That wasn’t Lumumba’s only mistake, however. He made another big one in Washington, at least according to legend within the Agency. After a frenzied set of meetings in Washington, he made a personal request. Like Sukarno four years earlier, he wanted to have an exchange with a sex worker, the story goes. This inspired “revulsion,” adding to the distaste US officials already felt for him. In the middle of the twentieth century, black men in the US were brutally tortured and murdered for alleged sexual transgressions involving white women, including for simply whistling. Washington didn’t like the way Lumumba talked politics, either. Under Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon said “he was gripped by this fervor that I can only describe as messianic.”17 New CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard M. Bissell called him a “mad dog.” On July 21, Allen Dulles said it was safe to assume he had been “bought by the communists.”18
On August 25, the White House gave the order, and the CIA drew up plans to have him killed.19
Bissell asked Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s in-house scientist—the same man who had overseen MK-Ultra, a program that kidnapped poor black men in the United States and dosed them with LSD to see if the Agency could control their minds—to prepare a poison.20 The CIA made plans to inject it into Lumumba’s food or toothpaste.21 That operation fizzled, so the Agency ran an operation to lure Lumumba out of United Nations protection, where he could be killed by local rivals.22 Although ultimately without direct Agency participation, this is what happened. Lumumba lost UN recognition on November 22, and five days later fled house arrest in Leopoldville. Troops loyal to Joseph Mobutu, the CIA-backed Army chief of staff and former friend of Lumumba, caught up with Lumumba, kidnapping him and delivering him to the Belgian-backed rebels in Katanga. Working with four Belgians, Katangan rebel forces stuffed Lumumba into the back of a car, then unloaded him near a shallow well. They shot him three times, and shoved him into the hole.23
Lumumba’s death made waves all around the world. People marched in the streets in Oslo, Tel Aviv, Vienna, and New Delhi. Belgian embassies were attacked in Cairo, Warsaw, and Belgrade. Moscow named a university after him. Mobutu took over the second-largest country in sub-Saharan Africa, staged public executions of his rivals, built a dictatorship, and became one of Washington’s closest Cold War allies in Africa.24
But for Kennedy, it was tiny little Cuba, just ninety miles from Florida, that occupied his attention for the first months of his presidency.
When Fidel Castro’s guerrilla forces overthrew the Batista dictatorship in January 1959, his movement was neither openly communist nor aligned with the Soviet Union. Indeed, he was accompanied by Che Guevara, the committed Marxist who had come to the conclusion, while watching the Guatemalan coup in 1954, that the United States could not be trusted. Capitalist imperialism, Che believed, would wage war on any democratic socialist project, and therefore armed struggle and a tightly controlled state were the only options open to Third World revolutionaries. But at the very beginning, Castro hoped for decent relations with Uncle Sam, and some in Washington even welcomed his victory. This fell apart quickly. Washington responded to Castro’s agrarian reforms and nationalizations by imposing severe trade restrictions, which led Cuba to turn to the Soviet Union for badly needed fuel imports.
During JFK’s campaign, he attacked Eisenhower for being weak on Cuba.
The Bay of Pigs invasion, whose planning began before Kennedy took office, was a fiasco for the United States, and for JFK, for two reasons. The first reason was bureaucratic breakdown. The CIA failed to communicate the true chances of success to the president, and failed to come to a clear agreement as to the support its Cuban mercenaries would need after they landed on Cuba’s shores and attempted to incite an anti-Castro uprising. The preparations alone created all kinds of problems, even before the invasion began. The CIA considered calling off the operation, but warned the president that the mercenaries they were training in Guatemala would speak out publicly against Kennedy if they were demobilized.25 And in Guatemala, the presence of the Cubans led to a military revolt against the US-backed dictatorship, setting off a brutal war that had been slowly preparing to explode since the coup in 1954. The second reason was that the United States thought Cubans would genuinely rise up to support an anticommunist revolt.
