Sukarno had been considering the creation of a new militia, a national “Fifth Force” composed of regular people, workers, and peasants, a kind of National Reserve that would exist alongside the regular soldiers. China had urged the Indonesians to create a people’s militia because, as Zhou Enlai told Foreign Minister Subandrio, “the militarized masses are invincible.” The Army was opposed to the idea, however, and Sukarno planned to talk about it with them soon.35 As the CIA noted in May 1965, the PKI itself had “only limited potential for armed insurgency and would almost certainly not wish to provoke the military into open opposition.”36
In August 1965, Sukarno fell ill and was treated by a Chinese doctor. He recommended the president reduce his workload and “exercise restraint in his sex life.” Sukarno refused, and political insiders began to worry about what would happen if he died.37 Aidit, the leader of the Communist Party, went to Beijing and had a meeting with Mao, and we have a partial transcript of their conversation:
Mao: I think the Indonesian right wing is determined to seize power. Are you determined, too?
Aidit: [Nods] If Sukarno dies, it would be a question of who gains the upper hand.
Mao: I suggest that you should not go abroad so often. You can let your deputy go abroad instead.
Aidit: For the right wing, they could take two possible kinds of actions. First, they could attack us. If they do so, we would have reasons to counterattack. Second, they could adopt a more moderate method by building a Nasakom government.… The Americans told Nasution that he should wait patiently; even if Sukarno dies [head of the Armed Forces, General Nasution] should be flexible rather than start a coup. He accepted the suggestion from the Americans.
The Chinese leader was much less trusting of the Indonesian military and its backers in Washington.
Mao responded, “That is unreliable. The current situation has changed.”
Aidit then described a counterattack plan in which the Communists could establish a military committee, mixing left and center elements so as not to raise the “red flag” and invite immediate opposition. Mao shifted the conversation to his own experience with the Chinese Nationalist Party, perhaps to make a “suggestion that Aidit should be prepared for both peace talks and armed struggles,” according to Taomo Zhou, the historian who recently unearthed this conversation.38 Aidit, however, did not prepare his party for any armed struggle.
As 1965 went on, rumors that right-wing generals were conspiring with the CIA or some foreign power began to spread like wildfire in Jakarta. The Indonesian government found a letter, purportedly written by British Ambassador Andrew Gilchrist, stating “it would be as well to emphasize once more to our local army friends that the strictest caution, discipline and coordination are essential to the success of the enterprise.” Sukarno summoned the military chiefs, demanding to know who these “army friends” were. The “Gilchrist document” could have been a forgery. It could have been real. Or it could have been planted by the British or Americans as a psyops trick, perhaps one of many, to provoke the left into action.39
Suspicions held by Sukarno and many in the Indonesian government intensified when they found out who was coming from Washington to replace Howard Jones. Newly minted Ambassador Marshall Green, they learned, had been in Seoul when Park Chung Hee took power in a military coup that destroyed the short-lived parliamentary Second Republic. Just as the Guatemalans had been suspicious of John Peurifoy’s aggressive past when he was sent to interact with Jacobo Árbenz, Green’s arrival was widely seen as a signal that Washington had abandoned the soft, diplomatic Howard Jones approach and was now fully committed to regime change.40
Like Kennedy before him, Johnson’s administration considered Indonesia more important than Vietnam. “President Johnson has come increasingly to the conclusion that, at the end of the day, he would be ready for major war against Indonesia,” said Secretary of State Dean Rusk to a British official.41 A meeting of the National Security Council’s secret 303 committee concluded that “the loss of a nation of 105 million to the ‘Communist camp’ would make a victory in Vietnam of little meaning.”42 Under Secretary of State George Ball and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy agreed that the loss of Indonesia would be “the biggest thing since the fall of China.”43
In December 1964, Pakistan’s ambassador to Paris, J. A. Rahim, sent a letter to his foreign minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, reporting on a conversation he had with a Dutch intelligence officer working for NATO. He wrote that Western intelligence agencies were organizing a “premature communist coup.” Indonesia, the NATO officer told him, “was ready to fall into the Western lap like a rotten apple.”44
Francisca spent much of 1965 in Algeria, working on preparations for a conference that would bring the Afro-Asian Journalist Association together with journalists from Latin America. But a military coup deposed Ben Bella, Algeria’s revolutionary socialist first president, and threw those plans into disarray. When she came home, in August 1965, she felt that things were different. Tense. The widespread rumors about an imminent right-wing coup were indeed everywhere. In her social circle, people were talking about the possibility of a right-wing Council of Generals working secretly to remove Sukarno or destroy the left.
