Who are the No. 1 War Criminals?

[p. 32]

Bhutto

Ali Bhutto, Foreign Minister at the time he became a friend of Sukarno, and later Prime Minister of Pakistan was hanged April 4, 1979 at 2 a.m. He was a sharp critic of us Foreign Policy. Pakistan was historically a Washington ally and for many years a member of the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (seato). This was a us and British initiated pact to so-called protect the region from supposed Communist hordes dispatched by Peking, or for that matter from the ussr. Bhutto agreed with Sukarno and Sihanouk, that American soldiers should quit the former Indo-China altogether. He emphasized this critical stance of Washington even at un headquarters. That was the last straw for what the Secret Team could stomach from Bhutto. The crazy minds of these disreputable us characters wanted the man stone dead, and that is, as usual, what they get.

On the very day General Zia-ul Haq declared Martial Law for Pakistan, July 5, 1977, Bhutto was arrested. Five and a half years, he had served his country as a Foreign Minister, as Prime Minister and President, as well as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. From one day to the other he was called by general Zia ‘a demoniac threat to the security of Pakistan.’ Bhutto had all along been very much aware that ‘the bloodhounds are after my blood,’ he had warned in a speech in parliament referring to ‘an international conspiracy’ to get him. This meant: Washington, who else?

In 1966, his friend Sukarno related to me an incident that took place a year earlier in Caïro. The Indonesian President and the then Foreign Minister Bhutto, were talking in the lobby of a hotel, when Sukarno was approached by an American girl, introducing herself as Pat Price. She said, she was planning a book on Indonesia and was Sukarno prepared to help her? The President made a promise and Pat went on her way. But Ali Bhutto said ‘Watch out’ and was suspicious of another cia move. Sukarno: ‘I arranged for her to come to Indonesia. I received her at Merdeka Palace. I gave her a female assistant to easily find her way around. She started work. After a few months I was handed a report by our intelligence service. That sweet, coquettish Miss Price turned out to indeed be a cia agent. She had been carefully followed by our security service. She used everywhere my name, and my introduction, and misused my assistance and our hospitality, because in fact she was an ordinary cia spy.’

‘How certain are you she was cia?’, I asked. ‘She had meetings in the middle of the night with other us agents. She had frequent encounters with members of the us Embassy at unusual times and at unusual places. What especially drew the attention of our service were camouflaged meetings with the us military attaché. She succeeded to work herself into some of the highest circles of our military establishment.’³⁷

37 Willem Oltmans, Den Vaderland Getrouwe, Bruna, 1973, p.p. 309-310.

[p. 33]

Like Sihanouk and Bhutto, President Sukarno was very much aware of the cia's dirty business in Southeast Asia. On October 6, 1966, Sukarno told me: ‘The cia is fishing in troubled waters of eight countries in our region. President Nasser warned me. He sent a general as a personal envoy, who had been instructed only to speak with me. They had discovered documentary proof in Egypt of cia activities here. Other documentary proof had been found in Syria, because the ambassador of that country came to see me likewise. You are a journalist. You must go on digging for the facts.’ I might add, here that also Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, whom I interviewed and filmed three times in the seventies and eighties referred repeatedly to ‘the contemptible cia games’ in India.³⁸

Ali Bhutto was able to write a book in prison. I often wished Sukarno had been able to do so. His views of the 1965 coup would have been of vital historic importance. He had received two intelligence reports about the events that fateful night from September 30 - October 1. He believed neither one. He remained puzzled about which firecracker had gone off first. He knew, that the framers of the plot resided in Washington, but how did they manage to recruit so many traitors from within the Indonesian military structures? Dollars and promises for more dollars had played a major role.

From my Death Cell³⁹ dealt in detail with the conspiracy that led to Zia's 1977 coup d'état, when Bhutto was arrested. He had expected it. He told the National Assembly on April 28, 1977 that he foresaw trouble. The next day, April 29, Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, sent Bhutto a message proposing ‘personal quiet talks’. Vance was a decent man. This was reason enough for the invisibles to operate in specific cases and covert operations entirely outside the State Department and if need be outside the White House. Bhutto, knowing that Vance probably had been kept in the dark about the cia conspiracy in progress against him, showed the American invitation to hold talks the next day in Rawalpindi in public. The chargé d'affaires of the us Embassy let it be known immediately, that when confidential talks were leaked beforehand, it would be difficult to organize them. Of course, the cia did not want Vance to talk at all with Bhutto, because the Pakistani leader had already been marked for liquidation anyway.

