The 1965 Coup in Indonesia: The CIA's Version

=== [PDF page 1] === The 1965 Coup in Indonesia: The CIA's Version van der Kroef, Justus M Asian Affairs, an American Review; Nov 1, 1976; 4, 2; ProQuest pg. 117 The 1965 Coup in Indonesia: The CIA’s Version JUSTUS M. VAN DER KROEF D URING THE night of September 30, 1965, and the early morning hours of October 1, it may be recalled, a coup d’état was attempted in Jakarta. Leaders and cadres of the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) and about 2,000 members of PKI women’s and youth groups were involved, together with dissident Indonesian Army and Air Force officers supported by three battalions and other, smaller units under their command. Though sporadic fighting erupted and went on for days in Central Java and elsewhere, the coup attempt was virtually crushed within 72 hours by loyal Army units. In the aftermath of this episode, President Sukarno, who was widely suspected of having had some foreknowledge of the plot, relinquished his powers to General Suharto, who had played a critical role in crushing the coup. Major changes in domestic and foreign policy followed in the wake of these events. But although the Gestapu affair (an acronym from Gerakan Tiga Pulu September, or Thirty September Movement), as Indonesians commonly call it, was a major turning point in contemporary Indonesian and, indeed, Southeast Asian history, its causes and inner dynamics remain controversial. The extent of PKI involvement, especially its top leadership, including Party Chairman D.N. Aidit (who was executed a few weeks after the coup); the role of “progressive” Army officers; the extent to which President Sukarno, Foreign Minister Subandrio, and various high-ranking Army officers had prior knowledge of the plot; and the encouragement, if any, given to the conspirators by the People’s Republic of China; all these are among the many aspects of the affair that have given rise to a plethora of contrasting analyses and interpretations. The recent declassification of a lengthy report on the coup pre- 117 Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Heldref Publications === [PDF page 2] === 118 Asian Affairs pared by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1968 is therefore of special interest to students of contemporary Asian affairs.’ What did the CIA have to say, and what advice did it have to give, about the Gestapu affair? Perhaps the first thing to be noted about the report is the date of its issuance, which is given on the cover and title page as December 1968. By that time, various detailed analyses of the coup had already been published, including the testimony of major PKI figures such as Politburo member Njono, and of prominent military figures including Lieutenant Colonel Untung, given during their trials in 1966 and subsequently. More than three years had elapsed since the coup, and a new government had stabilized itself in power which was notably more sympathetic to US strategic concern over attempted Communist coups than its predecessor. Presumably the CIA, the US government’s premier intelligence-gathering agency, had access to information that was not readily available to others. But in this respect, the CIA report is a disappointment. There is not much new in its pages—indeed, one wonders, after reading the report, why the CIA felt it necessary to classify the original document. On the other hand, the CIA version does a competent job in weaving together the generally known data about the coup. Its account of the activities of the principal dramatis personae involved in the coup is especially useful. We have in these pages an almost hourly log of the movements of the major participants during the first day of the Gestapu affair, including a comprehensive analysis of the activities of President Sukarno. The report also presents a brief but inclusive account of coup developments outside of Jakarta which provides evidence that the preparations of the PKI and military plotters were much more 1 Central Intelligence Agency, Research Study, Indonesia-1965, The Coup That Backfired (Washington: December 1968). The report may be obtained from the Document Expediting (DOCEX) Project, Exchange and Gift Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540. The report was declassified by the CIA Directorate of Intelligence at the request of Representative James M. Jeffords (R.-Vermont), and was released by the International Relations Committee of the US House of Representatives on April 7, 1976. See Professor Guy J. Pauker’s letter to the editors of Problems of Communism, May-June 1976, p. 88. The reasons for the release of the report, in the present writer’s view, are connected with adverse impressions of the Suharto regime in and out of Congress at a time of planned increases in US military assistance to Indonesia. