34. “Summary of Facts, Investigating CIA Involvement in Plans to Assassinate Foreign Leaders,” Executive Director of the CIA Commission, May 30, 1975, 4, www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32112745.pdf.
35. Thomas, The Very Best Men, 158.
36. Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior, 238–40; and Robert Maheu and Richard Hack, Next to Hughes: Behind the Power and Tragic Downfall of Howard Hughes by His Closest Advisor (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1992), 71–115.
37. Jones, Indonesia: The Possible Dream, chap. 9.
38. Ibid., chap. 10.
39. Jones, Indonesia: The Possible Dream, 181.
Chapter 4. An Alliance for Progress
1. On Chinese immigration to Southeast Asia, see Reid, History of Southeast Asia, in particular 81–85, 191–95. All information on Benny Widyono’s life is from author interviews.
2. Legge, Sukarno, 282–83.
3. Jones, Indonesia: The Possible Dream, 242; Mortimer, Indonesian Communism under Sukarno, 120–22.
4. Telegram 272 from Singapore to the Foreign Office, April 25, 1958, Records of the Prime Minister’s Office (PREM) 11-2370, UK National Archives, cited in Simpson, Economists with Guns, 35.
5. Jones, Indonesia: The Possible Dream, 160.
6. Legge, Sukarno, 297.
7. Bryan Evans III, “The Influence of the United States Army on the Development of the Indonesian Army (1954–1964),” Indonesia 47 (April 1989): 27, 44.
8. In his masterful intellectual history of Modernization Theory, Nils Gilman explains that it was a response to the seemingly attractive model for Third World development offered by the Soviet Union, and in many ways transformed anticommunism “from the hysterical red-baiting populism of McCarthy into a social-scientifically respectable political position.” Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2003), loc. 221 of 4567, Kindle.
9. Simpson, Economists with Guns, 36.
10. Ibid., 19.
11. Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 294.
12. Telegram 2154 from Jakarta to State, January 25, 1961, RG 59, Central Files, 611.98/1-2561, NA. Cited in Simpson, Economists with Guns, 39.
13. John F. Kennedy Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Speech Files, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961, at www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKPOF/034/JFKPOF-034-002.
14. Van Reybrouck, Congo, 259.
15. Ibid., 299.
16. Ibid., 296–98.
17. Quoted in “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, an Interim Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,” US Senate, November 20, 1975 (US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC: 1975), 53, at www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94465.pdf.
18. Thomas, The Very Best Men, 221. See also Senate Report, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” 57.
19. On August 26 Dulles signed a cable emphasizing the priority of the “removal” of Lumumba; this was taken by CIA operatives in the Congo as a “circumlocutious means of indicating that the President wanted Lumumba killed.” See Senate Report, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” 15–16.
20. For discussion of Project MK-Ultra, see Thomas, The Very Best Men, 211–12. There is now extensive declassified information on the illegal program.
21. Van Reybrouck, Congo, 304.
22. Thomas, The Very Best Men, 222–24.
23. Van Reybrouck, Congo, 306–08.
24. Ibid., 336–39.
25. Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 357.
26. Ibid., 367.
27. Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, 245–53.
28. Simpson, Economists with Guns, 51.
29. Jones, Indonesia: The Possible Dream, 197.
30. Ibid., 144.
31. Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 124–28.
32. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, My War With the CIA: The Memoirs of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, as related to Wilfred Burchett (London: Penguin, 1974), 110.
33. Short, Pol Pot, 128.
34. Thomas, The Very Best Men, 286–91.
35. Ibid., 207, 225–29.
36. Ibid., 294–95.
37. Ibid., 287–89.
38. Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 400. They did not do this. Bowles considered the idea “half-cocked.”
39. Simpson, Economists with Guns, 73–75.
40. National Security Council, “Urgent Planning Problems,” June 9, 1961, NSF, Komer Series, Box 438, JFK Library, cited in Simpson, Economists with Guns, 53.
41. CIA paper for the Special Group, December 11, 1961, and December 14, 1961, mentioned in FRUS 1964-1968, Vol. XXVI, 234–35. Cited in Simpson, Economists with Guns, 75.
