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6 Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and the United States From our viewpoint, of course, an unsuccessful coup attempt by the PKI might be the most effective development to start a reversal of political trends in Indonesia. Howard P. Jones, U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, March 10, 1965 For Aidit the covert use of progressive officers to dislodge the rightwing army high command must have seemed a clever strategy. Both the party and President Sukarno could be saved from the Council of Generals with one swift, backhanded stroke. In its first stages the movement was on its way to success: it mobilized troops without being detected and achieved the element of surprise—the corpses of six generals are sufficient proof of that. The surprise, however, was short lived. Aidit was apparently unaware that others in the army leadership and the U.S. embassy had been patiently waiting for an event like the movement and had already prepared a plan for responding to it. While the generals and the embassy staff did not anticipate that the movement would erupt on October 1 and would kill half of Yani’s staff, they did anticipate some sort of dramatic action involving the PKI. They were waiting for a pretext for attacking the party and undermining Sukarno’s rule. Aidit unwittingly played into their hands. As declassified U.S. government documents reveal, in 1965 the generals realized that they could not stage an old-fashioned coup d’état against Sukarno—he was far too popular. They needed a pretext. The best pretext they hit upon was an unsuccessful coup attempt that could 176 be blamed on the PKI. The army, in its contingency planning, had already drawn up a game plan: blame the PKI for an attempted coup, begin a full-scale war on the party, keep Sukarno as a figurehead president , and incrementally leverage the army into the government. The army kept the U.S. embassy abreast of its plan and knew that it could count on U.S. diplomatic, military, and economic support when the time came to implement it. The movement broke upon an army that knew exactly how to react. Even if the PKI had no involvement with the movement, it almost certainly would have been blamed for it. When reading these documents about high-level army planning that was done before the outbreak of the movement, one is struck by how closely the events of 1965–67 followed the army’s game plan. I do not believe this tight correspondence between the events and the plan can be explained by arguing that certain army generals designed the movement themselves. Of course, it is tempting to interpret the movement as a fake coup attempt that was designed to fail. But such a “hidden hand” argument is not only difficult to believe (given the complicated logistics required), it is impossible to square with the facts. As I argued in chapter 2, the movement would have been designed very differently if it had been meant to be a setup. When dealing with the covert operations of intelligence agencies, one should be careful not to push conspiracy theories too far. The U.S. embassy and the army generals were not controlling all the events through double agents. The movement originated with Aidit, his Special Bureau, and a group of progressive officers and was designed to succeed. It failed not because it was preprogrammed to fail but because it was poorly organized and because the army had prepared for a counterattack. Even if Suharto had not known about the movement’s plans beforehand, he and his fellow generals would have reacted in a similar manner. The army might not have been able to defeat the movement so quickly and effortlessly, but it would have organized an anti-PKI and anti-Sukarno campaign all the same. In rejecting extreme conspiracy theorizing, one should not jump to the other extreme and argue that U.S. officials and army generals were surprised on October 1 and had to improvise all their responses. A point that has been obscured in much of the literature on the movement, especially in accounts by U.S. officials, is that the U.S. government had been preparing the Indonesian army for a showdown with the PKI and a takeover of state power.1 From 1958 to 1965 the United States trained, funded, advised, and supplied the army precisely so that it could turn itself into a...

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