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Heldref Publications === [PDF page 3] === The 1965 Coup in Indonesia: The CIA’s Version 119 extensive than commonly supposed. The reason why the famous editorial praising the coup attempt was published in the PKI daily Harian Rakjat on October 2, 1965, has prompted much speculation, especially on the part of those writers concerned to minimize Communist participation. According to the CIA report, which is altogether persuasive on this point, the editorial demonstrates that the PKI had foreknowledge of the coup, and appeared on schedule—despite the worst possible circumstances for the Party, since the coup had already been virtually crushed—because responsible Party leaders were not prepared to change course without new instructons from Aidit. Some of the CIA’s more perceptive surmises have been partially corroborated by subsequent disclosures. This is the case, for example, with the socalled “Gilchrist letter” of March 1965. Purportedly written by the British Ambassador to Indonesia, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, to the Foreign Office, the letter reports on alleged US and British plans for the subversion and overthrow of the Sukarno government with the aid of Indonesian Army leaders. The letter was utilized by Sukarno in his confrontation with the anti-PKI generals, and also extensively used by the PKI. The CIA report correctly notes that the letter was a forgery, but is incorrect in listing Subandrio, Aidit, and the Chinese as “prime suspects” (p. 196). Actually, as we now know, it was none of these. The revelations of the former Czech intelligence agent, Ladislav Bittman, published in 1972, indicate that the “Gilchrist letter” was concocted by Soviet and Czech intelligence. Its purpose was to influence Indonesian opinion further in an anti-American direction, and to feed Sukarno’s grandiose ambitions of Third World leadership.” The CIA report has also been able to capture something of the highly charged atmosphere of political intrigue and rumor in Jakarta in the months preceding the coup. Its highly factual, “police blotter” approach adds considerably to the credibility of the narrative. Yet, for all its comprehensiveness, the report is curiously silent on certain critical aspects of the Gestapu affair. And in the end, what the report does not deal with, despite the availability of easily accessible, published information, is as interesting as anything else. The CIA report presents the Gestapu story in reverse order, deal- 2 Ladislav Bittman, The Deception Game, Czechoslovak Intelligence in Soviet Political Warfare (Syracuse: Syracuse University Research Corporation, 1972), pp. 119-122. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Heldref Publications === [PDF page 4] === 120 Asian Affairs ing first with the coup attempt on the night of September 30, 1965, and its failure; then backtracking in order to take up planning and recruitment for the coup; and ending with a “prelude” that focuses on major PKI policies leading up to the September events. According to the Foreword, the data presented in the first part “are matters of established fact,” against which “we must examine” the testimony of various coup participants. The section concerned with planning and recruitment is “entirely” based on the interrogation of those involved; and this evidence must be considered “in a slightly different light” from the presumably “established” facts presented at the beginning. The last section, on PKI policies, deals much more with “matters of judgment.” Unhappily, some of the “matters of established fact” in the first part of the report, are not all that clearly established. Thus, we are given a brief account of the murder of the six Indonesian Army generals and the lieutenant by coup participants at the well at Lubang Buaja, near Jakarta’s Halim Air Force Base. The CIA report states that all the victims except the lieutenant “were shot without any hint of torture or mutilation.” Stories of the alleged torture of the victims carried in the Indonesian press, and perhaps inspired by the Army, “suffered from severe inflation,” according to the CIA report. The confessions of PKI youth and women’s front members who were present at the killings indicate they were “little aware of what was happening,” and “no doubt” were “contrived by the (Indonesian) Army” (p. 20). But we also have the confession of Mrs. Djamilah, a member of the PKI women’s front organization Gerwani, to the effect that she participated in the murder of the generals, using a razor blade previously given to her by coup leaders at Lubang Buaja:* The victim was shot three times, then fell down, but was not dead yet. A green-uniformed person, wearing three crooked white bars on the shoulder patches, ordered the IWM/Gerwani members to advance. All repeated the earlier actions, stabbing at the victim’s private parts, and cutting these parts of the body until he died... Afterwards, the corpse was thrown into the well... 3 Djakarta Daily Mail, November 5, 1965. See also Sinar Harapan (Jakarta), November 5, 1966. