QAA Podcast - UNLOCKED: Premium Episode 137: Hidden Cold War History feat Vincent Bevins

Episode Date: November 22, 2021

The anti-communist crusade that defined the post-world-war-II period. We explore how the CIA and the US government worked to crush left-wing political progress in so-called Third World countries by forming an international coalition of anti-communists carrying out a program of mass-murder that spanned the globe. We speak to Vincent Bevins, journalist and author of 'The Jakarta Method', a book using thorough historic research and journalism to explore the cold war in a new light. If you want access to extra weekly episodes like, this you can subscribe for $5 a month here: http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Follow Vincent Bevins: http://twitter.com/vinncent Buy The Jakarta Method: http://thejakartamethod.com Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: http://qanonanonymous.com Episode music by Nick Sena (http://nicksenamusic.com) & Rudy (https://soundcloud.com/rudy-3), Event Cloak (http://eventcloak.bandcamp.com)

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listener to Premium Chapter 137 of the Q&ONANANANANANAS podcast, the Hidden Cold War History episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rockatansky, Liv Egar, Julianfield, and Travis View.

This week, we're going to be talking about the anti-communist crusade that defined the post-World War II period, and in my opinion, is still highly relevant when we think of contemporary conspiracy theories. We'll explore how the CIA and the US government worked to crush left-wing political progress in so-called third world countries during this era, and how their actions evolved into an international coalition of anti-communists carrying out a program of mass murder that spanned the globe. Interventions took the form of economic and diplomatic pressure, covert and psychological

operations, as well as outright military intervention. Our guest is Vincent Bevin's, author of the Jakarta Method, a thoroughly researched book on the topic, and I really do recommend picking it up. It's full of very personal stories that obviously we're not going to get into many of those, and it also does just a great job at demystifying this part of history. This episode is largely based on Bevan's work. He covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, was the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Time, and he's written for a dozen of other big papers.

But before we speak to him, we're going to get our hands dirty with a little bit of history. Birth of the CIA. In the post-World War II period, President Harry Truman put in place what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, stating, I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. This was coded language, referring to a decision to wage war on supposed communists outside of the United States. Truman was following the advice of Arthur Vendenberg, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, who had told him to, quote, scare the hell out of the American people about communism. Here's from Bevin's book. In 1947, FBI director Jay Edgar Hoover, who had been hugely influential on creating and disseminating the anti-communist consensus, addressed Hewack and gave voice to some of the fundamental assumptions of that ethos.

He said that communist plan to organize a military revolt in the country, which would culminate in the extermination of the police forces and the seizure of all communications. He said, One thing is certain, the American progress which all good citizens seek, such as old age security, houses for veterans, child assistance, and host of others, is being deployed as window dressing by the communists to conceal their true aims and entrap gullible followers. The numerical strength of the party's enrolled membership is insignificant. For every party member, there are ten others ready, willing, and able to do the party's

There is no doubt as to where a real communist loyalty rests. Their allegiance is to Russia. Hoover had presented a logical death trap. If anyone accuses you of being communist or communist adjacent, no defense is possible. If you're simply promoting mild social reform, well, that is exactly what a communist would do in order to conceal their true motives.

If your numbers are insignificant, that is only further proof of your deviousness as your comrades are all lurking in the shadows. And if there are a lot of you, warrior openly, proudly communist, that's just as bad. It's hard to overstate how big a role Edgar Hoover played in shaping American politics and policy over the course of his life. He oversaw the FBI from 1919 until 1972 when he had a heart attack and died on the job.

He had been appointed during the first Red Scare and then brought us a second one in the form of McCarthyism. Even in his old age, Hoover was so feared by Nixon that the president was recorded in 1971 explaining that he chose not to remove the 76-year-old FBI director for fear that he might, quote, bring down the temple. Edgar Hoover is perhaps the prototypical American deep state actor, unelected yet wielding immense power while presidents cycled in and out of the White House. In the post-World War II period, the FBI had already shown how effective an intelligence agency

could be at shaping domestic politics. But now the United States needed foreign operatives for the clandestine side of their war on communists. So the temporary wartime office of strategic services or OSS was developed into the central intelligence agency or CIA by 1951. Running the clandestine operations for the CIA was a man called Frank Weisner, who was so extreme in his hatred of communism that one of his ex-OSS colleagues in Germany is quoted as saying, I myself was no great admirer of the Soviet Union, and I certainly had no expectations of harmonious relations after the war, but Frank was a little excessive, even for me. Above him was the newly minted CIA director, Alan Dulles, who had held Wisner's position before him and knew the value of covert operations firsthand. Bevins explained their mentality in his book. Paul Nitzah, the man who wrote the so-called blueprint of the Cold War,

described the upper-class imperial values that children soaked up at the Groton School, a private institution which was modeled on elite English schools and gave the CIA many of its key early members. Quote, in history, every religion has greatly honored the members who destroyed the enemy. The Quran, Greek mythology, the Old Testament. Groton boys were taught that, said Nitsa. Doing in the enemy is the right thing to do. Of course, there are some restraints on ends and means. If you go back to the Greek culture and read Thucydides, there are limits to what you can do to other Greeks who are part of your culture, but there are no limits to what you can do to a Persian. He's a barbarian. The communists, he concluded,

were barbarians. Early operations by these self-dubbed CIA boys were mostly a bust, The Soviets repeatedly anticipated their incursions into their territory, and it later came to light that Weisner's entourage at the time included British Soviet double agent Kim Filby, who was acting as a mole for the USSR. That would be like a funny show to make, just like the CIA trying to do plans and just continually getting screwed over by the Soviets. The Ukrainian and Albanian death squads, the CIA trained and then parachuted into Soviet territory, were systematically killed before they could foment revolt locally.

These setbacks caused Wisner and the CIA to modify their strategy. Here's from Bevan's book. Slowly but surely, they realized that actual Soviet territory was mostly rock solid. They were certainly failing to penetrate it. If they wanted to fight communism, and they did very badly, they had to look elsewhere. The third world offered that opportunity. The problem these men overlooked, according to a mostly sympathetic history written by journalist Evan Thomas, was, quote, the fact that they knew almost nothing about the so-called developing world.

North Korea. In the early 1950s, the CIA ran a set of operations out of South Korea, where they used UN-US troops to fight North Korea. The region had been liberated from Japanese imperial rule by Korean communists under Kim Il-sung. Although the Soviets didn't join the struggle, the North Koreans were eventually aided by the Chinese, who were still grateful for the help Kim Il-sung had given them against the Japanese in Manchuria. The South, in turn, was ruled by Singh Menri, a Christian anti-communist who had lived in the U.S. for decades prior.

He reliably targeted leftists and oversaw the massacre of tens of thousands of people on the island of Jeju, citing the threat of communism. Here's from Bevin's book. During the resulting three-year stalemate, the U.S. dropped more than 600,000 tons of bombs on Korea, more than was used in the entire Pacific Theater in World War II, and poured 30,000 tons of napalm over the landscape. More than 80% of North Korea's buildings were destroyed, and the bombing campaign killed an estimated 1 million civilians. In Korea, the CIA boys also tried out some of the same tools they had unleashed in Eastern Europe. Thousands of recruited Korean and Chinese agents were dropped into the North during the war. Once again, the infiltration was a total failure.

Later, classified CIA documents concluded that the operations, quote, were not only ineffective, but probably morally reprehensible in the number of lives lost. The CIA only found out later that all the secret information the agency gathered during the war had been manufactured by North Korean and Chinese security services. Iran. In 1952, Wisner turned his eyes to Iran. Their British MI6 agents had been trying to overthrow Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadegh, elected by the Iranian parliament in 1951,

and broadly considered a champion of secular democracy. This was a relief for the population. which had suffered greatly under the British appointed Shah, losing two million lives to famine. But despite their supposed withdrawal as colonial rulers, the British were still using the Anglo-Iranian oil company to extract twice more oil wealth in the country than Iran was itself. Mossadegh carried out a series of social reforms including land taxation and the introduction of things like unemployment benefits, sick leave, and an end to forced labor.