In April 1961, three months after JFK took office, the opposite happened, and the soldiers of fortune were immediately arrested. Che Guevara might not have known how to build a socialist country quickly, famously struggling as finance minister; but he certainly wasn’t naïve enough to leave the country vulnerable to the same kind of Yankee scheme he had witnessed firsthand in Guatemala.
It seems very possible the US officials could have toppled Castro, as they toppled so many other governments in the region over the years, if they had applied more pressure, or developed another strategy entirely. But the Bay of Pigs failure was so spectacular, and so obvious, that their hands were tied. The United States had shot its shot, and couldn’t try anything so public again.
For days after the invasion, Kennedy’s “anguish and dejection” were evident to everyone around him. Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles said that Kennedy was clearly “quite shattered.” Kennedy himself related that it was the worst experience of his life.26 He said he felt personally guilty for those who had died in the invasion. And it was a national humiliation. After the Bay of Pigs, two things changed for the JFK presidency, which had started with such idealism. From then on, he would have to deal with the CIA Wisner had created and with the problems it had bequeathed to him, and he would now govern while being accused of being soft on communism himself.
Even Khrushchev ridiculed Kennedy for the failure in Cuba. Although Castro is not a Communist, “You are well on the way to making him a good one,” the Soviet leader told JFK. Privately, Khruschev told Communist allies he feared Kennedy was no match for the huge military-industrial complex in the US, and worried the young president couldn’t keep the “dark forces” of his country at bay.27
It was just four days after the Bay of Pigs invasion, as JFK was still piecing his presidency together, that that President Sukarno came to visit. For the Indonesian president, the parallels between the Bay of Pigs and what Indonesia had gone through in 1958 were obvious. But being the polite Javanese man that he was, he did not bring it up. The White House, in turn, took the advice from Jones’s embassy to shower Sukarno with pomp and circumstance, while the Secret Service catered to Sukarno’s “insatiable demand for call girls.”28 Sukarno could not get JFK to budge on West New Guinea, but reportedly was impressed with the man himself. Kennedy, reportedly, called Sukarno “an inscrutable Asian.”29
Just after his meeting with Sukarno, the young president sent a letter to Jones in Jakarta laying out clearly that he was in charge of the US presence in Indonesia, including “all other United States Agencies.”30 It was clearly part of an attempt to wrest control over foreign relations away from the CIA after the Bay of Pigs failure.
Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Agency’s actions had been felt viscerally. Secret American plotting was exposed in Cambodia, badly undermining US credibility in the region. For years, Norodom Sihanouk had railed against Eisenhower’s anticommunism, believing the Americans were trying to get rid of him for maintaining a neutral stance. His claims were dismissed as far-fetched or absurd at the time. But he was right. In 1959, a CIA agent was instructed to liaise with Sihanouk’s interior minister to organize a coup, which never succeeded.31
The South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem also tried and failed to organize a coup in Cambodia, with US approval. After that failed, Sihanouk received a gift box. Maybe it was an attempt to patch things up. Instead, it exploded when his staff opened it, killing two men.32 The parcel bomb, the third attempt to destroy Sihanouk, was traced to a US base in Saigon, but may have been sent without US knowledge. However—and this crucial dynamic repeats itself throughout the Cold War—the incident would not have happened if the South Vietnamese thought
Washington would disapprove. Broad US plotting often led to events the Americans did not specifically predict. Either way, Sihanouk’s relationship with the US was damaged beyond repair.33
