On Borrowed Time

by Robert Manne

  On our instructions, Burchett is seeking opportunities to penetrate the American and West European press.

  Taking into account our interest in the journalistic activity of Burchett for the bourgeois press, in a direction that is desirable for us, and also in his covert co-operation in the Soviet press, the Committee for State Security requests the payment to Burchett of a one-time subsidy in the sum of 20,000 roubles and the establishment for him of a monthly subsidy in the sum of 4000 roubles.

  The KGB’s request was considered by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 October 1957. It resolved to grant Burchett 20,000 roubles but to reduce the recommended monthly subsidy to 3000 roubles.

  Every detail in the KGB memorandum is consistent with the Washington testimony of Yuri Krotkov. It now turns out that he was not a liar and a perjurer, but a truth-teller.

  The conclusions to be drawn from this document – which has been available in the Bukovsky archive for many years but apparently read by no one involved in the Burchett debate – are almost self-evident. In 1957 Burchett became a paid agent of the KGB. Even before payment had been agreed, Burchett had proved his value. On KGB instructions, he was already “seeking opportunities to penetrate the American and West European press”. He was employed in the hope that he might write pro-communist articles in bourgeois newspapers but also undertake covert work with the Soviet press. Burchett was, then, in part at least employed as what the KGB called an “agent of influence”. But there was far more to his employment than this. The KGB had been impressed by Burchett’s extensive contacts in the worlds of diplomacy and journalism, knowledge that it hoped would prove useful in KGB operations. Even before the payments were arranged, Burchett had provided the KGB with “an array of interesting materials … in written form”.

  Burchett was obviously regarded by the KGB as a significant asset. The recommendation of his appointment was by the chairman of the KGB to the Central Committeee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His memorandum was marked “top secret”. Nor does it seem as if the resolution was decided by the Central Committee without thought, as part of some routine bureaucratic process. Having considered the KGB’s recommendation, the Central Committee decided to reduce Burchett’s monthly subsidy by 1000 roubles. The payment was handsome. In the late 1950s the average monthly salary for a Soviet worker was around 600 roubles. Burchett was paid five times as much. Workers would take more than three years to earn what he received just as a down payment.

  There are many questions that are not answered by the KGB memorandum and the Central Committee resolution. We do not know which KGB operations Burchett was involved in. Krotkov gave evidence in Washington about Burchett’s participation in an action concerning the Daily Express but knew none of the details. We also do not know what information Burchett might have supplied about his contacts in dissident circles in Eastern Europe. On his second visit to Moscow in 1957 Burchett discussed with Krotkov the mood he had discovered among the Polish intelligentsia. “[H]e told me that he talked to some intellectuals and that their ‘brains’ are not good enough, that they are thinking too free.” Krotkov passed on this intelligence to his KGB controller. In the summer of 1956, Tibor Meray introduced Burchett to leading members of the anti-Stalin opposition in his Budapest apartment months before the Hungarian uprising. One of those Meray introduced to Burchett, Miklos Gimes – defamed in Burchett’s memoir, At the Barricades – was executed in 1958. Did Burchett in 1957 provide the KGB with his version of this meeting?

  Nor do we know how long Burchett worked for the KGB. Three years after Burchett began working as a KGB agent, a great schism in the international communist movement opened between the Soviet and Chinese parties. In 1963 Burchett wrote a letter to his father arguing that in this dispute the Chinese were “one hundred per cent right”. He urged his father to keep his opinion confidential. Even if Burchett was still a paid KGB agent, clearly this fact did not determine his privately held ideological world view. By now Burchett was working for the North Vietnamese regime, which maintained relations during the 1960s with both Moscow and Beijing. There is some evidence that payments from Moscow if not the KGB continued at least until the late 1960s. In mid-1969 the Australian filmmaker Edwin Morrisby was working on a documentary with Burchett. He witnessed a Vietnamese communist at Phnom Penh airport hand Burchett a wad of traveller’s cheques and tell him that they were a gift from either “Starigrad” or “Tsarigrad”, a reference Morrisby took to be to Moscow. Logic suggests, however, that by the early 1970s all relations between Burchett and the KGB must have been broken. In 1973 Burchett co-authored with Rewi Alley a book of unconditional praise for Maoist China following the Great Leap Forward and the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, China: The Quality of Life. By this time the Soviet Union and China were bitter foes. The KGB was not in the business of subsidising the ideological enemies of the Soviet Union.