He built public baths, rural housing, and pest control. But he also made the mistake of nationalizing the oil industry. This was a step too far for the British who asked the Americans and the CIA for some help. At first, the Yanks were reluctant to get involved with the British Empire. But the Brits pointed out that the two-day party, which was communist-led, was about to maybe take over the country if nothing was done to stop them. This, despite the leader Mossadegh's open disgust for communism. So the CIA set up Operation Ajax, greenlit by Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers,

and assigned the operation to Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, who worked for the CIA. Bevinz explains. The CIA bribed every politician it could and looked for a general willing to take over and install the Shah as dictator. Agents paid street thugs, strong men, and circus performers to riot in the streets.

When CIA station chief, Roger Goyran, argued the U.S. was making a historic mistake by aligning itself with British colonialism, Alan Dulles recalled him to Washington. The CIA created pamphlets and posters proclaiming that Mossadegh was a communist, an enemy of Islam. They paid off journalists to write that he was a judge,

Jew. The CIA hired gangsters to pretend to be two-day party members and attack a mosque. Two of Roosevelt's Iranian agents who were handling some of the hired muscle tried to turn down further work at one point, saying the risk was becoming too great. But Kermit Roosevelt convinced them by saying that if they refused, he'd kill them. By 1953, the country had been weakened through economic sanctions and a British blockade, and the Shah was repeatedly teaming up with royalists and right-wing groups to stop, for example, Mossadegh, from allowing illiterate Iranians to Despite this, Mossadegh still continued gathering votes and attempted to reform the country through democratic means.

Then the Shah finally exceeded to British and American demands and agreed to remove Mossadegh, replacing him with Kermit Roosevelt's choice, General Fazlola Zahedi. The Shah had been told that the United States would proceed with or without his approval at this point. Violent clashes left about 300 dead, and the military royalists joined the CIA-led uprising to place Zahedi in power. One of the first things he did was to make a deal with foreign oil companies to form a consortium, and quote, restore the flow of Iranian oil to world markets in substantial quantities.

In return, the British and Americans lent the Shah's government their full support. As a result, the Iranian working class remained in poverty and the great majority of the colonial era oil holdings were restored. The Philippines. Also on the CIA radar at the time was the young nation of the Philippines. Bevan's writes, In 1954, the CIA wrapped up another successful operation nearby in the Philippines. The left-wing Huck Rebellion that began under Japanese occupation, continued after both the Japanese left

and the U.S. officially handed over power to Filipinos. Anti-occupation Huck guerrillas were opposed to the new president who had been an active collaborator with the Axis Powers and the ongoing oligarchal control of the economy by hugely powerful feudal landowners. U.S. military advisor Edward Lansdale wrote in his diary that the Huck's, quote, believed in the rightness of what they were doing,

even though some of the leaders are on the communist side, there is a bad situation, needing reform. I suppose armed complaint is a natural enough thing. The U.S. helped the Philippines devise and implement a counterinsurgency operation and made considerable progress, including the use of more napolem. In a bit of bizarre psychological warfare, Lansdale also collaborated closely with Desmond Fitzgerald, a Wisner recruit at the CIA, to create a vampire. As part of a range of psychological operations alongside the war in the guerrillas,

CIA agents spread the rumor that an ass-wang, a blood-sucking ghoul of Filipino legend, was on the loose and destroying men with evil in their hearts. They then took a Huck rebel they had killed, poked two holes in his neck, drained him of his blood, and left him lying on the road. After years of conflict, the Hucks gave up, and the Philippines settled into right-leaning pro-American instability

that would last decades, with special privileges granted to U.S. corporations. The woeful condition of the Filipino people remained entirely unchanged. Because of this, now, whenever I hear about a cryptid, I'm going to have to ask myself whether or not it's a CIA op. So another thing ruined. Welcome to my life.

Yeah, wait a minute. This dismantles my entire worldview. All of these covert interventions were considered successes by the CIA, which soon grew interested in Central America as well. President Dwight Eisenhower was brutal in his assessment of foreign governments. They had to be sufficiently anti-communist in his eyes to warrant no U.S. intervention. Guatemala. Before I explain what happened in Guatemala, we need a bit of background.

During the Second World War in 1944, Guatemala went through a revolution. that saw the unseeding of a pro-Nazi dictator who had, in Bevan's words, worked hand in hand with the landed aristocracy in foreign corporations for two decades to keep peasants in a system of forced labor. In other words, slavery. But since the Second World War was raging at the time, anti-communists were too busy being allied with communists fighting the Nazis, so they didn't take much notice. When the country held elections in 1951, the people of Guatemala elected Jacob Arbenz. In his inaugural speech, Arbenz explained that he aimed to, quote, convert Guadamala with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state.

Despite being an avowed capitalist, Arbenz made the mistake of accepting the left-wing Guatemalan Workers Party into his political coalition. Worse, in an attempt to lift peasants out of poverty, Arbenz tackled land reform in 1952. This despite being a large landowner himself. Bevins explains, The government began to buy back large unused land holdings and distribute them to indigenous people and peasants. Processes of these kind were seen by economists around the the world as not only a way of benefiting regular people, but putting the whole country to productive use and unleashing the forces of market enterprise. But the law stipulated that Guatemala would make payments based on the land's official value, and the United Fruit Company, a U.S. firm

that basically controlled the country's economy for decades, had been criminally undervaluating its holdings to avoid paying taxes. The powerful company howled in protest. United Fruit was extremely well connected in the Eisenhower administration and started a a public relations campaign denouncing Arbenz as a communist in the U.S. and brought U.S. journalists on press junkets, which were successful in getting deeply critical stories published in outlets like Time, U.S. News and World Report, and Newsweek. The CIA again asked Kermit Roosevelt to oversee operations. He refused this time, telling his superiors that future coups wouldn't work unless the people

and the army in the country want what we want. Frank Wisner chose Tracy Barnes instead. Washington made three coup attempts, and it was the third one that worked. In November 1953, Eisenhower removed the ambassador in Guatemala City and sent in Jean Purifoy, who had been in Athens since 1950, and had thrown together a right-wing government favorable to both Washington and the Greek monarchy. Leftists there called him the butcher of Greece. In Guatemala, the North Americans did their best to create a pretext for intervention. The CIA planted boxes of rifles marked with communist hammers and sickles.

so they could be discovered as proof of Soviet infiltration. When the Guatemalan military, unable to find any other supplies, did actually buy some weapons, that turned out to be worthless, from Czechoslovakia, Weisner's boys were relieved. Now they had their excuse. Arbenz uncovered plans for the third coup attempt in January 1954 and had them published in the Guatemalan press. The CIA men were so confident that they kept going anyway,

issuing denials to the U.S. press. Under pressure, Arbenz resigned. handing power over to Colonel Diaz, who was the head of the armed forces at that time. But the United States very quickly indicated to Diaz that they had another man in mind, General Carlos Castillo Armas, who was even disliked by other conservative officers in the Guatemalan military. Bevan's rights, slavery returned to Guatemala. In the first few months of his government, Castillo Armas established anti-communism Day and rounded up and executed between 3,000 and 5,000 supporters of Arbenz.

Eisenhower was elated, even though wide. had been anxious throughout the operation, this was another triumph for his approach. After he and Barnes met with the president, they burst back into Barnes's living room in Georgetown and, quote, did a little scuffling dance. Indonesia, Sukarno, and the spirit of Bandung. The next country we're going to be talking about is Indonesia, where the CIA's intervention spawned the term the Jakarta method, a reference to how successfully it dealt with communism in the eyes of what was becoming a full-fledged, American-led international alliance of anti-communists. The Jakarta method, named after the capital of Indonesia, involved the systematic planned murder of an estimated 1 million unarmed civilians accused of being communists.

