Papers Show U.S. Role in Indonesian Purge
By George Lardner Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 28, 2001; Page A08
U.S. officials are trying to recall an official history of U.S. dealings
with Indonesia that documents some American responsibility for the killing
of thousands of Indonesian communists in the mid-1960s, including a cable
recommending payments to army-backed death squads.
CIA and State Department officials had agreed in May to postpone release
of the recently printed volume, part of State's often embattled "Foreign
Relations of the United States" series. But officials said yesterday it
was inadvertently distributed by the Government Printing Office to
libraries throughout the world.
A GPO spokesman said yesterday that it is now trying to get the books
back, on orders from the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
The spokesman, Andy Sherman, acknowledged that it might be difficult to
retrieve the microfiche copies that have been sent abroad. He said an
order not to distribute the book arrived too late.
"They're trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube," said Tom Blanton,
director of the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research group at
George Washington University. His group bought a copy of the 830-page
history Thursday and put it on its Web site, www.nsarchive.org, yesterday.
Blanton accused the CIA of trying to suppress this book, covering
Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines from 1964 to 1968, and another,
covering Greece, Turkey and Cyprus in the same period, even though the
documents they contain were declassified two to three years ago.
A CIA spokesman, Mark Mansfield, denied sole responsibility.
"The notion that the CIA has unilaterally blocked the release of these
histories is simply not the case," he said. "We work closely with the
State Department on these matters. All of us are intent on complying with
the law, while at the same time protecting classified information that if
disclosed could be damaging to us."
The documentary history dealing with Greece, Cyprus and Turkey was printed
in February 2000, but is locked up at GPO under the label: "Embargo: This
publication cannot be released." Officials declined to say why.
The volume on Indonesia contains documents indicating that 35 years ago,
U.S. officials supplied the names of thousands of members of the
Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, to the army in Jakarta, which was
tracking them down and killing them. Estimates of the numbers assassinated
range from 100,000 to a million.
U.S. officials later said they had simply plucked the names of top PKI
leaders and senior cadres from public records, but the history shows the
lists were highly useful to the Indonesian military.
In an Aug. 10, 1966, airgram to Washington, U.S. Ambassador Marshall Green
reported that an embassy-prepared list of top Communist leaders "is
apparently being used by Indonesian security authorities who seem to lack
even the simplest overt information on PKI leadership at the time."
An earlier memo from Green, on Dec. 2, 1965, recommended payment of 50
million rupiahs to a leader of the Kap-Gestapu, an army-inspired but
civilian-staffed group that "is still carrying the burden of current
repressive efforts targeted against PKI, particularly in central Java."
A memo the next day from CIA Far East Division chief William E. Colby
remains classified. "That leaves a strong impression that we did
something," Blanton said.
Fifty million rupiahs at the official exchange rate was worth about $1.1
million, but visiting tourists could buy that much for $6,250. Green's
cable said "our contribution" would be a "comparatively small sum" but
would still help Kap-Gestapu "considerably."
A U.S. official who asked not to be named said the recent political
turmoil in Indonesia prompted an interagency panel in May to postpone
release of the volume. The United States was at odds 35 years ago with the
Communist-backed Indonesian strongman Sukarno. This week, his daughter,
Megawati Sukarnoputri, was installed as president.
The attempt to block the Indonesian history is only the latest battle
between State Department historians, on one hand, and the CIA and
secrecy-minded State Department officials, on the other, over what should
be printed in the "Foreign Relations of the United States."
The prestigious series, which began in 1861, says in the preface to each
volume that it includes, "subject to necessary security considerations,
all documents needed to give a comprehensive record of the major foreign
policy decisions of the United States."
The last major controversy over the program arose in 1990 with publication
of a history on Iran that made no mention of the widely known CIA-backed
coup in 1953 that restored the shah to his Peacock Throne. Congress
responded the next year with a law explicitly requiring that each volume
be "a thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record." That appears
to have shifted much of the wrangling from what the histories say to when
they can be released.
Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
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