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Heldref Publications === [PDF page 5] === The 1965 Coup in Indonesia: The CIA’s Version 121 it was whispered among us that it was a general who had just been killed. The CIA report gives no source for its assertion that the Lubang Buaja victims were not mutilated or tortured. Nor is there any indication in the report as to how the confessions of Gerwani participants like Mrs. Djamilah were “contrived” by the Army, or what evidence the CIA has for asserting that they were. It is true that Mrs. Djamilah indicates in her confession that she was “little aware of what was happening.” This, however, she had in common with most coup participants and those otherwise involved, including Aidit and Sukarno, after the coup attempt had gotten under way. It is no ground for stating that torture and mutilation did not, in fact, occur. The matter is not merely of academic—or morbid—interest. Reports of torture and mutilation figured prominently in the explanations subsequently advanced in various Indonesian quarters to justify the Savage campaign waged against suspected Communists and other coup participants during the weeks and months that followed the failure of the coup. And if Mrs. Djamilah’s confession, among others, is to be set aside as “contrived” by the Indonesian Army, why is a different yardstick applied in the CIA report to the testimony of other participants in the Gestapu coup, which forms the basis of a major part of the CIA report? Til This part, it will be remembered, deals with planning and recruitment for the coup. According to the CIA, it is “entirely” based on the interrogation of those involved in the conspiracy; and therefore the evidence is of a “slightly different kind” than the “established fact” of the first part of the report. These interrogations were conducted mainly, though not entirely, by the Indonesian Army; and it should be pointed out that the Indonesian Army has not released all the information obtained from the interrogations. Nevertheless, the CLA report asserts (p. 99) that “enough” has become available so that “we can feel reasonably sure” not only about the events of the coup itself, but also of the conspiracy leading up to it. In a separate Appendix to the CIA report (pp. 311-316), it is also asserted that the Indonesian Army was not “suspected” of having edited the interrogations, and that in them- Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Heldref Publications === [PDF page 6] === 122, Asian Affairs selves the latter “are convincing proof” that they “have not been fabricated.” To substantiate this latter conclusion, the CIA report claims that if, in fact, there had been “fabrication” by the Indonesian Army, the latter would have taken greater pains to reconcile some “troubling discrepancies” in the statements of some of the witnesses. For example, “a few witnesses” were less certain about PKI involvement in the coup than others. Moreover, some coup participants were interrogated by police, Navy, and Air Force personnel, rather than by the Army, and the CIA report (p. 312) regards it as unlikely that so many different interrogators could have carried out a common fabrication. “After a while,” says the report (p. 314), “one gets a definite feeling for the people being interrogated and the reliability of certain testimony,” as compared to the testimony of others. What all this really adds up to, however, is a remarkable rationalization by the CIA for picking and choosing among a variety of evidentiary statements. If, as the report makes clear, the Indonesian Army has by no means revealed all the testimony and interrogation data it has, how may one be “reasonably sure” about the accuracy of what has been released? If there is “no doubt” that the confessions of the PKI front participants concerning the murder of the six generals at Lubang Buaja were “contrived” by the Indonesian Army, how can we be sure that this was not the case with the alleged interrogations of other coup participants apparently accepted by the CIA report? Would it really have strengthened the Army’s case for a PKI-inspired conspiracy if all the dozens of witnesses, including many who were by no means in the inner circle of the main conspirators in the PKI’s Biro Chusus (Special Bureau), or in the confidence of Army plotters like Latief and Untung, had nevertheless been equally positive in their statements about PKI participation? (Incidentally, was there any witness interrogated by the Army, or known to the writers of the CIA report, who actually denied any PKI involvement?) Would it have mattered to someone like former Air Force Major Sujono, one of the chief conspirators, that he was initially interrogated by a team that included Army, Navy, and Air Force personnel, and not just the Army? Does the CIA have proof that the interrogations of witnesses as reported by the Indonesian Army were not preceded by unrecorded “informal” interrogations? Does the CIA suggest that having a “definite feeling” for the “reliability of certain testimony” is a sound investigative approach? Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Heldref Publications === [PDF page 7] === The 1965 Coup in Indonesia: The CIA’s Version 123 Two cases—those of PKI Politburo member Njono and former Sukarno aide Bambang Widjanarko—make clear that considerable care must be exercised in evaluating the testimony elicited by Indonesian military interrogators. During a “preliminary” interrogation on January 4, 1966, Njono—according to the Army—confessed that at its meeting of August 28, 1965, the PKI Politburo approved the major action plan for the coup, including the formation of a new ‘“Revolutionary Council” to replace the Indonesian cabinet. In his trial before a special military tribunal a month later, however, Njono retracted this statement. He asserted instead that the Politburo on August 28 had merely decided to report to President Sukarno that a “General’s Council” in the Army might be preparing a coup of its own, and to wait for Sukarno’s reaction before undertaking anything further. Thus, Njono in effect denied PKI culpability in planning for the Gestapu affair. The military tribunal rejected Njono’s change of testimony on the ground that it was “politically” motivated; and in the semiofficial report on the Gestapu affair prepared by Nugroho Notosusanto and Ismail Saleh, two Indonesian Defense Department officials, one reads that Njono’s denial of his preliminary testimony “was illegal since it was an attempt to substitute true information with false.”* Why Njono changed his testimony may never be known; he was executed on October 29, 1968. It is curious that nothing appears in the CIA report about the mystery of Njono’s changed testimony, although the significance of the PKI Politburo meeting of August 28, 1965, is discussed at some length, and the report asserts confidently—if incorrectly—that the “various accounts” of the meeting “are in basic agreement” as to what happened (p. 229). Once again, one can only speculate as to why the CIA report is so selective in its reliance on the testimony of some coup participants and not on others. The testimony of Bambang Widjanarko, the substance of which was probably known in 1967, also suggests caution in assessing the reliability of interrogations conducted by the Indonesian Army. Widjanarko’s testimony, which was probably first given at the 1967 trials of two coup suspects, Generals Supardjo and Pranoto, and which was later reaffirmed and embellished during new interrogations in October * Nugroho Notosusanto and Ismail Saleh, The Coup Attempt of the September 30 Movement in Indonesia (Jakarta: P.T. Pembingbing Masa, August 1968), p. 120. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Heldref Publications === [PDF page 8] === 124 Asian Affairs and November 1970, presumably reveals that the late President Sukarno was the principal instigator of the Gestapu plot, with Army officers and the PKI participating out of loyalty or self-interest. The published version of the 1970 interrogations indicates, however, that his inquisitors were not especially skilled in testing his knowledge and credibility;? and the testimony as a whole is hardly such as to establish the overall validity of Gestapu interrogation reports. On the other hand, the CIA report is impressive in its marshalling of the evidence that Sukarno knew of the proposed coup, and probably approved of it in advance, only to “betray” the plotters once they had failed. For those particularly anxious to defend Sukarno against the charge of coup complicity, the section dealing with his involvement (pp. 250-265) should be required reading. One of the persistent mysteries about the Gestapu affair is the extent of military involvement in it. The CIA report explores in detail the participation of individual military figures such as Air Marshal Omar Dhani, and duly notes the leadership roles played by certain officers including Untung, Latief, and a few others. But it has nothing to say as to why the military became involved with the PKI in such a dangerous scheme. The only explanation provided is that “Untung and the other military were little more than dupes of the PKI,” and were “long accustomed” to following the PKI line in politics (p. 270). If we were dealing with a mere handful of officers who were fundamentally “apolitical” or “politically naive” (p. 270) but somehow became susceptible to Communist conspiratorial blandishments, then the CIA’s explanation might possibly be acceptable. What we would then have is, essentially, the obverse side of the explanation advanced in the socalled “Cornell Report” on the Gestapu affair written by two specialists on Indonesia then at Cornell University. This document viewed the coup primarily as reflecting an internal struggle within the Indonesian Army, with a small number of PKI leaders somehow “duped” into participating. But the CIA report was issued at the end of 1968, when—as the report itself notes (p. 180)—new information had revealed not only that PKI “contacts” in the military may have been even more wide- 5 See the review of the Widjanarko testimony by Justus M. van der Kroef in Pacific Affairs, Summer 1975, pp. 285-287. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Heldref Publications === [PDF page 9] === The 1965 Coup in Indonesia: The CIA’s Version 125 spread than was first suggested by the testimony of Sjam, one of the PKI’s chief coup plotters, but also that in “late July 1968,” the “Indonesian Army was shocked to learn” of recent revelations of the extent of PKI penetration into the Army’s Siliwangi Division regional command in West Java. Thus, for example, the CIA report fails to mention (1) that about 50 Siliwangi officers, including a general and two colonels, were arrested in July and August 1968 in this connection, and that some of them (according to Siliwangi Division Commander Major Dharsono) had been involved in the Gestapu affair; (2) that by early May 1968, a score of Air Force personnel had been arrested for plotting, along with the local PKI underground, to seize weapons at an Air Force armory in Surabaja and at Panasan Air Force Base near Surakarta, Central Java; (3) that in August 1968, several Army officers had been arrested in Central Sumatra on the ground that they were attempting to form a Communist “base area” in Riau; and so on. If the writer of the CIA report had been aware of these developments, this should have spurred consideration as to how and why the PKI managed to establish and maintain extensive connections with the Indonesian military esablishment even after the failure of the coup, as revealed by the growing number of PKI/Gestapu-related arrests of military personnel during 1968, and also in subsequent years. Failure to consider this aspect of the matter in depth is all the more striking because the CIA report does, in fact, suggest an awareness that extensive PKI-military connections did indeed exist. As the report puts it (p. 181): By late 1965, the PKI had made a good beginning in subverting crucial elements in the military, and it had plans for extending its Operations in this field and in supporting fields, such as the police field. Given a few more years, it might well have managed to subvert enough military officers to make it a real contest between the anti-Communists and the pro-Communists in the military. But the report does not identify the “crucial elements in the military” who were presumably subverted by the PKI (unless one considers Untung, Latief, and their fellow conspirators to be in this category). Indeed, the fact that the Gestapu plotters found it necessary to initiate Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Heldref Publications === [PDF page 10] === 126 Asian Affairs their coup by assassinating or attempting to assassinate such top Army officers as Yani and Nasution seems to suggest that the PKI was facing major obstacles to its subversion policy. But the more important question is why, “given a few more years,” the subversion of the military might have gone so far as to produce a “real contest” in their ranks. The absence of any analysis of the actual extent of, or potential for, PKI subversion of the Indonesian military is particularly surprising since a number of studies of the Gestapu affair published before the issuance of the CIA report attempted to deal with the matter. Hypotheses relating to supposed discontent among younger officers over the alleged corruption of their superiors and the luxuriousness and ostentation of their life-style, or over promotion and staff appointment policies, as well as to the question of interservice rivalries—all these might usefully have been examined as factors in the subversion of the military. One is repeatedly struck by what appears to be the CIA report’s unfamiliarity with, or apparent unwillingness to use, data in the public domain that are highly relevant to an understanding of the Gestapu affair. Two such instances relate to the report of the discovery at the end of 1964 of the PKI action program for 1965, which disclosed the Party’s plans for an eventual coup; and to the question of Chinese involvement in the Gestapu affair. In its section “Background to a Coup: September 1964-March 1965,” the CIA report deals with the resistance to Sukarnoist and PKI policies that developed in such varied groups as the “Organization to Uphold Sukarnoism” (Badan Pendukung Sukarnoisme—BPS), the Partai Murba (Proletarian Party), the right wing of the Indonesian National Party (PNI), the Muslim press, and so on. Why this resistance arose is not readily apparent from the report. There is, to be sure, a reference to rumors about Sukarno’s failing health as a reason for the formation of the BPS; and General Yani’s confidential meetings with some of his fellow generals in January 1965 are attributed to concern over the “situation in Central Java, where the PKI had its greatest strength” (p. 190). But a far more significant factor in arousing the concern of anti-PKI elements, within and outside the Army, and which is not mentioned in the CIA report, was the disclosure at the Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Heldref Publications === [PDF page 11] === The 1965 Coup in Indonesia: The CIA’s Version 127 end of 1964 of a confidential PKI action program for the following year. This program, which Aidit denounced as a forgery, nevertheless led to a confrontation between Aidit and Sukarno, and to formal repudiation of the plan by the PKI Chairman. Although Malaysia’s leading newspaper published an account of the incident (based on a United Press International despatch from Jakarta), the present author has not found any such report in the Indonesian press—which is, perhaps, not very surprising in view of its sensitivities, then as now, to the political nuances of the day. The account of the matter as reported in the Straits Times was as follows:° The