But before we get into that, we need to introduce the president of Indonesia at the time, Sukarno. He had been imprisoned for resisting Dutch imperial rule and was a beloved figure associated with the liberation of Indonesia from colonial rule and its subsequent uniting. Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous country, composed of over 17,000 islands, like Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, parts of Borneo, and New Guinea. Its national slogan at the time was, unity and diversity. Sukarno was credited with inspiring the spirit of Bandung,

a reference to the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference in 1955. Bevan's describes it. The people who came together at the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference represented about half the United Nations and 1.5 billion of the world's 2.8 billion people. As Sukarno declared in his opening speech, delivered in bursts of accented but perfect English, it was the, quote,

first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind. Some of the countries there had recently achieved independence, while others were still fighting for it. In his speech, Sikarno confronted colonialism, but remained cautious of angering the United States. He even wrote references to America's history

into the speech, seeing a correlation between third-world country's struggle and that of the Americans when they liberated themselves from British rule in 1776. Here's part of Sukarno's speech. All of us, I am certain, are united by more important things than those which superficially divide us. We are united, for instance, by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism,

and we are united by a common determination to preserve and stabilize peace in the world. How is it possible to be disinterested about colonialism? For us, colonialism is not something far and distant. We have known it in all its ruthlessness. We have seen the immense human wastage it causes, the poverty it causes, and the heritage it leaves behind when, eventually and reluctantly, it is driven out by the inevitable march of history. And I beg of you, do not think of colonialism only in the classic form which we of Indonesia and

our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa knew. has also its modern dress in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises, does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever, and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing and one which must be eradicated from the earth. The battle against colonialism has been a long one, and do you know that today is a famous anniversary in that battle. On the 18th day of April 1,775, just 180 years ago, Paul Revere

rode at midnight through the New England countryside, warning of the approach of British troops and of the opening of the American War of Independence, the first successful anti-colonial war in history. About this midnight ride, the poet Longfellow wrote, quote, a cry of defiance and not of fear, a voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, and a word that shall echo evermore. Yes, it shall echo forever more. At this point it's worth explaining that the original definition of third world countries, which accounts for two-thirds of the world's population, wasn't a negative one. Bevan's explains, that term was coined in the early 1950s and

originally all of its connotations were positive. When the leaders of these new nation states took up the term, they spoke it with pride. It contained a dream of a better future in which the world's downtrodden and enslaved masses would take control of their own destiny. The term was used in the sense of the third estate during the French revolution. The revolutionary common people who would overthrow the first and second estates of the monarchy and the clergy. Third did not mean third rate, but something more like the third and final act. The first group of rich white countries had their crack at creating the world, as did the second, and this was the new movement, full of energy and potential, just waiting

to be unleashed. For much of the planet, the third world was not just a category, It was a movement. At the time there was an active Indonesian Communist Party known as the P.K.I. They were unmilitarized and actively participated in the democratic process, showing no signs of armed insurrection. In fact, they disagreed with Mao on this. The CIA funneled a million dollars, worth over 10 million today, into the 195 Indonesian elections, in an attempt to prop up an Islamic anti-communist party known as Masjumi. Sukarno won the election despite them.

And, more worryingly for Washington, the communist Pekkani, K-I came in fourth place with a solid 17% of the vote. With the Soviet Union now overseen by Nikita Khrushchev after Stalin's death, the Indonesian Communist Party felt more independent and empowered than ever through their local electoral system. Meanwhile, in 1956, Khrushchev made a secret speech to the Communist Party denouncing Stalin's crimes, including his torture and killing of party members, a political purge. This caused various communist governments, including China's, to accuse him of revisionism.

Bevins explains what happened next. In 1956, the communist world was divided further, when Khrushchev sent tanks into Hungary to crush an uprising and reassert Soviet control. The violence of October and November 1956 was a public relations debacle from Moscow. It was also a deep personal failure for Frank Wisner. Though the US denied this publicly,

the CIA had been encouraging the Hungarians to revolt, and many did so thinking they would receive support from Washington. When the Dulles brothers decided against this course of action, seemingly hanging the protesters out to dry, Wisner felt personally betrayed. His behavior became increasingly erratic. William Colby, a senior CIA officer in Rome, said in 1956 that, quote,

Weisner was rambling and raving, totally out of control. He kept saying, all these people are getting killed. His son noticed that he appeared overworked and was deeply emotionally involved in the events in Europe. Weisner began acting in ways that people working with him had a hard time understanding. They thought it might have been because of an illness caused by a bad plate of clams he had in Greece.

Meanwhile, the Third World felt quite optimistic about their future. Some considered both Soviets and Americans' allies, and others felt aloof from the entire bipolar nature of the Cold War. But the PKI's performances in Indonesian polls were worrying Washington. Bevins explains, In elections the following year, the Indonesian Communist Party did even better than it had in 1955.

The PQI was the most efficient, professional organization in the country. crucially in the country plagued with corruption and patronage, it had reputation for being the cleanest of all the major parties. Its leaders were disciplined and dedicated, and they actually delivered on what they promised, especially to peasants and the poor. The American vice president at the time, Richard Nixon, gave voice to the general feeling in Washington when he said that, quote, a democratic government was probably not the best kind for Indonesia because the communists could probably not be beaten in election campaigns because they were so well organized. And most notably, the American ambassador recognized that the PKI was going into the countryside,

delivering the kind of programs that spoke directly to the people's needs. The party was, quote, working hard and skillfully to win over the underprivileged, he worried. Even worse, the PKK maintained a friendly relationship with Sukarno for the most part. Then, rebellions to the Sukarno government started up in Java, Bali, and Sumatra. The government and much of the people of Indonesia were suspicious that the United States were behind the uprisings, but both the U.S. press and their diplomats assured the Indonesians that they were just being paranoid. Speaking of diplomats, it's time for me to introduce another main character in Vincent Bevan's book, Howard Jones. He was the American diplomat the Indonesians

referred to as smiling Jones, both because he was relatively jovial and compassionate for an anti-communist, but also because behind his smile they knew was hiding a remarkably powerful and aggressive nation. As we'll see in a moment when he was reassigned to Indonesia in 1958 as ambassador, Jones was kept out of the loop of certain crucial CIA clandestine activities. In 1958, the Indonesian army shot down one of the planes that had been carrying out daily bombings of military and commercial shipping vessels on the island of Sumatra, as well as, on one occasion, a civilian market. Bevan describes what happened next. A single figure floated towards a coconut grove. His white parachute got caught in the branches

of a tall palm tree, where he was stuck for a moment. Then he fell to the ground and broke his hip. He was quickly found and captured by Indonesian soldiers, who probably saved him from being killed on the spot by furious locals. His name was Alan Lawrence Pope. He was from Miami, Florida, and he was a CIA agent. After Wisner returned from sick leave in 1957, he had warned the Dulles brothers that the rebellion would be an unpredictable, potentially explosive affair. They ignored his concerns and gave Wisner the authority to spend $10 million to back a revolution in Indonesia. That's the equivalent of about $100 million today. CIA pilots took off from Singapore, an emerging Cold War ally, with a goal of destroying the government of Indonesia or breaking the country into little pieces.

They chose not to tell Howard Jones's predecessor, John Moore Allison, about the covert action because, as Wisner put it, the plans, quote, might elicit an adverse reaction from the ambassador. Instead, they transferred him to Czechoslovakia and brought in the oblivious Jones. Jones was brought back so that he could keep smiling to the Indonesians, while another arm of his own government dropped tons of exploding metal onto small tropical islands. Throughout the course of the CIA's history, this dynamic would often be repeated. The agency would act behind the back of the diplomats and experts at the State Department. If the CIA was successful, the State Department would be forced into backing the new state of affairs the agency had created. If the secret agents failed, they would just move on, leaving the embarrassed diplomats to clean up the mess. Jones became convinced that the

best way forward, now that the Sukarno government had grown understandably paranoid, was to support the Indonesian military directly. They already had anti-communist leanings, and he thought they could be encouraged and guided further. So that's what the official US position became. Meanwhile, despite Frank Wisner undergoing shock therapy in an attempt to mend his increasingly apparent mental illness, he continued aggressively pursuing anti-communist goals.