42. Thomas, The Very Best Men, 36–37.
43. Roger Morris, “A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making,” New York Times, March 14, 2003.
44. Author interview with Zuhair Al-Jezairy, September 2019.
Chapter 5. To Brazil and Back
1. Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965–1967,” Pacific Affairs 58, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 249.
2. Legend has it in the Indonesian Brazilian community, mostly in São Paulo, that the immigration started around 1960, when an Indonesian pilot first visited the country and started spreading the word to his friends and relatives.
3. All information about Ing Giok and the Tan family based on author interviews in São Paulo, 2017–2019.
4. A number of postcolonial countries owed their names to a commodity exported in the early days of European contact. For example: Argentina (silver), Gold Coast (now Ghana), Ivory Coast, etc.
5. The original text is Hans Staden’s True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America (Andreas Kolbe Publishing, 1557, with woodcuts). For more discussion of the text, see also Vincent Bevins, “The Correct Way to Be a Cannibal,” The Outline, September 20, 2017.
6. Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Brazil: A Biography (London: Allen Lane, 2018), 86.
7. Thomas E. Skidmore, Brazil: Five Centuries of Change, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 83.
8. Jeffrey Lesser, “Negócios com a ‘raça brasileira,’” Folha de S.Paulo, June 6, 1999.
9. W. Michael Weis, Cold Warriors and Coups d’Etat: Brazilian-American Relations, 1945–1954 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 11, 21–22.
10. Schwarcz and Starling, Brazil, 450. It’s also worth noting that in many ways, Brazil was an earlier and more enthusiastic anticommunist nation in the Cold War than the United States. See also Patto Sá Motta, Em Guarda Contra O Perigo Vermelho, 3.
11. Weis, Cold Warriors, 24–30; the use of the word “gringo” is my own—in Brazilian Portuguese, the word has no negative connotations.
12. In his annual address to the Brazilian National Congress in March 1953, Vargas elaborated on Brazil’s support for colonial freedom struggles in the UN General Assembly the previous October. See Getulio Vargas, Mensagem ao Congresso Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, March 15, 1953, 17–19, accessed online September 17, 2019, at www.biblioteca.presidencia.gov.br/publicacoes-oficiais/mensagem-ao-congresso-.
13. Weis, Cold Warriors, 71–75.
14. “Brazil Oil Monopoly Created by New Law,” New York Times, October 5, 1953.
15. Weis, Cold Warriors, 77.
16. Ibid., 85. Weis’s footnote for this is as follows: “Regarding the goals and activities of USIS/Brazil, see Trimble to Kemper, Sept. 28, 1954, file 320, Rio Post file, State Department archives. USIS received 490,000 dollars for 1955, compared to 360,000 dollars for 1954.”
17. Ibid., 128.
18. Telegram from the Ambassador to Brazil (Gordon) to the Department of State, Rio de Janeiro, March 28, 1964, FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. XXXI, 187, at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v31/
d187.
19. Bruce L. R. Smith, Lincoln Gordon: Architect of Cold War Foreign Policy (Lexington, KY: Kentucky University Press, 2015), chaps. 8–10, chaps. 12–13.
20. Ibid., 150–55, 202, 224. There are other mentions of their interaction throughout the book, but since meeting in World War II and consulting him about entering Harvard Business School, he was certainly an “old friend” by the early 1960s.
21. Ibid., 237.
22. Weis, Cold Warriors, 143.
23. John Gerassi, The Great Fear in Latin America (New York: Collier Books, 1971), 83.
24. Marcos Napolitano, 1964: História do Regime Militar Brasileiro (São Paulo: Contexto, 2014), 32–33.
25. Ibid., 33–38.
26. “Meeting on Brazil on July 30, 1962,” Presidential Records, Digital Edition. Recording of the conversation hosted by the University of Virginia at https://prde.upress.virginia.edu/v1/documents?uri=8010002.xml.
27. Thomas, The Very Best Men, 323. I am assuming this is based on an interview Thomas conducted with either Hogan or Fitzgerald, because the source he cites—John Ranelagh, The Agency (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986)—for the relevant passage contains no mention.
28. For characterization as “counterinsurgency assessment,” see Weis, Cold Warriors, 156. For the conclusions, see “Report From the Inter-Departmental Survey Team on Brazil to President Kennedy,” FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. XII, 228.