leader of the Indonesian Communist Party, D.N. Aidit, has been forced to repudiate the Party’s 1965 plan of operations because it became public knowledge, according to informed Indonesian sources. The sources said the document, written by the Party Central Committee at the beginning of December, listed as one objective “infiltration of the government” for an eventual coup. The rest of the instructions to Party cadres dealt with actions to be taken concerning land reform, cultural, educational, economic, and general political activities. The plan of operations was brought to the attention of President Sukarno. When he asked Aidit about it, the leader of Indonesia’s three million Communists had to deny that it did, in fact, originate with the Central Committee. Aidit told officers at the Police Academy in Sukabumi, West Java, last week that a “socalled secret document of the PKI” - was “produced by the most awkward agent of provocation to poison part of our state apparatus.” His comments were the first public announcement of the incident. The document has not been published, nor have there been any comments on it in any of the anti-PKI newspapers here (that is, in Jakarta). 8 Straits Times (Singapore and Kuala Lumpur), December 24, 1964. Emphasis added. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Heldref Publications === [PDF page 12] === 128 Asian Affairs Subsequently, the PKI Politburo, in its January 1, 1965, New Year’s Message, again alluded to the PKI’s supposed 1965 plan of operations, declaring that the document was the work of a “combination of imperialists, bureaucrat capitalists, and Trotskyites” engaged in slandering the PKI with the hope of “drawing middle-of-the-roaders over to their side.” On the basis of the document, the Politburo message said, it was being alleged that the PKI “is going to ‘seize power’,” and that the danger of communism now poses “a grave threat” in view of Sukarno’s allegedly deteriorating health. Was the PKI’s 1965 action plan a forgery or not? And whether it was or not, what role did it play in Indonesian politics? A group of generals led by General Yani, who was later murdered, began to meet “informally” in January 1965, as the CIA report points out, “to discuss the deteriorating political situation and what the Army should do about it” (pp. 190-191). But it is curious that the report does not deal with the furor surrounding exposure of the PKI’s alleged 1965 action plan. Nor does it explore what action, if any, Yani’s anti- PKI “brain trust” decided to take because of it; or the attempts reportedly made during the first half of 1965 by Yani, Third Deputy Premier Chaerul Saleh, and others to build a new, anti-PKI united front.® These and other alleged anti-PKI moves are central to one major school of interpretation of the Gestapu affair already mentioned, namely, that the PKI was either duped or provoked into participating in the coup. One would have thought that the CIA report, concerned as it is (and rightly so, in the judgement of this writer) with pinning primary responsibility for the coup on the PKI, would have dealt with the PKI’s alleged 1965 action plan, especially since the controversy surrounding the plan is discussed in published PKI Party literature, available to the CIA and to any other investigator. In some respects, the CIA report’s consideration of Communist China’s involvement in the Gestapu affair is even more baffling. In an analysis of the PKI’s “armed capability” (p. 173), the report asserts that (1) “there is no convincing evidence,” despite “a number of reports” to the contrary, that “the Chinese were shipping arms to the 7 PKI Politburo 1965 New Year’s message in Review of Indonesia, January 1965, p. 2. At the time, the Review was the PKI’s main English language organ. 8 Einar Schlereth and Batjo Daeng Bintang, Indonesien: Analyse eines Massakers (Frankfurt: Marz Verlag, 1970), pp. 151-154. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Heldref Publications === [PDF page 13] === The 1965 Coup in Indonesia: The CIA’s Version 129 PKI” via transshipment points along the coasts of Java and Sumatra; (2) that no “great” store of PKI arms was ever found; (3) that the “few caches” of arms that were found “have never been definitely linked to the PKI”; and (4) that if the PKI did have arms, it would certainly have used them during the Army’s post-coup repression of the PKI. But “the fact is that the Communists did not fight back,” presumably because they did not have the arms. But then the CIA report begins to hedge, stating (p. 174) that Chinese arms did indeed find their way to Indonesia before the coup, packed in crates marked “Construction Materials” for the planned complex of the Conference of New Emerging Forces being built in Jakarta. And on p. 287, the report admits that the Chinese were “known to have sent arms to Indonesia prior to September,” and that some Chinese arms were used in the coup by PKI volunteers. One can only speculate as to why the CIA report offers this confusing sequence of assertions on the question of Chinese involvement and the supply of Chinese arms. Two weeks before the coup attempt, the following report appeared in