Here's from Bevins. Behind the scenes, the CIA dreamt up wild schemes. On the softer side, a CIA front called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which funded literary magazines and fine arts. around the world, published and distributed books in Indonesia, such as George Orwell's Animal Farm, and the famous anti-communist collection, The God That Failed. And the CIA discussed simply murdering Sikarno. The agency went so far as to identify the, quote, asset who would kill him, according to

Richard M. Bissell, Weisner's successor as deputy director for plans. Instead, the CIA hired pornographic actors, including a very rough Sikarno lookalike, and produced an adult film in a bizarre attempt to destroy his reputation. So I wanted to interject here and just say that Sukarno was known for being a polygamist. And just every time he'd visit the United States, the CIA had to arrange a procession of sex workers to come and satisfy his insane appetite. And they hated him for it. They thought he was such a weird guy. And they also assumed that the Indonesian people felt the same way about polygamy or fucking.

But the truth is, at the time, the Indonesian people knew exactly what Sukarno was doing. And they'd still love them. They wanted to spread the rumor that Sikarno had slept with a beautiful blonde flight attendant who worked for the KGB and was therefore both immoral and compromised. To play the president, the filmmakers, that is, Bing Crosby and his brother Larry, hired a, quote, Hispanic-looking actor and put him in heavy makeup to make him look a little more Indonesian. They also wanted him bald, since exposing Sikarno, who always wore a hat, as such, might further embarrass him. The idea was to destroy the genuine affection that millions of Indonesians felt for the founding father of their country. The thing was never released, not because this was immoral or a bad idea, but because the team couldn't put together a convincing enough film.

Okay, we're getting word that a helicopter is incoming. Liv, we're going to need you to evacuate through the back door of your building. Okay, that sounds, okay, fun. I'll, I guess I'll see you guys later. It's for the best. We love you. All right, see you guys. The Jakarta Method.

In 1959, Sukarno, in reaction to a variety of regional rebellions backed by the CIA and their preferred Masjumi party, overstepped his constitutional powers and installed what he called guided democracy, which excluded the Masjumi as well as the Indonesian Socialist Party, for example. Despite his aspirations of recreating what Sukarno called a traditional village assembly, he was also assuring his continued position as the government leader. The communist P.I were not happy about this. They wanted to continue their growth within the bounds of open electoralism.

In an MI6 telegram from April 1958, the agency predicted that if another election was held, the PKI would probably win. It quickly became apparent that the military, who were the most anti-communist part of the Power Coalition in Jakarta, had shut down the planned 1959 elections. They had been granted new emergency powers during the regional rebellions and had seen a boost in popularity. They were also fuelling a rise in anti-Chinese sentiment within Indonesia. Meanwhile, the United States was making good inroads with them.

Bevins explained that, quote, by 1962, there were more than 1,000 Indonesians studying operations, intelligence, and logistics, mostly at Fort Leavenworth Army Base. The general consensus among policymakers at the time was that empowering local militaries in foreign countries would accelerate their development. Here's from a 1959 State Department study of then-recent Latin American history. Quote, authoritarianism is required to lead backwards societies through their socioeconomic revolutions, the trend towards military authoritarianism will accelerate as developmental problems become more acute. In April of 1961, the Bay of Pigs incident occurred mere months after

JFK was elected president. It was a failed attempt to ground invade Cuba, run by the CIA, which had trained death squads in Guatemala to overthrow the Castro government following his agrarian reform and nationalization efforts. The failure was devastating to JFK, who had been pressured into greenlining this operation planned way before he had taken office. Things in Vietnam and Cambodia were not going well either. The United States kept failing to unseat leftists and even neutral parties, despite multiple assassination attempts, carpet bombings, massacres, and psychological operations. None of this was jelling with JFK's purported stance on third world nations, that they

should be allowed to forge their own destinies independently. In other countries, similar patterns were emerging. In South Africa, for example, the CIA assisted white South African authorities in arresting Nelson Mandela. In Iraq, where the Communist Party was gaining popularity, the CISO, the CIA was gaining popularity. The CIA backed a coup that brought the Ba'ath party to power, with Saddam Hussein as their U.S.-backed leader. In Brazil, the U.S. government was dissatisfied with President Joan Goulart, who despite

his pro-American stance was carrying out too much reform for their tastes. The CIA trained key military personnel in Fort Leavenworth and inculcated them with anti-communist beliefs, as well as tactics. As usual, they organized right-wing anti-communist rallies and trained death squads to attack any vaguely leftist movements. The U.S. wanted the Brazilian military to overthrow the president and applied economic pressure to Brazil, which in turn fomented unrest and dissatisfaction with Gular. The main Brazilian newspaper, Globo, even published a cartoon portraying Gullar as a literal

devil, accusing him of letting illiterate people vote so that he could turn them into communists. Gullar was forced to flee to Uruguay, tanks rolled in front of Congress, and General Castello Branco was made president in 1964. The U.S. resumed friendly relations with the military dictator and Sukarno became sharply aware that Indonesia might be next. He had just signed a deal with the IMF to supposedly save the Indonesian economy, but the, quote, structural adjustment program had caused prices in the country to double overnight, sometimes even quintuple.

Sukarno was also worried about Malaysia, a young country founded by the British as a neo-colonial outpost which shared borders with Indonesia. The United States was supporting its creation in exchange for British assistance in Vietnam. In 1963, JFK was assassinated. His successor, President Lyndon Johnson, would show much less restraint when it came to interfering in Indonesia's domestic affairs. He found that the counterinsurgency put in place by JFK and the CIA was too incremental to his liking.

He stopped sending aid to Indonesia, minus, of course, the money flowing to its broadly anti-communist military, another growing source of worry for Sukarno. The Indonesian leader, instead of shying away from the issue, grew more defiant. Local leftists were also becoming more publicly anti-American. Bevins explains, On August 17, 1964, Sukarno gave a fiery speech and declared a year of living dangerous. He spoke of a Jakarta-Panampen, Hanoi, Peking, Pyongyang Axis, forged by the course of history and suddenly attacked army generals for profiting off the state enterprises they controlled.

A few months later, in angry retaliation for Malaysia's accession to the UN Security Council, Sukarno decided to pull Indonesia out of the UN in protest. He also accused the CIA of trying to kill him. Mounting tensions pleased the CIA, who were waiting for the leftists in Indonesia, and specifically their Communist Party, the PKK, to make a move so the Americans could have a pretext for a regime change. A secret plan involving the CIA and MI6 was put in place in 1965. It included the usual psychological operations, funding structures, and media propaganda.

The leader of the PQI, a man named Dupa Nusantra Aedit, met with Mao, who expressed worries that American incursions might make armed conflict inevitable. Despite this, the PQI never armed themselves, believing electoralism to be a preferable path. But Mao was correct to worry. Washington was hell-bent on forcing the issue and ready to intervene militarily. Here's from Bevins. 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 Russ to a British official, a meeting of the National Security Council's Secret 303 Committee concluded that, quote, the loss of a nation. of 105 million to the communist camp would make a victory in Vietnam of little meaning. Under Secretary of State George Ball and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, agreed that the loss of Indonesia would be, quote, the biggest thing since the fall of China. Then, between September 30th and October 1st, something strange happened in Jakarta. A group of mid-level military officers kidnapped six military leaders in the night.

Soon after, these generals were executed and their bodies dumped into a well, supposedly an accident. Those responsible then publicly declared that they had independently carried out this operation in reaction to an alleged coup plot against Sukarno. There are multiple theories about what happened next, but the result, within 12 hours, was the crushing of this intra-military movement, the sidelining of President Sukarno, and the rise to power of General Suharto, who was profoundly anti-communist and favored by the United States. Regime change had been achieved in Indonesia, but this was just the beginning. Bevins explains what happened next.

After the events of October 1st, 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. Curiously, General Suharto took command of the armed forces on October 1st, not Nasu Shon, 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 took several key actors weeks to understand that Suharto was actually in charge. Everything Suharto did in October suggests that he was executing an anti-communist counterattack plan that had been developed in advance, not simply reacting to events. Once in command, Suharto ordered that all media be shut down, with the exception of the military outlets he now controlled. After that, Suharto controlled all mass communications.