Kennedy’s White House, and especially his brother Bobby, became obsessed with destroying Castro, and put the CIA to the task. Robert McNamara, who served as secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968, later called the Kennedys’ approach to Cuba “hysterical.” At a party, Desmond FitzGerald, who had helped to create the vampire terror campaign in the Philippines, told a friend about his new job on the Cuba task force, “All I know is I have to hate Castro.”34 The CIA had already sanctioned outlandish attempts on Castro’s life. Under Eisenhower, they tried poisonous cigars, and attempted to make his beard fall out (they apparently thought that Cubans would respect him less clean-shaven). The Agency had contracted the mafia to murder Castro (Robert Maheu, the former FBI agent who set up that meeting with the mob, was the same CIA freelancer who had arranged for the fake Sukarno sex tape).35 After the Bay of Pigs, the Agency built upon this tradition. They created a scuba diving suit contaminated with spores, but couldn’t get it to the Cuban leader. One plan revolved around an exploding seashell.36 The Miami CIA station became the largest in the world, and offered cash bounties for dead communists. Edward Lansdale, the same man who had created vampire victims in the Philippines, discussed spraying civilian sugar workers in Cuba with biological warfare agents, as well as faking the Second Coming of Christ.37
Bobby Kennedy, whom Bowles considered “aggressive, dogmatic, and vicious,” was willing to employ even more drastic measures to shape Latin America as he thought fit. After the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, the Kennedy brothers debated the merits of sending in the Marines. Because this would not look good, Bobby suggested they simply blow up the US consulate themselves. That could provide the rationale for the invasion.38
Kennedy did launch his Alliance for Progress economic cooperation program in Latin America, as well as the Peace Corps and the Agency for International Development. But his administration’s active engagement to fight communism ended up being primarily with local militaries. His administration wholeheartedly embraced Modernization Theory and hired economist W. W. Rostow, author of the suitably titled The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, as one of JFK’s advisers. Under Kennedy, the most important alliance for progress was made with armed forces around the world, and their task was to lead their countries closer to a US-style economic system.
Bobby played a special role in adopting the State Department’s recommendation that Third World militaries should focus on “counterinsurgency” in addition to nation-building—that is, fighting wars against internal enemies and playing a broader political role in society at large. From the start, US officials held up Indonesia as a crucial testing ground for this vision.39 The Kennedy administration provided increasing levels of assistance to the Indonesian military, which was meant to serve as a counterweight to support that Sukarno was now receiving from the Soviets. Despite the Kennedy brothers’ obsession with Cuba, in 1961, the National Security Council listed Indonesia and West New Guinea among its most “urgent planning priorities,” because it was there that they believed Moscow and Washington were competing most directly for influence. Within a few years, Indochina would dominate international headlines, but until the middle of the 1960s most officials considered Indonesia far more important than Vietnam or Laos.40
After returning to Indonesia from Washington, Sukarno did not let the issue of West New Guinea go. At the end of 1961, he gave a speech titled “Triple Command of the People,” or Trikora, demanding the dismantling of the Dutch “puppet state” and calling for the mobilization of the “entire Indonesian people” to regain the territory. General Nasution and other military leaders were wary of provoking war with the Dutch, but organized citizen militias and the Navy clashed with Dutch ships. As Jones had been telling Washington, this was not about a piece of land for Sukarno—it was about completing his revolution and the legitimacy of his state, and Indonesians would go to war over this if they had to. Exasperated that his allies in Holland were proving so stubborn, and seeing this as a small price to pay to avoid losing Indonesia altogether to the Soviet orbit, Kennedy finally pushed the Dutch into a negotiation to hand over the territory.
