14-06-2016, 02:11 AM
Edward Curtin at GlobalResearch has written a detailed review of Greg Poulgrain's recent book The Incubus of Intervention: Conflicting Indonesian Strategies of JFK and Allen Dulles. There's a lot of food for thought for researchers. Poulgrain's earlier book The Genesis of Konfrontasi covers related events throughout Indonesia in depth and discusses the Dulles-led intelligence forces that were hard at work in that locale. JFK is not mentioned much through the text, but the introduction to that book (by an Indonesian academic) pointedly makes reference to JFK's assassination.
The review here of Poulgrain's sequel - and the long except I've printed further below - makes it clear that The Incubus of Intervention is very much a JFK assassination book, and that Poulgrain has approached his study of Dulles' actions in the light of JFK's murder.
Note to Jim D - I had a major computer glitch and lost some work in scanning Poulgrain's earlier book - many apologies and I'm working on fixing that up.
The long chapter printed at the bottom of this post contained much that was new to me.
Poulgrain's book is very hard to locate. Poulgrain has posted online a complete chapter from it, and I've reprinted this below.[size=12]
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Chapter 2: JFK, Dulles and Hammarskjöld
Kennedy's Planned Trip to Jakarta
In the Foreword to my book on Malaysian Confrontation, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, one of Indonesia's leading writers, commented on President Kennedy's anticipated visit to Jakarta in early 1964:
Kennedy's plans to meet Sukarno in Indonesia never came to pass: that we all know, for he was murdered....
Pramoedya drew attention to the planned visit without elaborating, apart from saying that Kennedy, and Indonesia's President Sukarno, had to disappear from the stage of history. Half a century has elapsed since these two leaders disappeared' and with them the political positivity of the now forgotten plan to visit Jakarta. Instead, in the mid-1960s, a proliferation of violence and military mentality suffused the nation. Indonesia still bears the scars. This outcome was in stark contrast to the Indonesia strategy' Kennedy was planning in 1963. Working in conjunction with Sukarno whose perennial aim was to unify his nation, JFK's intended visit was lost in the turgid history of that time.
Kennedy's proposed visit to Jakarta in April or May of 1964' according to the long serving US ambassador in Indonesia, Howard Jones, was a strategy to end Malaysian Confrontation. This period of hostility between Indonesia and Malaysia, involving armed skirmishes and provocative political posturing, fell short of war. It started in early 1963 as Indonesian protest' against the British format of decolonisation which was simply lumping together its disparate colonial possessions in Southeast Asia to ensure the numbers of Chinese overall were in the minority. The reaction in Washington to Confrontation resulted in US aid to Indonesia being reduced to a trickle. Reopening these aid channels was part of Kennedy's rationale in making the trip because Indonesia was a vital component of his larger strategy in Southeast Asia. Planning the visit to Jakarta involved several months of negotiation before Kennedy and Sukarno reached an agreement; then on November 20th the visit was formally announced. Because of the tragedy in Dallas a few days later, the visit did not occur. The assassin's bullet put an end to our plans and disposed of the immediate prospects for settlement of the Malaysia dispute,' wrote Jones.1 Confrontation continued up to 1965/6 when President Sukarno was ousted by General Suharto.
As shown in my book The Genesis of Konfrontasi, from archival evidence and interviews, Sukarno was not the instigator of Malaysian Confrontation. Instead, the principal Indonesian player was the Foreign Minister, Subandrio, who ran the largest intelligence service in Indonesia and fully expected to be the next president. As well, Confrontation did not start without various covert actions by persons linked to both British intelligence (MI6) and American intelligence (CIA), centered in Singapore and operating outside the aegis of government.