He accused the P.K.I. of shocking crimes, using deliberate and incendiary falsehoods to whip a hatred against the left across the country. The military spread the story that the PKI was the mastermind of a failed communist coup. Suharto and his men claimed that the Indonesian Communist Party had brought the generals back to Haleem Air Force Base and begun a depraved demonic ritual. They said members of Gawani, the women's movement, danced naked while the women mutilated and tortured the generals, cutting off their genitals and gouging out their eyes before murdering them. They claimed that the PKK had long lists of people they planned to kill and mass graves already prepared. They said China had secretly delivered arms to people's youth brigades.

The army paper, Angertan Bersenjata, armed forces, printed photos of the dead general's bodies, reporting they had been cruelly and viciously slaughtered in acts of torture that were an affront to humanity. So hey, Satanic panic go worldwide. Yeah. And, you know, we'll be talking a bit with Vincent about the connections between all of this anti-communist messaging being so focused on this and how, you know, we're still dealing with bizarre, satanic, you know, conspiracy theories to this day. Obviously, all of this was a lie. And the United States, as well as the international press, supported it. Here's Bevins. The U.S. government assisted Suharto in the crucial early phase of spreading propaganda and establishing his anti-communist narrative. Washington quickly and covertly supplied vital mobile communications equipment to the military, a now declassified October 14 cable indicates.

This was also a tacit admission very early that the U.S. government recognized the army, not Succarno, as the true leader of the country, even though Succarno was still legally the president. The Western Press did its part two. Voice of America, the BBC, and Radio Australia broadcast reports that emphasized Indonesian military propaganda points as part of a psychological warfare campaign to demonize the PQI. These broadcasts reached inside the country in Bahasa Indonesia as well, and Indonesians remember thinking that the credibility of Suharto's narrative was more trustworthy because they heard respected international outlets saying the same thing. This is the part of the story where things get very, very ugly. On October 5th, the State Department received a cable from

the U.S. ambassador in Jakarta, Marshall Green. It read, following guidelines may supply part of the answer to what our posture should be. A. Avoid overt involvement as power struggle unfolds. B. covertly, however, indicate clearly to key people in armies such as Nasushan and Suharto our desire to be of assistance where we can, while at the same time conveying to them our assumption that we should avoid appearance of involvement or interference in any way. C. Maintain and if possible extend our contact with military. D. Avoid moves that might be interpreted as note of non-confidence in army, such as precipitantly moving out our dependence or cutting staff.

E. spread the story of PKI's guilt, treachery, and brutality. This priority effort is perhaps most needed immediate assistance we can give Army if we can find way to do it without identifying it as solely or largely U.S. effort. Green followed this up with another message that said

the Army now has the opportunity to move against the Communist Party if it moves quickly. It's now or never. The military in Indonesia began systematically killing anyone suspected of having communist sympathies. All of them unarmed, starting on the island of Java. The Army newspaper explained that they wanted to, quote, exterminate them down to the roots.

They named the effort Operation Annihilation. Ambassador Green wrote to Washington that if Army repression of PKI continues and Army refuses to give up its position of power to Sukarno, PKI strength can be cut back. In long run, however, army repression of PKK will not be successful unless it is willing to attack communism as such. has nevertheless been working hard at destroying P.K.I. And I, for one, have increasing respect for its determination and organization in carrying out this crucial assignment. Two weeks later, the White House authorized the Bangkok CIA station to provide small arms

to its military contact in central Java, quote, for use against the PQI. They bundled it with medical supplies. Bevins explains, After seven years of close cooperation with Washington, the military was already well-equipped. You also don't need very advanced weaponry to arrest civilians, who provide almost no resistance. What officials and the embassy and the CIA decided the army really did need, however, was information. Working with CIA analysts, embassy political officer Robert Martins prepared lists with the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists and handed them over to the army so that these people could be murdered and checked off the list.

As far as we know, this was at least the third time in history that U.S. officials had supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to allies so that they could round them up and kill them. The first was in Guatemala in 1954, the second was in Iraq in 1963, and now on the much larger scale was Indonesia, 1965. Quote, it really was a big help to the army, said Martens, who was a member of the U.S. Embassy's political section. I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad. Yeah, okay. You know, I don't know what's worst if they were totally not self-aware or the fact that they are self-aware. It's like, yeah, I'm probably responsible for the mass murder, but what you get to do?

On November 22nd, the army located the head of the P.K.I. D.N. Aided and executed him. The military published what they said was a confession from AID in which he admitted that he had been plotting to take over Indonesia. Newsweek ran it in the United States. Meanwhile, the embassy and the CIA knew it was a false confession, since they recognized one of the documents supposedly mentioned by AID. It was propaganda they had helped create. Bevin explains that... U.S. officials were in close contact with the military, making it clear to them that direct assistance could resume if the PKI were destroyed.

Sakarno was removed and attacks on U.S. investments halted. Aid flows were also conditional on Indonesia's willingness to adopt IMF and U.S. approved economic plans. All army leaders seemed to want to know, according to a State Department cable in December, was, quote, how much is it worth it to us that PQI be smashed? It was worth a lot. But U.S. officials were also very alarmed that the military government in waiting had not yet reversed Sukarno's plans to take over U.S. oil companies,

by far their most important economic concern at the time. They, quote, bluntly and repeatedly warned the emerging Indonesian leadership that if nationalization went forward, support from Washington would be withheld, and their grip on power was at stake, according to historian Bradley Simpson's analysis of the declassified communications. The White House enlisted Australian and Japanese officials in the fight. They won. On December 16th, a telegram from Jakarta to the State Department described the victory. Suharto arrived at a high-level meeting by helicopter, strode into the room,

and, quote, made it crystal clear to all assembled that the military would not stand for precipitous moves against oil companies. Then he walked out. The violence spread across the country. Sexual slavery, rape, and mutilation were widespread, and especially targeted women who had been demonized in the campaign. Washington received a memo indicating that, quote, most Politburo and Central Committee members have been killed or arrested, and estimates of the numbers of party members killed range up to several hundred thousand. Oh my God. They celebrated the advances, spoke of connecting the new government with the oil companies, and reiterated their goal to lend support to the military without appearing

responsible for the actions. The New York Times framed the ongoing mass murder as, quote, a nation run amok in, quote, violent Asia, where life is cheap. They repeated the lie to their readers that the communist P.K.I. had killed six generals on the 30th of September. Corporations also joined in. Bevins explains, It wasn't only U.S. government officials who handed over kill list to the army. Managers of U.S. own plantations furnished them with the names of troublesome communists and union organizers who were then murdered. The primary responsibility for the massacres and concentration camps lies with the Indonesian military. We still do not know if

the method employed, disappearance, and mass extermination was planned well before October 19. perhaps inspired by other cases around the world, or planned under foreign direction, or if it emerged as a solution as events unfolded. But Washington shares guilt for every death. The United States was part and parcel of the operation at every stage, starting well before the killing started, until the last body dropped and the last political prisoner emerged from jail, decades later, tortured, scarred, and bewildered. At several points that we know of, and perhaps some we don't, Washington was the prime mover. and provided crucial pressure for the operation to move forward or expand. When the conflict came and when the opportunity arose, the U.S. government helped spread the propaganda that made the killing possible

and engaged in constant conversations with the army to make sure the military officers had everything they needed from weapons to kill lists. The U.S. Embassy constantly prodded the military to adopt a stronger position and take over the government, knowing full well that the method being employed to make this possible was to round up hundreds of thousands of people around the country, stab or strangle them, and throw their corpses into rivers. The Indonesian military officers understood very well. The more people they killed, the weaker the left would be, the happier Washington would be.

Up to a million Indonesians, maybe more, were killed as part of Washington's global anti-communist crusade. The U.S. government expanded significant resources over years engineering the conditions for a violent clash, And then, when the violence broke out, assisted and guided its longtime partners to carry out the mass murder of civilians as a means of achieving U.S. geopolitical goals. And in the end, U.S. officials got what they wanted. It was a huge victory. As historian John Russo puts it, quote, almost overnight, the Indonesian government went from being a fierce voice for Cold War neutrality and anti-imperialism to a quiet, compliant partner of the U.S. world order. But how could the international press and the State Department remain entirely untroubled by the fact that this was achieved through the mass murder of unarmed civilians? Howard Federspiel at the State Department summed up the answer perfectly, quote, no one cared, he recalled, as long as they were communists, that they were being bushered. This is the first intercontinental conference of colored peoples, so-called colored peoples, in the history of mankind.

