Who are the No. 1 War Criminals?

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The Secret State

Former intelligence analyst David F. Rudgers of the Central Intelligence Agency recently published Creating the Secret State⁶. It is quite normal to take half a century before sufficient documents will have become available to begin to get a correct picture of what actually happened. In 1882 the us Navy established the first intelligence unit ever. It was in 1920 followed up with the Military Intelligence Division (MLD), writes Rudgers, and operated within the command of the General Staff (G-2). It happened during the deterioration of the international situation in the 30s that ‘the geopolitical thinking of us policy makers’ changed. The Germans were using fifth-columnists as spies. Only in 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt at last sent a few important ministers a confidential directive, that espionage, sabotage and counter-intelligence matters needed to be investigated.

In those days we see William J. Donovan, who was nicknamed ‘Wild Bill’, when serving in the National Guard along the border with Mexico, emerging as the first American espionage Czar. He led a Law firm in New-York, that made him a millionaire. He was also a Republican. Roosevelt, dissatisfied with the reporting of ambassador Joseph Kennedy in London, replaced him with Donovan. Rudgers discovered how Donovan's mind gradually became fascinated with the possibilities of ‘secret warfare’. Wild Bill admired the UK intelligence services and the British aptitude for clandestine operations. He wrote many letters to Roosevelt and members of the cabinet suggesting Washington followed suit. Historian Rudgers describes in minute detail how gradually the unification of various us intelligence organisations led to the foundation of one central spy organisation, the cia. During this process of change, the image of Donovan obtained godlike proportions. Nobody wanted a us Gestapo for countering the Kremlin, wrote Rudgers, but, in fact, that is what the cia eventually turned out to be. When Pinochet in Chili or general Suharto in Indonesia looked for practical ways to put tens of thousands of political prisoners behind bars, they urged Washington for assistance and advice. In Chili as well as in Indonesia us undercover assistence was generously provided to assist in setting up regular concentration camps, in both countries.

March 16, 1945 ambassador Donovan sent President Roosevelt (fdr) a copy of a portion of Great Britain's Official Secrets Act, ‘which imposed harsh penalties on persons seeking or receiving security classified material, suggesting it could serve as a model for action at a later time,’ reported Rudgers.⁷ fdr and Wild Bill became the fathers of the Office of Strategic Services (oss). Obviously President Truman had less patience with the ostentatious Donovan. Rudgers discovered in the Washington files only one meeting of 15 minutes between the two

6 David F. Rudgers, Creating the Secret State, University Press of Kansas, 2000.

7 David F. Rudgers, Creating the Secret State, University Press of Kansas, 2000, p.p. 30.

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men on May 14, 1945. J. Edgar Hoover of the fbi also belonged to Donovan's enemies. Allen Dulles was running the oss Office in Switzerland at the time and would later become cia director. However, in 1961 he inflicted irrepable damage on jfk with his crazy cia adventure on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs. President Kennedy discharged Allen Dulles six months later.

Harry Truman dissolved the oss on September 20, 1945. After an intermediate period of two years the cia opened for business on September 18, 1947. America had finally legalized its way to fight shadow warfare. The invisible government had become a fact of life and a decisive factor in the Cold War, which was just warming up between the former partners who had, as allies, fought against the Axis powers.

Rudgers reaches at the closure of his research an unusual conclusion. With the defeat of the enemy in 1945 Donovan's oss ceased to have a purpose and was promptly closed down. However, the post war rise of ‘the evil empire’ permitted the uninterrupted existence of the cia till the ussr imploded in 1991 on its own accord. Next, the writer seems to believe, that ‘intelligence, as it has been understood since World War II, is a dying business.’ He added, ‘The cia has entered its second half century of existence striving to avoid the fate of its oss parent.’ I disagree profoundly.

One year after Rudgers wrote these lines, Bush II descending from former cia director Bush I, arrived in the centre of Washington power.