For Indonesia, at least, this was a shift from the days of Eisenhower and the Wisner method. Rather than attempting to destroy him, Kennedy gave Sukarno what he knew he needed. At the same time, the power and influence of the anticommunist Indonesian military, in constant coordination with US officials with Washington, rose steadily in the background. Kennedy’s positive engagement took the form of a “civic action program” (CAP) in Indonesia, which included the covert training of “selected personnel and civilians” and a range of anticommunist activities whose nature, more than fifty years later, is still a classified secret.41 The CAP proved crucial in the creation of a negara dalam negara, a “state within a state,” led by the generals. The process had begun when the military got emergency powers to fight the CIA in 1958. Now, the military received equipment and training from the US to engage in fishing, farming, and construction, which increased its economic interests and role around the country.42
In Africa, the US took a different direction. With CIA assistance, white South African authorities arrested Nelson Mandela in 1962. US officials also set the Middle East on a new path, in 1963. Outside Indonesia, the largest Communist Party in the Bandung countries was the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), which had grown in opposition to dictator Abd al-Karim Qasim. The ICP thought of making a bid for revolution—and the Soviets advised against it. But Washington backed a successful coup by the anticommunist Baath Party, which immediately moved to crush the ICP. The CIA supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to the new regime, which slaughtered untold numbers of people. A Baath Party member named Saddam Hussein, only twenty-five years old, reportedly took part in this US-backed anticommunist extermination program.43 Some communists were shot in their homes, while others were taken to prison; those who survived jail said Hussein had a reputation for being the worst of the torturers—they prayed to be taken in for interrogation on his nights off. The new Baath regime overturned the land reform that Qasim had passed.44
In Kansas, the Indonesian officers kept pouring into the country, and pouring into Benny’s dining room. Presumably, they were now studying counterinsurgency strategies in addition to soaking up US anticommunist ideology more generally. But that’s not what Benny remembers about those days. They all had one big last night before he went off to get a PhD, get married, and start a family. In between Missouri and Kansas, there’s a street called State Line Road. Benny, his student friends, and the anticommunist generals-in-training walked across to Missouri for some cocktails. The Army guys wanted to find a specific club they liked, one with full nudity. They all got drunk, and the soldiers got their way.
5
To Brazil and Back
Squeezed Out
In the same years that Benny was in Kansas, life for Indonesians of Chinese descent like him got increasingly difficult back home. They had long suffered from intermittent explosions of racism, but as lines in the sand were drawn and redrawn under Sukarno’s Guided Democracy, there seemed to be less and less space for them. The first major blow was a 1959 law, passed just as Benny was heading to Kansas, that took some economic rights away from foreign nationals. In practice, this included the country’s large ethnic Chinese population. It was not Sukarno who pushed for this—it was the military—but he let the racist law, a deviation from Indonesia’s foundational values, pass. The Army also organized violent anti-Chinese riots—for which it did not seek Sukarno’s approval. The military used US funds to plot these pogroms.1 The situation was terrifying.
Many Indonesians of Chinese descent began to look for a way out. This included the Tan family, whom we met briefly in the introduction. Tiong Bing and Twie Nio lived in Jakarta, not too far from
Francisca’s home. Tiong Bing, the father of the family, had come from a line of farmers but worked as an engineer in the largely Chinese section of North Jakarta, where life had become tense. Many in their community moved to China, but their family was looking for a different opportunity. Prospects for Canada or the US were grim. They had heard, however, that some Chinese Indonesians had gone to Brazil, which offered good opportunities and relative freedom from discrimination.2 The trickle of immigration started in the early 1960s, and as a result stories of Brazil made their way back to Jakarta, and to the Tans.
So the family decided to board the Tjitjalengka, a big old Dutch hospital ship that had been used to carry prisoners of war during World War II, with their three children. Tiong Bing never actually got permission to leave his engineering job, his daughter Ing Giok remembers. He just ran away. His exit papers might have even been faked. “We’ll figure it all out after we get on the boat,” he told the kids. It wasn’t easy to keep three little girls healthy and happy as they inched their way around the globe. Ing Giok kept throwing up. But six weeks later, they pulled into the port of Santos, in the state of São Paulo.
The China of the 1960s
Ing Giok was only a little girl when she first saw Brazil, and it was a very different place from what she was used to. Perhaps for those reasons, the country’s major characteristics jumped out at her more clearly than they would to North Americans, or even to Brazilians.3 First, she realized very quickly that Brazil is a Western European settler colony, with extreme inequality and a very obvious racial hierarchy. This all became apparent as her family moved into an apartment in Brooklin, the São Paulo neighborhood named after the New York borough, and her parents got her into an upper-middle-class Catholic school.
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