Who are the No. 1 War Criminals?

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Sukarno

Indonesia declared Independence August 17, 1945. Sukarno became the first president of the fourth largest country in the world. Mohammed Hatta was his running-mate and became vice-president. The Dutch colonialists considered this declaration of freedom illegal and sent an Army to restore ‘order’. Holland launched two so-called police actions to destroy Sukarno's young Republic. Indonesia's foreign service had just been created and was working overtime in Washington. They hired lawyer Joseph Borkin to approach individual us Senators for help. A letter written by Borkin and signed by a dozen Senators got to President Truman's desk suggesting a withdrawal of us Marshall Plan aid to Holland if military actions against Indonesia were not halted forthwith. The trick worked. The Dutch Government withdrew its troops and transferred sovereignty December 30, 1949.

Borkin, an American Jew, became a close friend of the President of the world's largest Muslim nation. In 1978 Borkin published The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben with subtitle: The startling account of the unholy alliance of Adolf Hitler and Germany's great chemical combine.²² The Wall Street Journal called the book ‘a masterly account of an industrial machine gone mad.’ Joe was for many years a friend of mine. He kept all his documentation on Indonesia, including personal letters from Sukarno at hand, and was planning a book about the Indonesian President. An untimely heart failure ended Joe's life. His reminiscences about Sukarno were never written.

Naturally, the Washington intelligence fraternity was convinced, they knew best what kind of leftist fellow-travelling chap Sukarno really was. Already in 1950 a Dutch soldier of fortune, Werner Verrips, was commissioned to investigate how Sukarno could be gotten rid of in an unobtrusive manner. With his partners he robbed on December 20, 1950 a bank in Surabaya, East Java, to finance this bravado enterprise. Verrips was arrested, spent a number of years in an Indonesian jail, returned to Holland, resumed his undercover activities and died in an automobile accident December 4, 1964.

The 1958 cia coup against Sukarno I referred to earlier. In between there were at least five attempts on Sukarno's life, who all failed. A second full scale coup occurred in 1965. I saw it coming. So did Sukarno. It was for a long time in the works. In 1962 Ujeng Suwargana, an envoy for general Abdul Haris Nasution, travelled to Paris, Bonn, The Hague and Washington to inform politicians, diplomats, publishers and journalists, that Sukarno was to be overthrown. Nasution would become head-of-state. Ujeng visited me in New-York and I took him and his wife on March 17, 1962 to dinner at my favorite Greenwich Village restaurant ‘Finale’. He quoted Su-

22 Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, The startling account of the unholy alliance of Adolf Hitler and Germany's great chemical combine, Macmillan, New-York, 1978.

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karno as once having said, ‘I am like a flower, I am rather picked than withering away’, by which the President had meant according to this man, that he preferred to die a hero, than he would be forced to resign the presidency.’²³

It became clear to me that evening in New-York, that a group of generals were plotting against their President. Since Sukarno had became increasingly surrounded by sycophants and schemers of Indonesian intelligence services under the direction of Foreign Minister dr. Subandrio, the President and I set up a secret channel, through which we could circumvent unwarranted sabotage of our contacts. For many years I sent letters through general Suhardjo Hardjowardojo, the chief of the military house of the President. Sometimes with questions, sometimes with information. When The Invisible Government was published in 1964, I immediately drew Sukarno's attention via our private channel to this publication. In The American Police State in 1975, David Wise mentioned, that somewhat to his surprise, the Indonesian Embassy in Washington D.C. ordered in 1964 twenty copies of his first book to be distributed among members of the Indonesian cabinet.²⁴ Also, Sukarno called in us ambassador Howard Jones and lectured him on the unacceptability of the behaviour of ‘the invisible government’ in Washington.