At some point, a group of midlevel Army officers formed a group and decided to call it the Gerakan 30 September (“G30S” or “September 30th Movement”) and came up with a plan. But unless you were closely following political developments in Jakarta, September 29, 1965, felt like another normal day for most people around the country. That includes members of the PKI and its affiliated organizations. Wayan Badra, the young son of a devout Hindu priest in Bali, woke up early in his tiny village, and walked to the ocean, then turned left at Seminyak Beach, to trod four kilometers across the empty sand to school in Kuta. Two of his teachers were Communist Party members, and all the students liked them. A few other teachers were from the nationalist PNI Party. Wayan Badra saw them all as Hindus, as the Balinese had been for almost two millennia, as well as allies in the construction of the new Indonesia. Sakono, the eager young left-leaning student from Central Java, who loved both Marxism and soccer, had grown up—well, turned nineteen, at least. He was now a member of the Communist-affiliated People’s Youth organization and feeling very proud that he had just qualified to work as a teacher. He sat around, waiting patiently to get word he could start working. Sutrisno, his curly-haired teacher and friend, continued organizing as a full Communist Party kader, or cadre, in their village. Magdalena, in Jakarta, caught the truck to work, cut cloth into T-shirt shapes for nine hours, then rode back home, past the towering National Monument, and flopped onto her bed.
Night Call
Very late at night on September 30, 1965—really, it was already the early hours of October 1—the Gerakan 30 September met at Halim Air Force Base, the same airport where Francisca and Zain had made their first modest home in a garage fourteen years earlier.
The leaders of the September 30th Movement were from the Armed Forces: Lieutenant Colonel Untung, for example, was a stocky military man who had attacked Dutch troops in the fight for West New Guinea; and Colonel Abdul Latief was a distinguished commander who had fought in the revolution against the Dutch in the 1940s.
They organized seven teams, made up of soldiers already under their official military command. Each had a similar mission. They would head to the homes of seven of the highest-ranking officers in the Armed Forces, arrest them, and bring them back. In the deep darkness of the morning, they set off toward the center of Jakarta in Army trucks.
They were partially successful. Six of the teams brought back their men, including Lieutenant General Achmad Yani, the commander of the Army. However, the most important target, General Nasution—the friend of Washington and Howard Jones since 1958—got away. As they started the raid on his home, Nasution jumped over the back wall of his house, in the upscale neighborhood of Menteng, and hid in the home of his friend, the Iraqi ambassador. The September 30th Movem
ent brought back his military assistant instead. During the raid, his five-year-old daughter was shot and killed.
Some of the members of the September 30th Movement, mostly regular Army soldiers, went into town and occupied Independence Square, site of the towering National Monument that Magdalena passed when she first arrived in Jakarta. One of the movement’s higher-ranking officers went to the Presidential Palace to inform Sukarno they had arrested generals who were plotting against him. He wasn’t there. As he often did, he was sleeping at his third wife’s house that night.
At 7:30 a.m., the residents of Jakarta heard a radio broadcast of “a statement obtained from Lieutenant Colonel Untung, the commander of the September 30th Movement.” The voice told the people of the capital that the movement was formed to prevent a “counterrevolutionary coup” being planned by the Council of Generals, a group that “harbored evil designs against the republic and Indonesia and President Sukarno.” The movement had arrested them to protect Sukarno, and more news would be forthcoming.