  At this point, a personal explanation is necessary. In 1985 I wrote an article in Quadrant on the anti-Burchett side of the debate. In 2008, I returned to the question of Burchett in the Monthly. Despite my political movement towards the left since the end of the Cold War, my view of Burchett was largely unchanged. Except for one issue. Under the influence of Tibor Meray’s scepticism, I abandoned the earlier case about Burchett as a KGB agent. Although he was, I argued, undoubtedly in the pay of several communist regimes and had connections with their intelligence services, the description of him as a KGB agent – commonly understood to be someone enjoying a long-term, covert relationship under the direction of the Soviet intelligence service – was probably misleading. As it now turns out, on this matter I was wrong. My (false) concession did not, however, save me from the wrath of Burchett’s supporters.

  The new documentary evidence about Burchett’s relations with the KGB places these supporters in an awkward position. They might resume their attack on the messenger of unpleasant tidings. They might claim that the document in the Bukovsky archive is a forgery. They might assert that there is nothing untoward in being a paid agent of a secret police force responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. They might simply try to ignore the evidence that has been presented in this article. Or they might, instead, rethink their position on the Burchett question.

  The Monthly, August 2013

  WHILE RIVERS RAN RED

  In the early hours of 1 October 1965, the first step was taken in a plot to remove the right-wing leaders of the Indonesian army, and to push the regime of the volatile and charismatic President Sukarno even further to the left. Six senior generals were abducted and then killed. Dipa Nusantara Aidit, the chairman of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI), was one of the plotters. Their hopelessly ill-thought-out action began collapsing within a day, and in response a ferocious campaign of repression was mounted.

  Between October 1965 and March 1966, perhaps half a million Indonesians – mostly PKI members or supporters, and their families – were brutally murdered. While anti-communist and Muslim groups participated with great enthusiasm, the army, under its new leader General Suharto, directed the campaign. Some of the victims were shot. Some were bludgeoned to death or had their throats slit. Some were beheaded. Mass graves littered the Indonesian archipelago. Rivers were bloated with corpses. Travellers reported seeing heads on pikestaffs by roadsides. Several hundred thousand leftists were, in addition, imprisoned indefinitely in concentration camps. For the next generation, the children of the victims were treated as political lepers, described as “infected” and “unclean”. In scale and speed, the Indonesian murders of 1965–1966 resemble the Armenian or Rwandan genocides, but what occurred in Indonesia was not, legally speaking, genocide. The anti-Chinese dimension of the murders, while on occasion real, has often been exaggerated. What took place is what scholars call “politicide”: mass extermination for political reasons. It was indeed one of the most brutal and thorough politicides in history.

  Both the
anti-army action of 1 October and the anti-PKI response took Washington by surprise. By this time the United States had withdrawn most aid and personnel from Indonesia. During the period of rapid military escalation in Vietnam, the United States was alarmed and gloomy about the radically anti-American drift of the Sukarno regime, and its increasingly close links with Beijing and the pro-Chinese PKI (the world’s third-largest communist party). The loss of Indonesia to communism, which appeared to Washington as likely, was regarded as no less serious than the possible loss of Indochina.

  Washington’s only fear once the Suharto-led response began was that the Indonesian army might pull back before the PKI was entirely crushed. It was soon clear that, to put it mildly, this would not be the case. The new hardline US ambassador to Indonesia, Marshall Green, reported on 20 October, “Army has nevertheless been working hard at destroying PKI and I, for one, have increasing respect for its determination and organization in carrying out this crucial assignment.”