Nevertheless, Bhutto sent his Foreign Minister to Paris with a 50 page report documenting charges, that foreign intelligence services were busy destabilizing Pakistan. The report was quietly handed to Cyrus Vance personally. The Secretary of State proposed, however, to shelve the 50 page report and instead make a fresh start in us-Pakistani relations. While staying in a Paris hotel, the suite of the Pakistani Foreign Minister was ransacked. The 50 page intelligence report had been locked up in the safe of the Embassy of Pakistan in Paris. Bhutto later sent

38 Willem Oltmans, On Growth, Putnam & Sons, New-York, 1975.

39 Ali Bhutto, From my Death Cell, Orient Paperbacks, New Delhi, 1980.

[p. 34]

this crucial intelligence report to a conference of Islamic Foreign Ministers in Tripoli, Lybia.

Bhutto took up his own defence. He wrote in his book, that he told the judges, ‘I have been in a death cell, 7 by 10 feet for over one year now. I feel a little dizzy there. I do not want to mention here whatever has been done to me. I do not want to show marks on my body or anything like that (...) It has been said that I was a tyrant, a dictator, a Hitler (...) believe me, I have been very shabbily treated (...) For ninety days I have not seen the sunshine or the light.’⁴⁰

He recalled before his judges, that while he was in power, he had negotiated the return of 90.000 prisoners of war from India. ‘Yet, I am now treated like a criminal. I am not a criminal, but I am treated worse then the co-accused. I can hear in my cell the sound of music. I hear the laughter of other prisoners in my death cell from which I cannot get out. On October 15, when two prisoners ran away, I was locked up. What did I have to do with their escape? I cannot and will not run away from my country. I was advised to leave. Mr. Mustafa Khar told me, “these people are after your blood.” On September 13, a foreign journalist, whose name I cannot mention, took me aside and said, Mr. Bhutto, I cannot tell you what is in store for you. You better leave this country.’

In Indonesia, the same happened when Sukarno was already the semi-prisoner of General Suharto. Adam Malik, once a friend of Sukarno pleaded with him to please leave the country. Malik had joined the cia traitors, but perhaps felt some remorse and wished his former friend a better old age then he knew Suharto had in store for him. Sukarno was placed in total isolation in villa ‘Wisma Jaso’ of his Japanese wife, Ratna Sari Dewi. Madame Dewi had left for Tokyo in 1967 for her safety at the urging of her husband and had delivered their daughter, Karina, in Japan. Madame Hartini, his Indonesian wife, was virtually his only infrequent visitor, while his children rarely received permission to go and see him. All other visitors were barred. Here was the father of the nation being tormented to death by treacherous generals of the very nation, he, Sukarno, had led to freedom. One general stole his last automobile. Another, general Alam Sjah walked in to take away his last television set, to further isolate Sukarno from the outside world. He died as a flower without water on June 20, 1970, exactly as one of his murderers, Ujeng Suwargana had come to tell me in 1962 in New-York, what the generals were going to do to him.

Bhutto told his judges: ‘I do not want mercy. I want justice. I am not pleading for my life as such, not as a way of flesh, because everyone has to go. There have been so many attacks on my life. I was attacked at Sangkar. I escaped miraculously in Sadiqabad. Then in the frontier tribal territories a bomb exploded just before I was to speak. There were at least four of five attempts in Baluchistan, once by a Langah, who threw a handgrenade at me. The

40 Ali Bhutto, From my Death Cell, Orient Paperbacks, New Delhi, 1980. Chapter 2.

[p. 35]

Khan of Kalat, who was one of my closest friends, told me not to go for I would be killed. I said, I have to do my public duty, and addressed a public meeting. It is not life I plead for. I want justice.’