At around 9:00 a.m., Sukarno finally arrived at Halim Air Force Base to meet with the representative who had tried to find him several hours earlier.
For reasons we still don’t fully understand, all six of the captured generals were dead by the time he arrived, their bodies at the bottom of an abandoned well near Halim Air Force Base. We don’t know if President Sukarno, or even the member of the September 30th Movement designated to meet him, knew this at the time.
The September 30th Movement’s leaders were from the Army. Neither the Air Force nor the Navy nor the police command were involved. However, when the leaders of the Air Force were informed of the movement and its success, they cheered. They believed that an internal military action, loyal to President Sukarno, had prevented a right-wing plot. Reportedly, Sukarno himself was surprised by the nature of the radio announcement, but he was willing to wait and see what had happened and how the situation would develop before taking a position.
Aidit, the leader of the Indonesian Communist Party, and some members of the People’s Youth also arrived at Halim Air Force Base at some point on October 1. They were in a different building, and unable to communicate directly with the leaders of the Army rebellion. The movement had cut off telephone lines in the city, and they didn’t have walkie-talkies or radios. Nor did they have tanks, the standard equipment for coup plotters at the time.45
The confusion lasted for no longer than one day: within twelve hours, the movement was crushed, and the Army, now led by right-wing General Suharto, was in direct control of the country.
More than fifty years later, we still don’t have a complete understanding of who planned the Gerakan 30 September, or what the real purpose of the night raid was. What we have is a range of credible theories.
One possible version of the story, put forward by historian John Roosa, is that Aidit helped to plan the raid through a Communist intermediary within the military. Because his conversations with the Army were secret and indirect, both sides (Aidit and the movement) ended up signing off on a plan that was badly conceived and doomed to failure. They intended to quietly arrest the generals—as had long been customary in Indonesia, since before Sukarno himself had been kidnapped in 1945—and present them to the president as traitors. Their deaths, in this version, would have been the result of incompetence and panic. This is probably the most “conservative” of the credible accounts, the account that presents the strongest case against the PKI. Aidit would have only told a tiny group of people in the party—not even the Central Committee nor the Politburo. In this version, Aidit and a tiny group of high-level Communists would have been guilty of contributing to the accidental deaths of those generals, and they would have been provoked into doing so by those US and UK misinformation campaigns, which were explicitly designed to make them believe they had no choice but to act.46
This story doesn’t convince everyone.47 Why, some ask, would Aidit take armed or violent action against the Army when the Communist Party’s position was so well established with Sukarno in office? Aidit knew very well that the PKI’s influence was entirely based on soft power, and that the military had all the weapons. And how is it that trained military men charged with arresting their sleeping superior officers would accidentally end up killing all of them and throwing them in a well?
There are a number of competing theories. Benedict Anderson, perhaps the most famous Indonesia expert of the twentieth century, and scholar Ruth McVey presented an account in 1966, in which the movement was largely what it says it was—an internal Army movement that the PKI did not help organize.48 As a result, Anderson was kicked out of Indonesia for twenty-six years. Just before his death in 2015, he said he still believed this to be the case.49
Then there are the entirely plausible assertions that General Suharto, the man who rose to power after the dust settled, planned or infiltrated the movement, perhaps with foreign assistance, to engineer his rise to power. He was, after all, close to the leaders of the rebellion. Suharto had a history of conflict with Nasution and Yani, and was the only high-ranking, openly right-leaning Army official not targeted by the movement. Former Foreign Minister Subandrio, the same man who had to listen to Howard Jones deny that the CIA was bombing the country back in 1958, presents a credible insider’s account, in which Suharto was notified in advance by his friends leading the September 30th Movement; he pledged his support to them, but instead planned to hold back and use the rebellion as a pretext to seize power.50 G30S leader Latief also said, afterward, that Suharto was informed of the plans in advance.51
We know there was a conspiracy. Unless the CIA and other organizations such as the Indonesian military release what they have, we can only theorize as to its true nature based on the available evidence.52 But the next part of the story is not in doubt.