  By late October, the US embassy began receiving reports of the frightful massacre that the Indonesian army and its supporters were conducting. On 29 October the embassy advised Washington of mass beheadings in the province of Aceh. On 1 November, Green informed Washington that Suharto and the minister of defence, General Abdul Haris Nasution, were “moving relentlessly to exterminate PKI …” Green was not speaking metaphorically. On 4 November the embassy reported that the “smaller fry” in the PKI were “being systematically arrested and jailed or executed”; on 13 November it was reported that mass nightly killings “by civilian anti-Communist troops with blessing of the Army” were taking place in Central and East Java. On 16 November the US consulate in Medan, North Sumatra, sent news of “a real reign of terror against PKI” and of indiscriminate killings even of those “with no ideological bond to the party”. Information about the massacre continued for months. By mid-1966, the US embassy’s official death-toll estimate was 300,000. The Swedes thought this far too conservative.

  The US embassy made it clear to the Indonesian army that it supported the mass murders. But it went far beyond expressions of support. There is incontrovertible documentary evidence from the US State Department’s own publication, Foreign Relations of the United States, that in various ways the Americans assisted the campaign of the Indonesian army and the anti-communist militias. In early October 1965 the United States helped spread mendacious anti-PKI propaganda. In mid-November it decided to supply the army with communications equipment “to use in the fight” against the PKI. In early December, Green passed the civilian murder squads 50 million rupiah (more than US$200,000 in 1965) earmarked for “repressive efforts … particularly in Central Java”. And, in late December, US embassy staff member Robert Martens handed to the army the first instalment of lists containing the names of 4000 to 5000 communists, despite knowing they would almost certainly be slaughtered.

  The most important support given to General Suharto and the murder squads as they went about their business was, however, what on 8 June 1966 the State Department itself described as the US policy of “silence”. “The anti-communist leaders wanted no cheers from us. This policy remains generally sound, particularly in the light of the wholesale killings that have accompanied the transition.” Not one US official ever raised the issue of the mass murder campaign with a leader of the Indonesian army. Not one member of President Lyndon Johnson’s administration spoke publicly about the mass murders. Of all leading US politicians, only the former attorney general, Senator Robert Kennedy, broke the silence. “We have spoken out against inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the Communists,” he argued in a speech in January 1966. “But will we speak out also against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia?”

  Kennedy was alone. The reason is obvious. As Time magazine put it in mid-1966, the “boiling bloodbath” in Indonesia “was the West’s best news for years in Asia”. Or as Howard Federspiel of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research admitted in 1990, “No one cared as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered.”

  *

  Like the Americans, the Australian embassy in Jakarta was well informed about the massacre. Indeed by mid-1966 the embassy estimated that the death toll was likely to be “in the vicinity of half a million” and described the “savagery and scale of the killings” as “probably unique”. The Australian embassy had seen what was happening firsthand. In February 1966 its first secretary, J.M. Starey, inspected several Australian aid-funded road projects. He reported that in Bali the best estimate was already 100,000 deaths. He reported that in West Timor “the Army was in complete control” of the “nightly executions”, that the preferred method of execution there was “beheading”, and that even the wives and children of PKI members were being murdered. There is one piece of evidence that Australia’s ambassador in Jakarta, Keith “Mick” Shann, was at least privately disturbed by the slaughter. On 19 December 1965 he informed Canberra that, “In many cases the massacre of entire families because one member spoke to the Communists has occurred. Some of the methods adopted are unspeakable.” Yet this did not influence policy. Shann assured the Indonesian army in November 1965 that they “would be completely safe in using their forces for whatever purpose they saw fit”. In January 1966, he suggested some token aid to the army “as a means of … indicating our sympathy for what they are doing”. In February 1966, he was depressed when, momentarily, the political star of one of the leaders of the mass murder, General Nasution, appeared to have faded.