David Wise mentioned in 1975 as well, how the cia had gone into the pornographic movie business, financing a porno film, Happy Days, starring an actor resembling President Sukarno. The Intelligence Committee of the House of Representatives discovered this idiotic gem, for which an Asian man had undergone plastic surgery so he would look more like the Indonesian head-of-state, who at the time was in power. It was the Secret team's way of trying to damage Sukarno's reputation. Reading in 2001 The New York Times best-seller, The Hunting of the President, The Ten Year Campaign to destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton by Joe Conason & Gene Lyons the professional Washington ‘hunters’ of enemies have indeed considerably improved their Gestapo skills.²⁵

Wise named in his 1975 book additional cia plums. King Hussein of Jordan, and various other foreign leaders, were regularly procured by women, who were paid by federal funds. The cia under direct pressure from both lbj and Nixon launched ‘Operation Chaos’, which meant spying on us citizens, infiltrating antiwar groups, and compiling unfavourable files on 300.000 people. The cia experimented with mind altering drugs on persons that did not know hallucinogens were being given to them. The cia provided disguises to the White House burglars who broke into Watergate. The cia, in violation of its charter, prepared a psychological profile of Daniel Ellsberg, the patriot who leaked the notorious Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. In violation of strict federal law, the cia secretly opened, read, photographed and resealed hundreds of thousands of letters dispatched within the us. They are most likely doing the same today, probably on a considerably larger scale.

23 Willem Oltmans, Memoires 1961-1963, Papieren Tijger, Breda, 1997, p.p. 75-77.

24 David Wise, The American Police State, Random House, New-York, 1975, p.p. 199.

25 Joe Conason & Gene Lyons, The Hunting of the President, The Ten Year Campaign to destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, St. Martin's Press, New York, 413 pages.

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With lbj's decision to widen the war in Vietnam Sukarno became a liability to the Washington warmongers in Southeast Asia. He clearly sided with China and North-Vietnam and felt the us had no business in Asia at all. This made him in the eyes of the st and their congenial spirits in the invisible government, a Communist as well. Don't ever expect subtle nuances from the mindscapes of us intelligence boys. The jfk Administration had gone out of its way to lend an ear to Sukarno's views. The Kennedy's respected him for his 1955 initiative of bringing Afro-Asian nations together in Bandung. Sukarno created the Non-Aligned Movement of governments, that were prepared to play a mediating role between the superpowers and try to get the Cold War over with.

The second Non-Aligned conference was held in Belgrade in 1961. As special envoys of that summit, Jawaharlal Nehru (India) and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) flew to Moscow: Sukarno (Indonesia) and Modibo Keita (Mali) flew to Washington. The nations of the developing world were urging Khrushchev and Kennedy to halt the arms race and stop building ever more missiles with multiple nuclear warheads. The simple message was: don't waste your brains and resources on inventions how to wipe each other out, but sit down and talk together until you find a compromise acceptable to both.

Roger Hilsman demonstrated in chapter 25 of his book that the Kennedy Administration did read the finer points in Sukarno's mind. He recalled that the Indonesian leader's two visits to the Kennedy White House went well. ‘Kennedy recognized the politician and dedicated nationalist in Sukarno’. Aside from the embarrassing ignorance of American spies on the subject of Sukarno, members of Congress competed with each other as to who would find the biggest insult. Congressman William Bloomfield, also a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called Sukarno in a speech on the floor of the House, ‘a power-mad dictator, a despot, a bully, a Hitler and an international juvenile delinquent’²⁶ Hilsman mentioned these details in his book to illustrate what he, as jfk's Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, was up against. ‘In Congress’, he wrote, ‘knowledge of Indonesia was superficial at best.’ Those then are the blessings of democracy at work.

‘Shortly after Averell Harriman (former us ambassador to Moscow and London and governor of the state of New-York) was nominated by jfk to succeed Hilsman as Under Secretary of State for Far eastern Affairs, he gave a television interview. The questioner dropped the remark, ‘that Communist Sukarno.’ Harriman got mad and snorted back: ‘He is not a communist, he is a nationalist!’.²⁷

During Sukarno's April 25, 1961 visit to the Oval Office, jfk had asked him to elaborate on where the Indonesian leader stood on the Cold War. He replied, that he was prepared to tell jfk, but only to him and alone. They withdrew to Kennedy's bedroom and they talked there.

26 Roger Hillsman, To Move a Nation, Doubleday & Co, New-York, 1967 p.p. 376.

27 Roger Hillsman, To Move a Nation, Doubleday & Co, New-York, 1967 p.p. 378.

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Of course, jfk was better informed on Sukarno, than representative Bloomfield, who behaved like a silly blabbermouth, or better than the Donovan boys in the invisible government. While jfk was making the effort to become informed on Indonesia and its leader, Dallas ended all of that. With Lyndon Johnson, the Eisenhower-Dulles mentality returned to the White House, which meant in practice, the cia was getting a free hand again and a second opportunity to set up a coup in Jakarta and get rid of Sukarno permanently.