After the events of October 1, General Suharto seized control of the country, and told a set of deliberate, carefully prepared lies. These lies became official dogma in one of the world’s largest countries for decades.
Propaganda Bersendjata
On October 1, 1965, most Indonesians had no idea who General Suharto was. But the CIA did. As early as September 1964, the CIA listed Suharto in a secret cable as one of the Army generals it considered to be “friendly” to US interests and anticommunist.53 The cable also put forward the idea of an anticommunist military-civilian coalition that could gain power in a succession struggle.
Suharto, a laconic forty-four-year-old major general from Central Java, was serving as head of the Army’s Strategic Command, or KOSTRAD. Suharto had studied under a man named Suwarto, a close friend of RAND Corporation consultant Guy Pauker and one of the Indonesian officers most responsible for implementing military-led Modernization Theory, “a state within a state,” and US-allied counterinsurgency operations.54 Suharto had a checkered past within the Indonesian military. He had been caught smuggling in the late 1950s, and was fired by Nasution himself. According to Subandrio, Suharto’s flagrant corruption so angered Yani and Nasution that Yani personally gave him a beating, and Nasution almost put him on trial.55 During Konfrontasi, Suharto had made sure that troops along the border with Malaysia were understaffed and underequipped, using his power to minimize Indonesia’s conflict with the UK (and the US) at the time.56
Curiously, General Suharto took command of the Armed Forces on October 1, not Nasution—the highest-ranking officer in the country—after Washington’s longtime friend was lucky enough to survive the events of the previous night. This was such an unexpected role reversal that it took several key actors weeks to understand that Suharto was actually in charge.
Everything Suharto did in October suggests that he was executing an anticommunist counterattack plan that had been developed in advance, not simply reacting to events.
On the morning of October 1, Suharto arrived at KOSTRAD, which for some reason had not been targeted or neutralized by the September 30th Movement, even though it sat directly across from Independence Square, which t
hey occupied that morning. At an emergency meeting in the early morning, he took over as commander of the Armed Forces. In the afternoon, he told the troops at Independence Square to disperse and put an end to the rebellion or he would attack. He retook central Jakarta without firing a single shot, and went on the radio himself to declare the September 30th Movement had been defeated. President Sukarno ordered another major general, Pranoto, to meet him at Halim Air Force Base and assume temporary command of the Armed Forces. Contradicting a direct order from his commander in chief, Suharto forbid Pranoto to go, and gave Sukarno himself an order: leave the airport. Sukarno did so, and fled to a presidential palace outside the city. Suharto then easily took control of the airport, and then the entire country, ignoring Sukarno when he saw fit.
Once in command, Suharto ordered that all media be shut down, with the exception of the military outlets he now controlled. Curiously, Harian Rakyat—the Communist Party newspaper where Zain had worked for more than a decade—published a front-page editorial endorsing the September 30th Movement on October 2, a full day after the coup had failed and the offices were reportedly occupied by the military. The fact that it was the only nonmilitary paper to come out that day might indicate that the Army published it so as to incriminate the party, or it may indicate that the party thought there would be nothing incriminating about going forward with a piece offering support for an internal Army movement with, at that time, the seemingly laudable goal of stopping a right-wing coup.57 Theories abound. Author Martin Aleida, who was working at the paper at the time, says the editorial’s prose was markedly different from the style employed by Njoto, the PKI member who usually wrote these sorts of things.58 The cover page of the paper that day featured a cartoon, drawn in usual People’s Daily style, with the September 30th Movement depicted as a fist punching the “Council of Generals,” drawn as a man who falls back, revealing a hat with “CIA” written on it. Francisca simply remembers that Zain continued working that day as usual, until Harian Rakyat was shut down.
The Jakarta Method Page 16