a Malaysian newspaper, based on Hong Kong and Thai sources:° Communist China is reported to be sending secret supplies of arms, explosives, and military equipment to the Indonesian Communists, who are getting ready for a showdown with the armed forces. The Bangkok newspaper Democracy reported yesterday that clandestine shipments of arms were being unloaded at various places along the Java coast. It quoted Hong Kong sources for these disclosures, which coincided with reports from Jakarta about unusual activity around Baten and Pulabutan Batu in West Java and some smaller ports in East Java. The Indonesian police are reported to have stepped up their investigations into these reports. Political observers say that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) is fully aware that the ® Sabah Times (Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia). September 14, 1965. See also Prachathipathai (Bangkok), September 12, 1965. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Heldref Publications === [PDF page 14] === 130 Asian Affairs Indonesian armed forces will resist any Communist bid for power, and it is getting ready for the inevitable clash. In view of President Sukarno’s declining health, the PKI has intensified its efforts to build a secret military force with Communist Chinese help. If the CIA was not aware of these reports from Hong Kong, as well as in the Thai and Malaysian press, one wonders what its news evaluating or monitoring services were doing, precisely at a time when Chinese contacts with Sukarno and the PKI were increasing. It has since been disclosed that Chinese arms may also have been flown into Indonesia secretly from China, possibly even in Sukarno’s private jet, in addition to covert arms shipments that the Chinese “channeled through other lanes, such as ships owned by the national shipping company Pelni and handled by reliable PKI employees.””° The Chinese weapons played a role in the bloody aftermath of Gestapu. In early November 1965, weeks after the coup attempt, even the American press was reporting that a “Communist revolt” appeared to be spreading from Central to East Java, where some 500 members of the Communist youth wing “had battled soldiers” and paramilitary reinforcements rushed into the area; and that the Communists were also continuing operations in Central Java, “where they have seized two districts, despite the efforts of a reinforced army division.”"' And the CIA could also. have learned from the American press that Indonesian troops were indeed encountering PKI guerrillas armed with Chinese weapons, which had been smuggled into the country (as the Indonesian government kept asserting) in crates marked as building materials and stored in caches.” In light of all this, one wishes for some explanation for assertions in the CIA report that the Communists “did not fight back” against the Army in the aftermath of the coup, that the arms caches were “never” linked with any certainty to the PKI, and so on. This, too, is not a matter of merely academic interest. One of the 10 Antonie C.A. Dake, In the Spirit of the Red Banteng, Indonesian Communists Between Moscow and Peking (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1973), p. 333. 11 New York Times, November 3, 1965. 12 [bid., October 11, 1966, and May 18, 1971. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Heldref Publications === [PDF page 15] === The 1965 Coup in Indonesia: The CIA’s Version 131 most persistent liabilities of the present Suharto regime in Indonesia, in the view of many of its critics, is its identification with the extermination of tens, and perhaps hundreds, of thousands of PKI members, Party sympathizers—and, it is to be feared, some with not the slightest connection with the coup or the PKI—during the weeks following the collapse of the coup. Various participants in this bloodbath, from paramilitary village guards to Muslim youth gangs who often claimed to have operated under Army supervision, subsequently sought to excuse their conduct on the ground that some (but by no means all) of their PKI victims were, in fact, armed and had resisted apprehension. All this may be mere rationalization. But the reports of Communist activists battling military units, indeed of Communist forces seizing “two districts” in Central Java despite the efforts of an entire reinforced army division, not to mention the underground PKI campaign of murder, kidnapping, arson, and other acts of random terror during the weeks after Gestapu,” suggest the need for closer analysis of the post- Gestapu PKI resistance than is provided in the CIA report. In such an analysis, the “availability” of weapons to the PKI is a crucial question. It would be ironic if the picture presented by the CIA report—of PKI members not fighting back in the aftermath of the coup because they allegedly had no weapons—were now used by Suharto’s critics to perpetuate the myth of an unprovoked post-coup massacre of defenseless dupes and innocents. 13On PKI terror see, for example, Straits Times, November 12, 1965, and Antara Daily News Bulletin, November 3, 1965. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Heldref Publications