The Secret Team scenario for these bloody events is always the same. First rumours are spread, in this case by Ujeng Suwaragana and others, that a Council of Generals had been formed to topple Sukarno. The president took these whispers seriously and dispatched one of his aides, colonel Magenda to Washington and New-York to check out the Ujeng story. It proved to be true. When in the night of September 30, 1965 some members of the presidential Tjakrabirawa Guard picked up six top generals, including general Yani, Chief of the Army, who was a blameless Sukarno loyalist, the confusion was total. The enemies of the President led by general Suharto, were promptly accusing Sukarno of having launched a pre-emptive strike against his presumed enemies. Events that fateful night in Indonesian history amounted to a shrewd scheme.

Sukarno's immense popularity with the masses was intentionally placed under a cloud of suspicion. Indonesians became confused and did not rally around their president as expected under normal circumstances. Did he side with the Communists as his enemies were saying? When General Suharto and officers loyal to him, discovered the six generals had been killed, they attributed these murders to Gerwani, women of the pki (Partai Kommunis Indonesia). In other words, the 1965 coup, like its predecessor in 1958, was portrayed as fundamentally necessary to prevent the Communists from grabbing power. This time the people were told after Suharto took control over the media, that Sukarno himself had sided with the pki. The people should have known better but the killings of the generals placed the verisimilitude on the side of Suharto. Even Peking was said to have been directly involved, an additional lie dreamt up in Washington.

October 1, 1965, Sukarno intended to replace General Yani with General Pranoto Reksosamudro. But Suharto decided differently. He appointed himself Commander-in-Chief of the Army. That was the decisive moment that the 1965 coup took place. There and then Suharto committed insubordination and high treason vis à vis Sukarno as President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. Suharto's noble alibi, ‘save the nation from Communism.’

With Sukarno's influence reduced to a semblance of presidential power, Suharto was soon to become the Pol Pot of Southeast Asia. While the Indonesian military dic-

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tator butchered peasants, workers and citizens to the left, Pol Pot did the same with the intelligentsia and people to the right. According to Washington, Suharto was doing a similar splendid job. In reality, Pol Pot was a first class War Criminal and so was Suharto.

Suharto began by summarily liquidating the entire top of the pki. The st in Washington danced. Next Suharto ordered bloodthirsty paratroop colonel Sarwo Edhie to organize a nationwide raid on Communists, and pro Sukarno patriots, which resulted in the largest bloodbath Southeast Asia had hitherto seen. The Economist estimated the mass extermination of suspected Communists and Sukarno loyalists following the 1965 coup at 500.000. Suharto truly makes Slobodan Milosevic pale into a miserable amateur. Yet, Milosevic is sweating it out as a War Crimes suspect in The Hague, while it proved impossible to bring Suharto to book, after he was driven out of power in 1998. The best his successors could do, is place him under house-arrest. Washington always continues to protect War Criminals that served them well. Augusto Pinochet of Chili is another case in point. A lifetime patronage of cia rogues is guaranteed by the Secret Team. At the same time, this Washington protection of War Criminals increases suspicions that chaps like Suharto, Mobuto or Pinochet were indeed murdering and stealing as Quislings for Washington carrying out the wishes of the invisibles of the cia.

Even Bill Clinton had referred in the nineties to Suharto as ‘our boy in Jakarta’. It might have been a slip of the tongue, but at the same time it tells the story of Washington's selective indignation, when people are massacred in our nowadays world. Killing leftists is good. Killing rightists is bad. Intelligence operations are designed to protect the killers and prevent the truth from ever becoming known. Sometimes by accident bits and pieces do surface. Former State Department official, William Blum, wrote in 2000 about the 1965 Jakarta coup: ‘it was later learned that the us embassy in Indonesia had compiled lists of “Communists”, from the top echelon down to village cadres, as many as 5.000 names, and turned them over to the Army (Suharto) which then hunted those persons down and killed them.’²⁸ Blum referred to an Associated Press story of a former us diplomat in Jakarta who finally did talk.

28 William Blum, Rogue State, A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, p.p. 141.