29. Weis, Cold Warriors, 131.
30. Elio Gaspari, A Ditadura Envergonhada (Coleção Ditatdura Livro 1), chap. 1, “O Exército dormiu Janguista,” loc. 1088 of 13184, Kindle. Gaspari demonstrates that Walters did not want to come; it was certainly not a promotion, which lends more weight to the supposition (widely held in Brazil) that he was sent to “fix” things. I return to Walters and his memoirs in the last subsection of this chapter.
31. Vernon A. Walters, Silent Missions (New York: Doubleday, 1978).
32. Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 522.
33. Schwarcz and Starling, Brazil, 501–07.
34. Weis, Cold Warriors, 161. The organization was Instituto Brasileiro de Ação Democrática. When Pernambucan Governor Miguel Arraes credibly alleged that AID was being used for elections, the US withdrew assistance in his region, and tensions worsened between the governments.
35. Weis, Cold Warriors, 231. The footnotes section makes reference to an author interview with Miguel Osorio de Almeida, who was sent to the Soviet Union in 1963 to appeal for increased trade. He was told that Brazil was in the US orbit and they “did not want to be mixed up with communism in Brazil.”
36. Schwarcz and Starling, Brazil, 377.
37. Marly de Almeida Gomes Vianna, Revolucionários de 35 (São Paulo: Camponahia das Letras, 1992) 40–43. Even when the Comintern took its most radical turn in 1928, the organization never believed in immediate revolution in colonial and semicolonial countries, and the line for parties in those nations was to avoid open conflict with other nationalist forces, including the local capitalist “bourgeoisie,” at all costs.
38. Prestes, from Southern Brazil, led a march across the country demanding secret ballots, public schools for all, and, technically, the overthrow of President Arthur Bernardes—though the protesters intentionally avoided confrontation with government troops and sought more to rally soldiers and citizens to their cause. Prestes then went into exile for five years, and became more radical, attempting to join the Communist Party. At first, the PCB—and Moscow—weren’t so sure about him. They called him a “petty bourgeois” caudilho and, because Communists had been burned by making alliances with Nationalists in China, worried about accepting a kind of a Brazilian Chiang Kai-shek. He was only finally admitted in 1934, as the government of Getúlio Vargas was taking its hard turn toward fascism (Vianna, Revolucionários, 50–51).
39. Ibid., 117.
40. This account of the rebellion draws on Vianna, Revolucionários, 230–48.
41. O Globo, June 26, 1935, 1st ed. Cited in Vianna, Revolucionários, 132–33.
42. Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta, Em Guarda Contra O Perigo Vermelho, 223.
43. Patto Sá Motta, Em Guarda Contra O Perigo Vermelho, 60, 66–67.
44. Schwarcz and Starling, Brazil, 419–22.
45. Patto Sá Motta, Em Guarda Contra O Perigo Vermelho, 116.
46. Federico Finchelstein, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 47–48.
47. Patto Sá Motta, Em Guarda Contra O Perigo Vermelho, 49–52.
48. Ibid.,169.
49. Weis, Cold Warriors, 20.
50. Patto Sá Motta, Em Guarda Contra O Perigo Vermelho, 156.
51. Fundação Getúlio Vargas, CPDOC, “Verbete: Movimento Anti-Comunista (MAC),” summary at www.fgv.br/cpdoc/acervo/dicionarios/verbete-tematico/movimento-anticomunista-mac.
52. Patto Sá Motta, Em Guarda Contra O Perigo Vermelho, 149–52.
53. Napolitano, 1964, 38–39.
54. O Globo, January 25, 1964, reprinted in Patto Sá Motta, Em Guarda Contra O Perigo Vermelho, 93.
55. Kinzer, Overthrow, 169.
56. Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 697–98.
57. Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 225–26.
58. For Johnson’s career before the presidency, see Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Integrated Media, 2015), chaps. 1–6.
59. Ibid., 175–77.
60. Jornal do Brasil, September 13, 1963, 6. Cited in Napolitano, 1964, 46.
61. Ordem do Dia do Exercito, General Jair Dantas Ribeiro, November 1963, printed in General Fernando de Carvalho, Lembrai-Vos de 35! (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca do Exército Editora, 1981), 375–77. Lembrai-Vos is an edited volume of all Intentona memorial speeches from 1936 to 1980. My translation maintains some of the stilted, overwrought language of the original. As cops often do in the US, Brazilian police and military officers tend to try too hard, using arcane grammatical structures and obscure vocabulary when attempting to speak formally.