I am proud that my country is your host. It is a new departure in the history of the world that leaders of Asian and African peoples can meet together in their own countries to discuss and deliberate upon matters of common concern in spite of diversity that exists among its participants let this conference be a great success We are speaking to journalist and author Vincent Bevins, who wrote The Jakarta Method, which we based this episode on.

He's going to help us get a deeper understanding, hopefully, of what happened after the events of 1965 in Indonesia. Vincent, thanks for joining us. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. First of all, the book is really great. You interviewed a lot of people as part of your research for it. How did you go about that, and how was that very kind of direct experience? Yeah, I mean, I think if I had tried to write this book sort of straight without tracking, down the people and making it into sort of a narrative, it would have taken me two years less

than it did. So the decision to really go out and meet the people that had lived through this that had survived this was quite laborious, but I think it was worth it. And the reason it was laborious is because I'm American. And to come as somebody from the United States to speak to these people, inherently the walls go up, right? It's like, you know, these people watched all their friends and family to some extent killed with the backing of the United States government. So the real work was to slowly explain to everybody what my project was, earned the trust of gatekeepers, have them introduce me to other people, have them introduce me to other people, and then finally slowly figure out who actually wanted to talk about this, because a lot of people

would say, oh yeah, we'll do the interview and you got the sense that I don't know this is going to be too hard, they don't really want to talk about it. So that took a long time and it was just like patience. I just moved to a city where a lot of survivors lived and I slowly let it be known what I was trying to do until I could really form close relationships with people that really wanted to be in the book. And I think it was worth it because I got a sense in a way that I didn't have before I started the research of what these people really believed in. To what extent they really thought that they were going to win, that they thought that it was natural and obvious that once formal decolonization had taken place in the Global South or the Third World as they

were calling it, that they would be able to sort of take their rightful place as equals of the first and second world. And the extent to which the massacre was possible because they did not see it coming. They did not see themselves as rebels. They saw themselves as part of an obvious and an organic movement to reshape their country. And they thought they were doing, they thought they were the good guys. There was no sense in which they thought that they were sort of guerrillas in the mountains like Che Guevar and that they were risking their lives. It was seen as sort of, you know, yeah, yeah, we're all working together on this revolutionary project to sort of change, you know, move away from imperialism and savage capitalism. So, yeah, I'm really glad that I went that

route, even though it wasn't easy sort of in terms of time or sort of psychologically. I think it was, at some points, it was quite difficult to go through all this with these people, but I'm glad I did. And so we've kind of gone through what happened as Suharto rose and the massacres took place. But we haven't really explored how these kind of mass murder techniques employed by the military and their U.S. allies became known internationally as the Jakarta method, which is the title of your book. So could you tell us a bit more about that? Yeah. So although we've largely forgotten about this event in the English-speaking world, in 1965, this was a big deal. People in the actors in the Cold War, whether left or right, found out about this. This

was an explosion. I mean, this was the largest unarmed communist party, perhaps the largest democratic socialist movement in history decimated through mass murder. So on both ends of that political spectrum, you have different responses to what happened in Indonesia in 1965. On the left, you saw a lot of groups come to the conclusion that unarmed democratic struggle just doesn't work. We need to get guns. We need to go into the hills. We need to become militantly self-defense or else we might be killed like them. And there's a few cases I trace in the book, some more famous than others, of groups that decided,

oh, this means we need to really radicalize. Now, on the right, allies of the U.S., potential allies of the U.S., far-right movements, anti-communist groups around the world, came to a different conclusion. They looked at what had happened in Indonesia, and they said, well, we could do that. And not only can we do it, it will work.

This will be an effective way at consolidating. power and eliminating perceived enemies in the construction of an authoritarian capitalist regime, the most powerful government in the history of the world will help us get away with it and help us launder our reputation afterwards. We'll be welcomed into the so-called free world with open arms and the United States will do everything in their power to sort of make sure we get away with it. So the use of the word Jakarta to denote intentional mass murder of leftists or accused leftists, comes about in the early 70s and both Chile and Brazil at the exact same time. So everything that I refer to as the Jakarta method in this book does not happen after

1965. I think the things that lead up to 1965 also should count as part of this unofficial loose network of mass murder starting Guatemala in 1954, probably. But the use of the word Jakarta starts in both Chile and Brazil in the early 70s publicly in Chile and secretly in Brazil. So because the Brazilian military, which had taken power in a U.S. Bactiou in 1964, was collaborating so closely with the Chilean right wing that was seeking to oppose or overthrow democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende.

Because they were working so close, I think it's safe to assume that this wasn't a coincidence that it came up. This word was used at the same time in the same way by both of these groups. But publicly, what you saw was on the streets of Salvador, the capital, of Chile, a graffiti campaign that said things like Jakarta is coming or simply Jakarta. And this was probably a campaign, one of many, carried out by far right terrorists with the backing of the United States to say basically to the Chilean left supporters of Aende government employees, we're going to kill you just like we, just like the Indonesian military killed

their communists. And then we have also evidence of a plan within the Brazilian military to kill communists with the name of Operation Jakarta, Operation Jakarta. Now, that one was not carried out. We believe that they abandoned it partially. What's a complex story about the end of the hardest line in the Brazilian military dictatorship? But Jakarta in Chile, tragically did come in 1973 when the CIA eventually succeeds in assisting in the overthrow of the end.

and the junta eventually led by Pinochet take over, they do kill precisely the people that they had said they were going to kill in this campaign. And I met one of the widows of one of the more famous cases. And then these two countries ended up sponsoring a lot more mass murder around South America. But the entrance of that word onto the scene was 72 and 73 in South America. Before we get into that part of things in Operation Condor, I wanted to explore a little bit Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Because after 1965, the CIA partook in something they called the Phoenix program. So what was that? This is really interesting because, of course, we know about Vietnam as a war, you know, with regular U.S. soldiers on the ground. But the Phoenix program, led by the CIA,

notably starting after 1965 in Indonesia, was an assassination program. And the goal was to kill civilian members of the National Liberation Front or Viet Cong, civilian members, that is, to find these people, track them down and simply murder them. The total death count is hard to pin down, but it's certainly tens of thousands of people. And one really interesting thing about this to me, and I think it helps to underline a point that I keep trying to make in the book over and over. is that one of the men involved in the formation of the Phoenix operation had also been a veteran of the Bay of Pigs.

Then he had joined the CIA and led the operation that ended up hunting down and executing Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. And then after that, he gets moved to the Phoenix program in Vietnam. So one thing that we really fail to understand, I think, fully enough is the ways in which the anti-communist far right was an international movement that moved across borders that had formal and informal networks with which they shared personnel tactics, tips, plans, and very often with the support of the United States. So, I mean, it was, it's like, we all know about the sort of like, quote-unquote

international communist conspiracy. It's probably more accurate to speak of an international anti-communist conspiracy, although there was something of both. So tell us about what happened in Brazil and what was Operation Condor. Yeah. So as I said in 1973, you get the junta taking power with the backing of the United States, of course, in Chile. Brazil, whose military dictatorship had been very active in trying to make this happen, had been on the scene for a long time. And by 1975, these two countries, including other military dictatorships in South America, they get together to solve a problem, what they see is a problem.

And that is they're having an easy time killing all their. enemies in their own countries, but what happens when they escape across the border? What happens if they want to kill somebody somewhere else? So Operation Condor is essentially an international mass murder network that they can use to kill their perceived enemies in other countries. And this was sometimes leftist. This was sometimes, I mean, in the case of Chile, they killed former high-ranking officials in the military that had simply been against the coup and wanted to speak out about what had happened. And they successfully traded information. using, we believe, a sort of proto-internet supplied by the United States government.