I therefore strongly contend, that while the cia spent the second half of the 20th century containing the Soviet-Union, the state within the state situation will last uninterruptedly until China at last is permanently brought into line by 2050. Of course, it all depends on whether the us by that time has retained its own uncontested status of super power. The way the world is developing in the 21st century makes this expectation far from certain. In other words, in my view, contrary to David Rudgers, the cia has in the foreseeable future still a bright fuure and lots of covert operations to carry out, including, military invasions, the usual coup d'états, assassinations, firing of cruise missiles into sovereign states, which misbehaved in the view of Washington. And who knows, perhaps the poisoned cigars, that did not do it for Fidel, might be used on somebody else. The us spy genie is out of the bottle anyway, courtesy Wild Bill Donovan and associates.

I entered journalism in 1953 as foreign editor of the daily, Algemeen Handelsblad in Amsterdam. After two years in the Amsterdam bureau of the United Press I worked in June 1956 as correspondent for De Telegraaf in Rome, Italy, when President Sukarno of Indonesia arrived on a state-visit. I interviewed him and left later that year for Jakarta on assignment for the Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant and other papers. After covering Indonesia for one year, (1956-1957) I became June 10, 1958, permanent correspondent at United Nations headquarters in New-York

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till the 70s. I lectured from coast to coast on foreign affairs for W. Colston Leigh lecture bureau in New-York. It was then that I first looked into us policy vis à vis Southeast Asia. I talked to the Under Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs at the State Department, Walter S. Robertson, who saw me with an aide, Marshall Green, who in 1965 was us ambassador in Jakarta during the second cia coup against Sukarno. Having just spent one year in Indonesia, and having gotten to know Sukarno first hand, I was dumb founded to listen to the incoherent nonsense from two ‘experts’ at the State Department. Robertson and Green should have been fired for incompetence.

Professor George McTurnan Kahin and Audrey R. Kahin published in 1995 Subversion as Foreign Policy, The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia.⁸ Only 37 years later Washington released sufficient documents about this first 1958 cia coup in Indonesia that professionals like the Kahin's were able to print a reliable reconstruction of events. They stressed, for instance, that us ambassador John Allison strongly disagreed with opinions in Washington on Sukarno or Indonesia, but he was incapable of making himself heard to the men who had already taken the decision to let the cia overthrow Sukarno. I met Allison. He seemed an extremely unhappy man. Washington left him out in the cold. He was still unaware his superiors were planning to oust Sukarno altogether. When the cia coup took place he resigned as ambassador.

The reason why, at least in the minds of the Washington experts, Sukarno had to go was, that he had become a security risk. He was buying equipment for his armed forces in Moscow. He did so, since Washington had turned him down earlier. Sukarno went in 1956 on his first foreign state-visit since Indonesia became independent from Holland, to the United-States. Eisenhower received him correctly but with reserve. He was already listening to guys like Robertson and Green and becoming misinformed. He received an invitation for a return visit to Jakarta, but never bothered to go. Later in 1956 Sukarno went to Moscow and invited the Soviet head-of-state, Marshall Kliment Voroshilov to Indonesia. The Russian came in 1957 and Washington cried foul. Bernard Kalb, New York Times correspondent in Jakarta began writing articles hinting of Sukarno's tilt towards Moscow and Peking. Kalb's reports were nuts, because from my own contacts with Sukarno I knew this to be most definitely untrue. Yet, his articles carried weight in Washington and worked in favour of guys like Robertson and Green. I knew Kalb as a colleague in Jakarta and mistrusted him. When in the eighties he became State Department spokesman for Reagan and Shultz the true man revealed himself at last. A professional journalist can never ever become a slave to His Master's Voice. It is also true, that Kalb later resigned in protest over Shultz' agreement with Reagan over a terrorist attack by us warplanes on Lybia.

‘Apparently even more myopic than Allen Dulles as

8 George McTurnan Kahin, Audrey R. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy, The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia, University of Washington Press, 1995.