62. Napolitano, 1964, 50, 61.
63. Telegram from the Ambassador to Brazil (Gordon) to the Department of State, Rio de Janeiro, March 28, 1964, FRUS, Vol. XXXI, South and Central America; Mexico, 187, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v31/d187.
64. Walters, Silent Missions, 77, 123.
65. Brazil’s EBC has the full transcript (in Portuguese) and some photos, “Discurso de Jango na Central do Brasil em 1964,” at www.ebc.com.br/cidadania/2014/03/discurso-de-jango-na-central-do-brasil-em-1964.
66. Benjamin Cowan, Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 75–77.
67. Napolitano, 1964, 56–57.
68. Patto Sá Motta, Em Guarda Contra O Perigo Vermelho, 74. It is notable that in his memoirs, Vernon Walters makes it clear he shares the vast majority of the anticommunist assumptions I just outlined here. First, he believes that because of the “sinister precedent” of the Intentona Comunista, and the murder of the generals in their sleep, they had special reason to be worried about Jango’s appeals to rank-and-file soldiers. Second, he waves away abuses (“excessive zeal,” he says) committed by Brazil’s dictatorship by saying, with apparent sincerity, that we can be sure things would have been much worse “if Brazil had gone Communist.” Third, he puts forward the belief (also enunciated by Nixon) that “authoritarian rightist regimes always disappear eventually. Communist regimes, once they seize power, never let go.” Walters, Silent Missions, 371–89.
69. Here and below I have expanded the language and approach I used in my October 12, 2018, piece for The New York Review of Books. See Vincent Bevins, “Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s Would-be Dictator,” NYR Daily, October 12, 2018.
70. FRUS, 1964–1968, Volume XXXI, South and Central America; Mexico, 198. Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassy in Brazil, March 31, 1964.
71. Bevins, “Jair Bo
lsonaro, Brazil’s Would-be Dictator.”
72. Ruth Leacock, Requiem for Revolution: The United States and Brazil, 1961–1969 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990), chap. 11.
73. General-de-Exercito Pery Constant Bevilaqua, Alocucao Do Representante Das Forcas Armadas, December 1, 1964, printed in Lembrai-Vos De 35!, 381.
74. Leacock, Requiem for Revolution, 197.
75. Napolitano, 1964, 62. For analysis of Soviet responses to the coup, see Gianfrano Caterina, “Um grande oceano: Brasil e União Soviética atravessando a Guerra Fria (1947–1985)” (PhD diss., Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 2019), 267–75. Moscow only registered mild criticisms of the new government’s anticommunist posture, and expressed a desire to continue developing bilateral relations between the countries.
Chapter 6. The September 30th Movement
1. The Afro-Asian Journalist, Djakarta 1964, 1-1964, no.1, viewed at SOAS University London.
2. Declassified documents from Eastern Europe point to Zain as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and Martin Aleida confirmed this. Francisca, however, said they never really talked about his specific party activities at this time, though the team he was on was obvious, so I just call him an “influential figure on the left” here. Later in the text I discuss his party role. “Memorandum about talks with the Deputy Head of the Department for International Relations of the Central Committee of the PKI, Comrade Zain Nasution, on 30 June 1965,” Stiftung Archiv Parteien und Messenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (SAP-MO-BArch) DY 30 / IV A2 / 20, 66. Cited in Wardaya, 1965: Indonesia and the World (Jakarta, 2013); Author interview with Martin Aleida.
3. Mortimer, Indonesian Communism under Sukarno, 125–26.
4. Jones, Indonesia: The Possible Dream, 260.
5. For background on The Afro-Asian Journalist, see Taomo Zhou, “The Archipelago Reporting Global: The Afro-Asian Journalist Association, the Indonesian Left, and the Print Culture of the Third World, 1963–65” Medium, medium.com/afro-asian-visions/the-afro-asian-journalist-association-the-indonesian-left-and-the-print-culture-of-the-third-7f6463b185b0.
6. Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World, 109–13.
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