The sort of like basic sort of telex machine was the sort of digital, we're not digital, technological infrastructure for Operation Condor. And these countries, Operation Condor member countries, killed tens of thousands of people. So now, while Chile killed probably 3,000 in the initial years after the 1973 coup, Operation Condor killed tens of thousands of people. Well, Operation Condor itself killed less, but Operation Condor member countries killed tens of thousands of people throughout South America and in the United States. So one really famous case is the murder in Washington, D.C. of Orlando Letelier, and this was, you know, shocking to say the least. And, you know, they had operations in Europe

as well. And in the 1980s, when Central America became the perceived problem area for Washington, They sent advisors up to Central America to train and help Central American dictatorships with the repressive methods that they were using and that they were going to use. And in the 80s, you did see the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people for being left wing or accused of being left wing, often just for being from the wrong ethnic tribe. I mean, certain indigenous groups were coded as inherently leftist in a very racist way by, for example, the Guatemalan authorities. and that was enough to get your entire village exterminated. I went to one of these villages that had the vast majority of its men exterminated in the early 80s. That's so recent that Elliot Abrams, who was overseeing that stuff,

is like still a big power player. Like, he just came back. We have to deal with him on fucking Twitter still. Yeah, he's the guy. I mean, his job was to play defense for the Reagan administration and claim that everything that was, all the reports coming out of Central America were communist propaganda that we were standing up for human rights

in the region. And yeah, he was back. Trump brought him back. It was really insane to see him come back. And it was quite insane to see Ilhan Omar actually call him on that in a way that like you could see, but like the shock on his face. Like he didn't think that anybody would ever do that. But I mean, it's not like she, you know, nothing much ever happened. I mean, he's still a huge member of the foreign policy establishment in D.C. And so now we've looked at all of these different countries. There's a great map in your book that shows all the different places and the numbers. But you also get into these five major ways that you think the anti-communist Cold War Crusade change the world. And also, you kind of explore what it means for the United States and its

allies to, you know, win this, quote unquote. So can you tell us a bit more about that? Yeah, I'll go through those five ways quickly. But, you know, before that, just to say, the U.S. won the Cold War, you know, absolutely. And if we think about the Cold War in the narrow terms that are usually implied that the Cold War is something that happened between Washington and Moscow, then the Cold War ended because Moscow collapsed, sort of committed suicide on accident, I would say it, is what happened. But I think it's just as correct, if not more, so to view the Cold War is something that happened between the first and the third world, with the first being the aggressor in the third world, the victim. And certainly, countries in the

global South were more affected by the Cold War than I think either the Soviet Union or the United States were. And the way that they lived through this, this, this 40 year period profoundly affected their trajectories. So, um, the five ways that I lay out in, in the end of the book is that is the one, and this is the most obvious one, is the trauma, often unresolved trauma in the countries. I mean, just the people that I met that were, are still treated like trash, like witches, like, like, like subhumans, um, for having been part of the left in, in the global South. You're talking about survivors of 1965, who are still thought of as, which is basically like this feminist movement

that was demonized in all of the in all of the propaganda, right? Yeah, Guirwanis is the Indonesian women's movement may have been the largest feminist movement in the world at the time. And, you know, it was associated with the Communist Party like many other groups were, but it was, again, something that you would join

because you were into sort of, you wanted to stand up for women's education, sort of relevant to the questions in Afghanistan now. You were fighting against patriarchy, you were fighting against female general immunolation, but in 1965, a big part of the story that was told and maybe went into this is that they had performed a tantric, demonic sex ritual, which consisted of castrating and murdering Indonesian generals. All this was made up, perhaps with the assistance of MI6.

And to this day, the women that I met through, you know, for this book are, you know, still shunned in their communities. People, you know, if people find out you're a communist, they're going to say, say you're a Gawani, you're a witch, totally cut off, often living in poverty, several times. The people that I've met for this book reached out to me saying, can you know, can you raise some money on the internet, to pay for rent, to pay for rice, and basic supplies for this community, which, you know, luckily, it's not hard to do on Twitter when people have dollars.

But yeah, so that's number one, this trauma. And it's very real and it's very hard. for, I would say, tens of millions of people in Indonesia, not only the survivors, but their families and children and grandchildren. The second way is that this particular anti-communist crusade, as I call it, the particular way that the Cold War was fought destroyed a number of alternative possibilities for global development. So, right, the third world movement was trying to reshape the entire world economy

and to make things more equal between the white North Atlantic powers and everybody else. admittedly, this was a very difficult thing to do. You know, it was going to be hard no matter what, but it doesn't help when the most powerful country in human history is trying to crush you. And it was crushed. And I think, sort of if you asked me for sort of like a three or four sentence summary of the book, now like a couple years after I've written it, I might say that, you know, the Cold War was about neo-colonialism. So number three, not only was there sort of this macro geopolitical relationship set, also like microeconomic conditions in each country were profoundly shaped by this anti-communist violence, right? So the type of capitalism that these countries got,

Brazil, Indonesia, Chile, East Timor, you know, was profoundly affected by the fact that the governments that took power did so through mass violence aimed at quote-unquote communists. And the way that this took form concretely is that the type of back and forth that you're, you get in sort of undergraduate economics and political science textbooks in the United States cannot happen when anybody that makes any claims on the state can be labeled a communist and swept outside the body politic, right? So anything, all of the kind of labor struggles and all of the kind of sort of natural give and take that you would have seen in North Atlantic capitalism could not take place. And a lot of leftists in the global north don't like the use of the term

crony capitalism because the claim is like, no, all capitalism is crony capitalism. think there's something to that. But when you're talking about the difference between the type of capitalism and the Brazil got and the type of capitalism that say, you know, France and Germany got in the same period, there's a real difference. I think I use crony capitalism just to name the form in the Global South. And, you know, it's really, it really consists of having sort of oligarchical semi-futal relations surviving. And that's because the sort of naturally, let's say, the reform movements that history naturally produces to get rid of those were crushed. So you end up with a really deformed capitalism.

Fourth, they deformed the world socialist movement in the ways that I kind of described quickly. Like a lot of regimes became intensely paranoid and self-defense in ways, which I think were not good for them or their populations in the long term, even if you can absolutely understand why they did so. some of the more extreme cases that I point to in the book, I think, end up at a place that no one really wanted to be, even if you can trace how they got there and why they were so afraid. And then finally, there's the legacy of the fanatical anti-communist trope in global politics, not on the United States, but in the global South. I mean, this is still something, these are still phantoms that you can summon to go to battle for you when you need them to cue, you know, the red menace, the communist under your head. It's more pronounced in places like Indonesia, where it's illegal to claim any, you know,

it's illegal to be accused in any way of supporting communism or Brazil, where you have a violent anti-communist vowing to or saying that he would like to kill tens of thousands of leftists. But it's also there in the United States as well. So that's, it took a while to get through them, but those are the five ways. And so listening to you talk about. you know, the supposed Gerwani rituals, it just reminded me so much of the stories being told within QAnon. So I was wondering, because you do mention this a little bit in the book, do you think the anti-communist crusade fueled conspiracy theories, like, globally, but also,

you know, specifically in the United States and, you know, within the context of belief systems like QAnon. Yeah, I mean, I, QAnon, like, the deep lore is something that I think you know way better than I do, but I was very shocked to see, like, flags waving. like on the street of my childhood home and I went back for Christmas last year. And the thing that I always say about the relationship between that kind of stuff in my work is that there were so many real conspiracies employed by the U.S. government and other governments as well, but I think really notably by the U.S. government in the 20th century, that seems so insane that you are never really like owned up to.

