guard nearby started screaming at her father. He, of course, didn’t understand Japanese, and he didn’t know he was supposed to bow. So he didn’t. The guard came up to him and struck him hard, on the face,
in front of his whole family. “After that, we hated the Japanese,” Francisca would say later. “We knew their true purpose.”
Others got it much worse. By the thousands, Indonesian women were forced into sexual slavery, made to work as “comfort women” for the occupying Japanese troops. The Dutch were put into concentration camps. Francisca was put into a different school.
The new school was a bit of a shock, for two reasons. First, she was considered equal to the other students. Second, she learned to speak Bahasa Indonesia, which means “the Indonesian language,” a version of Malay that is now Indonesia’s official tongue.4 Francisca had always excelled at language, but here she was starting from zero. She wasn’t alone, though. Only a small minority of Indonesians spoke it as their first language. It had been used as a lingua franca at ports and in trade for a while, but most people spread across the country’s thirteen thousand wildly diverse islands didn’t know it.5
Soon after the Japanese left in 1945, a man named Sukarno declared independence very close to Francisca’s house.6 He had been hesitant to do it. So three youth leaders in the independence movement, impatient with his decision, kidnapped him and fellow independence leader Hatta—this was considered a brusque but broadly acceptable way of forcing someone’s hand at the time—until Sukarno committed to proclaiming the creation of independent Indonesia.
Maybe he was right to be a bit worried. Not long after the speech, Sukarno’s independence movement was in trouble. Just as the French did in Indochina, the Dutch came back, attempting to reassert colonial rule. The Netherlands called the attempts at reconquest “police actions,” in terminology that managed to be both condescending and euphemistic, and they were brutal. As the Japanese had, the Dutch employed mass violence to suppress support for the new republic. The independence leaders, a mix of nationalists, leftists, and Islamic groups, hopped around the archipelago, making alliances with local kingdoms and mounting resistance.7
The Jakarta Method Page 4