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to the realities of the Indonesian scene,’ wrote the Kahin's, ‘was the commander in chief of us Pacific Forces (cincpac), Admiral Felix Stump, who clearly at this time inclined toward military intervention.’⁹ Walter Robertson was convinced Indonesia would break up, once a cia coup was underway. He sent an official, Gordon Mein, to Jakarta to assess the situation. He concurred with ambassador Allison and his staff, and reported to Washington quite correctly that a break-up of Indonesia following a cia coup was unlikely. But the warmongers persisted. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Radford even believed that the Indonesian military would work with the us if worst came to the worst and he asked for a prompt survey in order to be ready if fast military action in Indonesia became necessary.

February 10, 1958 colonel Ahmad Hussein signed a proclamation announcing per ultimatum the arrival of the Pemerintah Revolusioner Republik Indonesia (prri) on February 15, 1958. The Kahin's discovered how Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers had become ‘deeply worried’ about growing Communist influence on Java in the summer of 1957. I had joined President Sukarno on a sea voyage to eastern parts of the republic in August. Several ministers, ambassadors and journalists travelled with him. Among them was professor Guy Pauker of the Rand Corporation in California, a thinktank with strong links to the cia. But this connection was unknown at the time. Pauker asked me, ‘since you seem to know the president well, will you introduce me?’ In 1957, I was unfamiliar with cia machinations. So, unsuspecting, I set up a dawn meeting at 06.00 a.m. with the President, when I knew him to be up early for tea and breakfast. I never discovered whether at least Sukarno was aware, that a cia informer travelled in 1957 on the same ship in his presidential party. Pauker must have been one of the sources to the idiots in Washington who suspected Sukarno of turning into a crypto communist.

The Kahin researchers further discovered that the Eisenhower Administration enlisted not only the cia and large supplies of modern us military equipment but also substantial components of the us Seventh Fleet and American planes and pilots together with supporting personnel, facilities and supplies from the Chinese on Taiwan and the government of the Philippines. Washington even received modest help from Britain and Australia, classical imperialist minded powers, always ready to fish in troubled Indonesian waters, even in Timor.

In their closing comment, the Kahin's observed, that Eisenhower's attempt to manipulate the politics of Indonesia had been ‘glaringly counterproductive.’ ‘Aimed at changing the character of that country's government to conform to what were perceived to be American interests, it actually strengthened those elements the Administration had sought to eliminate or weaken and destroyed those whom it wished to reinforce.’ This felicitous con-

9 George McTurnan Kahin, Audrey R. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy, The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia, University of Washington Press, 1995, p.p. 86.

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clusion by the Kahin's says in a nutshell what has been wrong with us Foreign Policy since World War II. Time after time, Washington decision-makers deluded themselves by projecting their anti-communist obsessions to foreign lands and their leaders, often contrary to expert advice by American diplomats or observers on the ground. In the case of Sukarno, Roger Hilsman, Director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and research during the jfk Administration observed in To Move a Nation¹⁰: ‘Before President Sukarno's visit to Washington in 1961, Kennedy remarked in conversation that when you considered things like the cia's support to the 1958 rebellion, Sukarno's frequently anti-American attitude was understandable.’

Between 1956-1966 I observed Sukarno in action in Indonesia itself or abroad, like in 1960 at the United Nations, when he delivered an epoch-making speech, ‘To build the world anew,’ or in Washington, San-Francisco, Teheran, Ankara, Copenhagen. Bonn, Venice and many other places. Sukarno was never at any time anti-American as Hilsman suggests. Neither was he anti-Dutch, because the colonialists locked him up for more than eleven years to prevent him from leading the march to freedom for the peoples of the Dutch East Indies. He disliked us Foreign Policy and Dutch colonialism. He was contemptuous of American and Dutch politicians, who called him names and insulted him without having a clue what he really was about. Or, as in the case of Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers, who in 1958 engineered a coup to topple him, at best, he felt contempt for them as misfits produced by a Secret State that should not even be there.

10 Roger Hillsman, To Move a Nation, Doubleday & Co, New-York, 1967 p.p. 363.