Like you can sort of, there's this, there's this sort of insane state of affairs on the internet where it only takes one or two clicks to find out something that the United States did in the Cold War that is insane. I mean, you know, MK Ultra dosing sort of black men in American cities with LSD in the attempt to control their minds. And, you know, like Operation Northwoods, the plan to murder American citizens in Florida and use that as a pretext to invade Cuba. It only takes two or three clicks to find out something mind-boggling that absolutely happened. But still, like, you don't hear, it's not in the official discourse. It's not like MS. NBC talks about that stuff. It's not like CNN talks about that stuff. Certainly don't

learn it in elementary school. So after the 1975 Church Commission, when a lot of this stuff came out, yeah, I think that sort of broke American brains to this day. And I think in the long term, if you actually wanted to combat conspiracy theory, if elites were really concerned about ending, you know, this dangerous phenomenon of conspiracism in society, and we could debate whether or not they really are, they would have to tell the truth about past conspiracies and stop using conspiracy to run the world. But perhaps conspiratorily, I think, I sometimes suspect if they do really want to combat conspiracism or if they're kind of fine with the way things are going. You have a passage in the book about Obama, which I didn't expect. But, you know, it makes sense

since he grew up in Jakarta. How do you think his life there shaped him in his presidency? Two things are really striking about this period in which Obama moved to Jakarta because of the mass murder. His stepfather was called back. His stepfather worked for the military, and he was in Hawaii, and the Indonesian military said, you got to come back. Young Barry and his mother went back a few months later. Yeah, two things are really striking about this.

And one, one comes up all the time on the internet. And I always have to kind of like parse the reality is that his father absolutely worked for the military in the wake of the massacre. So, you know, worked for the body that had carried this out just years after they had done so. and his mother worked for the U.S. embassy in the same period in which the U.S. government and its business partners back in the United States were profiting from this mass violence. So there's always some, like, conspiracy theories that pop out to like, ah, his mother was CIA or Barack Obama was, you know what, like, you don't really need to make up more stuff. I mean, who knows, but it's all right there. And he lays it out pretty strikingly in dreams from my father.

Like, he says that his mother is working at the embassy and realizes that everybody's a spook and is doing unspeakable things and there's horribleness everywhere and that his mother found herself a part of it and didn't like it. So it's, to me, really remarkable how clear-eyed he was about all of that. And, you know, when you contrast that with the way that he run the U.S. government, that he ran the U.S. government, sorry, that's also quite striking. Like, it seemed like when he wrote Dreams for My Father, he had a pretty deep understanding of the way that U.S. imperialism has operated. And when he came in, we all know sort of what happened to his promises on the anti-war front.

Speaking just very personally, like, it reminded me of the way that Kennedy took office. Like, whatever you think you want to do with the U.S. presidency, I think you get there and you realize that it is its own strong. with its own capabilities. Like, you know, there's, you show up and on the dashboard, there's only a few buttons and most of them are like bomb, invade, crush, you know, like, so you got to press one of those buttons. And I think, I don't know, maybe this is me projecting entirely my own personal research onto this man, but it seems like he got there and was profoundly disillusioned with what

the presidency actually is and can do. And ever since then, he should be like, oh, screw this. I'm just going to, like, go hang out with famous people. If you want to compare James from my father to his more recent comments on that period in history, it's really interesting because back then when he was not yet a major, measure, political figure, he's quite honest about the dynamics of a developing country and being from the global north in that kind of a horrible situation. I think this is a perfect time to bring up Afghanistan, the war that he didn't end.

But now, you know, his vice president at the time, Biden, you know, just did a withdrawal of the U.S. troops. we saw, I think, like, within four days of the intelligence agencies predicting a potential within 90-day fall of Kabul. We watched a fall of Kabul within four. You know, in terms of how this fits with U.S. foreign policy patterns that you describe in your book, you know, do you think that there's something to be said there? Yeah, I mean, I'm, of course, watching this constantly trying as much as possible to understand what's happening. I don't really understand what's really happening on the ground.

I'm, I'm, you know, profoundly interested in how this withdrawal actually happened and all of the dynamics that led up to this moment. But yeah, I guess two things pop out to me, again, in a very typically human way, like related to my own work and prejudices. But in the Jakarta method, I quote quite a bit, a very respected mainstream historian, Adorn Westad, or I don't know, maybe it's like Od or Arnavestad, I don't know, like it's a Scandinavian name. And he, you know, he takes a really big step back from U.S. history. And this is really a privilege that you get when you write a historical book is to take a hugely wide lens like this. And he uses that lens to look at the United States and it's, you know, not that long history and says, well, basically this

has been a country that has been militarist and expansionist at every period in its history. It has always had some enemy that it is using to justify aggression with military force somewhere. So he slots the war on terror into the space that the Cold War had occupied. Like basically, you know, you use this metaphor earlier of the control panel. It's like, well, you know, on the screen you had Cold War, you pull that out, you slot in war on terror and a lot of the same mechanisms, a lot of the same people. are at work in fighting it. And, of course, I think a lot of your listeners will know about, you know, CIA support for various Islamist factions in Afghanistan, late 70s and early 80s,

with the goal of bleeding the Soviets dry, creating a Vietnam for them, but not, of course, really caring too much with the long-term outcome was as we got into the 90s. So, you know, this is all related in a long-term way to the Cold War, although Taliban now is, you know, not the exact same thing. anyway, as the groups that the CIA funded back then, it's pretty clear that their goal was to give a Vietnam to the Soviet Union. And, you know, the long, you know, I think, you know, that's, that story's fairly well-known. And then another thing that just like I keep thinking about, and I don't even know if it's relevant,

but I can't stop thinking about it as East Timor. In 1975, Suharto, the general that was, you know, one of our best allies in the Cold War in Indonesia, invades the tiny half island of East Timor after Portuguese decolonization using, again, anti-communism as his justification for doing so, killing about a third of the population in the consequent crushing of the uprising. And eventually when, I went to East Timor when I was working in Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, and when the Indonesian military, I mean, the Indonesian military was awful there, really horrible stories of Team Marie's resistance fighters and women having to, you know, go to horrible lengths

to mount some kind of an opposition to their occupation. But when they eventually did have to go, eventually there was a referendum and it was the late 90s and when they did have to go, they intentionally left in such a way that was supposed to make the people of East Timor sorry for kicking them out. And to this day, very tragically, you can kind of see like, oh, man, like they really did a number on this place. You know, it was different. They didn't just flee. There was kind of a scorched earth policy on the way out. They really were aggressive about it. But I wonder if this dynamic is not common in episodes of imperial retrenchment. When empires have to shrink a little bit, at the very least, they want to make everybody

feel like it's a bad thing that they are. And I wonder to what extent we'll find out later. I mean, this is again purely speculative. We'll find out later that, you know, some people in the many, many layers of the Pentagon wanted it to, to, wanted to be able to, to, to be able to spin the narrative that we should have stayed. Well, thanks so much for lending us your time. Where can people go by the Jakarta method? Luckily, it's most places. If you can't find it at my website,

Vincentbevins.com, I have another website, which is the Jakarta Method.com just says like a list of all the places you can get it around the world or if you didn't want to avoid Amazon and things. But yeah, I've been really, like, really grateful that this book actually has sort of generated some interest. I didn't expect this at all.

So luckily it is out there in the world. And where can people find you and your work online? Yeah, through Twitter. Twitter is like the only way. Place that I like truly exist anymore. It's, you know, my name on there is Vince with 2N, so V-I-N-C-E-N-C-E-N-T. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Hey, thank you so much for having me and for your interest in this.

If you're interested in Indonesia and looking for a more artistic approach, I can't recommend enough a couple of movies by Joshua Oppenheimer, the act of killing and the look of silence. And you can probably find those online pretty easily. Thanks for listening to another premium episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast. Because of your subscription, you've helped us to stay advertising free, editorially independent, and we are eternally grateful. Listener, until next week, may the spirit of Bandung bless you and keep you.

It's not a conspiracy, it's fact. And now, today's auto Q. America says welcome in a big way to President Sukarn. Vice President Nixon and State Secretary Dulles are on hand at Washington's National Airport to greet the 54-year-old Indonesian Chief of State here on an 18-day tour. The U.S. sees in the visit an opportunity to show our sympathy and support for newly independent nations, such as Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies. Although newly independent, Indonesia is neutralist.

President Sukarno has full praise for our democratic traditions, says his country looks to America as the center of an ideal. Warm praise indeed, to which America's leader responds with equal warmth. It's a high-level welcome at the White House where President Eisenhower comes down to greet his visitor. Afterwards, Mr. Eisenhower entertained Dr. Sukarno

at a state luncheon, and as this country's top salesman of friendship and goodwill accorded him other courtesies. 12-year-old Gunter Sukarno shares in the warmth of America's hello.