Sukarno named in his autobiography the series of attempts on his life as well.⁴¹ November 30, 1957 several handgrenades were tossed at the President, when he visited at Tjikini the school where two of his children were following classes. His aide-de-camps, colonel Sudarto, threw Sukarno to the ground shielding him with his body and getting wounded by shrapnel. On March 9, 1960, Daniel Maukar took an Indonesian mig fighter and strafed the palace. The President was a forgiving soul. I asked him if the death sentence against Maukar would be carried out. He shook his head, no. The young pilot was indeed set free. Sukarno invited him for heart to heart talk. Also Allan Pope, the cia pilot, who had been shot down in 1957 during a bombing raid over the island of Ambon, and was captured, was set free after his wife had come to the palace begging in tears for fis freedom. ‘When it comes to women,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘I am weak. I cannot stand tears.’

Bhutto and Sukarno were exposed to a series of assassination attempts. Who arranged them and paid for them? Mrs. Indira Gandhi told me, that people would kill someone in India for a miserable thirty rupees. It should be noted, that cia puppet Suharto, during 32 years in the presidency, was never shot at once. In retrospect, I feel both Sukarno and Ali Bhutto, while being fully aware that they were targeted by the cia, downright underestimated the brutal, inexorable minds and methods of the ultimate bosses of locally hired killers. In regard to Sukarno, I can unequivocally testify to the fact, that he was a kind-hearted and forgiving man, who signed one death-warrant in his life. It was for Kartosuwirjo, a brutal killer, who had gone on a rampage to establish the Darul Islam with the aim to create an Iran type of Muslim State. The courts had condemned him to death. Sukarno deliberated with himself in silence for one week, whether to attach his signature. The children where at a loss why their father seemed in a daze. They didn't know the reason. Washington had little use of ‘a softy’ in Jakarta. They were in need of a hungry mass-killer, who was prepared to root out the pki tooth and nail and while doing so butcher as many leftists as his Army could lay its hands on. They picked Suharto and hit the jackpot.

Bhutto recalled in his memoir written from his death cell a direct threat, ‘We will make a horrible example of you!’ by Henry Kissinger, who, mind you, was talking to the head-of-state of Pakistan⁴². I have been a resident of New-York from 1958-1992. It took me many years to finally acknowledge that American mindscapes tick often that way. Get rid of the guy who is in your way. Shoot him. Kissinger, a Jew, who immigrated in childhood from Germany, simply adopted the us way of thinking. He came to

41 Cindy Adams, Sukarno: An Autobiography, Bobbs Merrill Company, New-York, 1965, p.p. 272-274.

42 Ali Bhutto, From my Death Cell, Orient Paperbacks, New Delhi, 1980, p.p. 65.

[p. 36]

fit Yankee habitudes like a glove. He managed to turn himself into one of the most prestigious and powerful men in Washington, even bagging a Nobel prize, while he was more than responsibie for us war crimes in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Who in his right mind would suggest in 2001 to nominate Slobodan Milosevic for the much coveted Stockholm reward?

January 5, 1979 Ali Bhutto turned 51. Following February 6, Chief Justice Anwarul Haq read out the Court's decision by a 4 to 3 majority, that upheld the death sentence for the former President and Prime Minister Ali Bhutto. The judgement contained 1.500 pages. Bhutto was informed of the verdict by the guard outside his cell. Messages from all over the world including President Jimmy Carter and Prime Minister James Callaghan of Great-Britain arrived to spare his life. General Zia had ignored similar requests to commute death sentences in 400 similar cases. ‘An innocent man does not plead for mercy’, Bhutto wrote.⁴³

Twenty one months after he had become Prime Minister Ali Bhutto was dead. Kissinger got ‘the horrible example’ that he had annouced beforehand. To prevent unrest in the country, Bhutto's top supporters were quickly jailed. Schools and universities were closed. The Army was ready to open fire at demonstrators. The people of Pakistan were just as powerless to voice dissent to the military regime as the people of Indonesia were incapable of rising up against the militairy traitors, who had taken over power in 1965 with direct aid from Washington. But the day will come, that the people of Indonesia and Pakistan will know, that the traitors of Sukarno and Bhutto were recruited by the cia among local military men. But ultimately the super war criminals were the crazy commie hunters in the top echelons of the invisible government in Washington.

43 Ali Bhutto, From my Death Cell, Orient Paperbacks, New Delhi, 1980, p.p. 245.