  As in the Australian embassy in Jakarta, so too in Canberra. The question of the Indonesian massacre was barely discussed in parliament during that period. On one occasion only, the Labor Opposition raised the fundamental question directly. Bill Hayden asked the minister for external affairs, Paul Hasluck, whether members of his government were alarmed by or critical of the loss of between 100,000 and 300,000 “human lives” and, if so, whether he would “give expression to these feelings on behalf of the Australian people”. Hasluck answered with not so much a straight as an inert moral bat. “Australians are naturally concerned at this suffering and loss of life. It is the constant hope of the government that political and social stability will develop in Indonesia.”

  Beyond this there were little more than occasional interventions. When Hasluck spoke of those who “have demonstrated in other ways their animosity towards the Chinese for interfering in the domestic affairs of Indonesia”, the leader of the Opposition, Arthur Calwell, interjected: “And murdered 200,000 of their compatriots.” When the minister for trade and industry, John McEwen, spoke of the “wave of relief” that had passed over the Australian community with the end of the Indonesian communist threat, the leader of the ALP Left, Dr Jim Cairns, responded. “Had … Communist forces killed 120,000 people we would have had members on the other side of the House taunting those on this side of the House by saying, ‘Have you protested against this act of genocide?’” As a result, Liberal backbencher W.C. Wentworth called Cairns a communist sympathiser. Labor MP Gordon Bryant accused the Holt government of speaking of the massacres in Indonesia “with great glee”.

  During his visit to the United States in mid-1966, Prime Minister Holt showed that, psychologically speaking, Bryant was not wrong. While addressing the American Australian Association, Harold Holt quipped, “With 500,000 to 1 million Communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume that a reorientation has taken place.” Holt’s startlingly frank and flippant remark was published in the New York Times. Momentarily, perhaps inadvertently, Holt had broken the American and Australian governments’ official code of silence concerning the murders in Indonesia.

  *

  During the period of army repression, the Australian government maintained as tight a control as possible over the way Indonesian events were interpreted. In early October 1965 a young officer at the Department of External Affairs, Richard Woolcott, reported, “we are now in a position to influence the content of leaders in prac
tically all major metropolitan papers”. In Jakarta, the embassy briefed the ABC’s correspondents on events in Indonesia in the knowledge that their reports would be regarded as authoritative. Radio Australia provided the most influential broadcasts in English to the educated Indonesian audience. On 18 October, Ambassador Shann reported that the embassy had been providing “regular daily guidance” to Radio Australia on the line it should run: to help discredit the PKI, to make sure it was not presenting news that suggested Sukarno retained control, and so on. On 5 November, Shann said that a colonel in the army had approached and advised him that Radio Australia should not make it appear as if “the army is acting alone against the PKI” and that it should “never suggest that the army or anyone else is pro-Western or rightist”. Shann took the advice.

  In his fascinating study of Australian opinion and what he calls “the Indonesian holocaust”, the University of Melbourne political and social studies professor Richard Tanter has shown how infrequently two newspapers in Melbourne, the Age and the Sun News-Pictorial, reported details of the mass murders. Nonetheless, the reports in Australian newspapers make it clear that any attentive citizen could have become aware of what was taking place. Vivid, heart-stopping reports were filed or re-published – by Denis Warner in the Sydney Morning Herald on 30 December 1965 and 15 June 1966; by C.L. Sulzberger in the Age and Canberra Times on 14 April 1966; by Robert Elegant in the Australian on 22 April 1966; by Frank Palmos in the Sun on 5 August 1996; by Seymour Topping in the Age on 24 August 1966. These reports did not make any attempt to disguise the horror, as the headlines make clear: “Bloody Vengeance Floods Indonesia”; “Vicious Killings Continue in Indonesia”; “Indonesian Army Led the Bloodbath”; “‘Bloody Liquidation’ of Indonesia’s PKI”. Elegant estimated more than 200,000 deaths. Sulzberger, who likened the slaughter to “Turkey’s Armenian massacres, Stalin’s starvation of the Kulaks, Hitler’s Jewish genocide”, put the likely toll at half a million.