President Sukarno's role in Confrontation underwent a change after Kennedy's assassination. Initially, when Indonesia became embroiled in the conflict not of his doing, Sukarno's public statements were designed to steer a course through dangerous political currents beyond his control, whereas after November 1963 he was attempting to regain leadership of this anti-British, anti-colonial campaign. This change in Sukarno was reflected in the expression Ganjang Malaysia', popularised in Western media as Crush Malaysia'. Earlier, Sukarno had disagreed with this interpretation, and actually performed for the media to demonstrate his meaning. Ganjang', he explained, was like nibbling food in your mouth to check it for taste as would a politician, checking for any disagreeable taste of colonialism then spitting it out! Territorial acquisition was not on the menu in Malaysian Confrontation. Nevertheless critics of Indonesia2 readily depicted Confrontation as expansionism because it came hard on the heels of Sukarno's sovereignty dispute over Netherlands New Guinea, a dispute in which President Kennedy's role had proved crucial. Sukarno commanded great respect as the founding father of Indonesian independence, but he himself was unable to halt Confrontation because it was driven by domestic political rivalry. Having ousted the Dutch from New Guinea, Indonesia in 1963 was still seething with anti- colonial venom. There were three rival streams of Indonesian opposition to Malaysia one linked with Subandrio, another with the Indonesian communist party (PKI) and another with the Indonesian army. These three disparate groups were involved in the initial border skirmishes with Sarawak in east Malaysia' being defended by British troops, in the throes of decolonisation. The intermittent conflict drew criticism from Washington through the US ambassador in Jakarta who explained that the US government agreed that Malaysia' was the best format for decolonisation. Then, in September 1963, after the burning of the British Embassy in Jakarta, bilateral relations with USA were strained to the point where aid for Indonesia was reduced to a minimum. Kennedy's efforts to ensure his aid program would not falter now attracted criticism from British officials who told the White House with increasing frequency that UK and US interests regarding Indonesia were beginning fundamentally to diverge.'3 Republican Congressman William S. Broomfield claimed that Indonesia was misusing US assistance. Support to cut US aid came from a clique of other Congressmen including Mathias, Gross and Findley.
Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon then endorsed the Broomfield amendment', demanding that Indonesia be dropped from the list of recipients of US aid. 'I say we should wipe it off the aid program', he declared.4
Kennedy's planned visit to Jakarta was a radical move to re-open all funding as this was a vital part of the follow-up strategy' he had set in place after intervening in 1962 in the anti-colonial dispute with the Dutch. In Indonesia, Kennedy's intervention had stirred popular euphoria in his favour, and this continued into 1963, such was the young American president's charisma. The Bay of Pigs, the Congo, Berlin, Laos, Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis the Cold War crises confronting him were making global headlines which for Indonesian readers kept JFK news' current, well past the highpoint of the New York Agreement in August 1962. In terms of implementing his follow-up strategy' to the sovereignty crisis, the ideal time to exploit pro-JFK sentiment was in 1963, yet the proposed date for the visit to Jakarta in early 1964 would still benefit from the kudos surrounding President John F. Kennedy. His footprint of fame' had been greatly enhanced by intervening in the New Guinea dispute: unresolved since independence in 1949, it had created its own anti-colonial niche in Indonesia's collective psyche.
Malaysian Confrontation in 1963 had caused the delay and then the Bloomfield Amendment, cutting the funding for his Indonesia strategy, left JFK no alternative. Only then did he resolve to make the Jakarta visit and employ his charisma as the last political weapon at his disposal. Success for Kennedy's visit to Jakarta depended upon the response of the Indonesian populace; and this (in late 1963) was still very positive. So it seemed a forgone conclusion that he would have achieved his goal because of the degree of veneration for JFK in Indonesia, combined with the eloquence of Indonesia's President Sukarno for whom there was still widespread adulation. The politics of personality was the only weapon at the disposal of both Kennedy and Sukarno to bring Confrontation to a stop, and it was their intention to employ it jointly, and to the full, once the US president was in Jakarta. During his three years in office, Kennedy's image and reputation had acquired a very positive aura throughout Asia and Africa far surpassing his predecessor, President Eisenhower. The 43-year old president was seen as pro-Indonesian his new political stance and willingness to act decisively, capped off by his intervention in the sovereignty dispute, was in stark contrast to the blatant political interference of his 70-year old predecessor.
Indonesians and especially Sukarno, whose oratorical skill was well-honed over four decades, welcomed the new style, the new era, as heralded in the inaugural address.
...Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace....
JFK's political opponents ensconced in Washington throughout the 1950s were unaccustomed to a president asserting such personal control. It was his forte, especially in foreign policy. Kennedy's instinctive style which was one of personal and intimate command'5 took on unprecedented importance and became a threat to the political strategy of his opponent because it meant he was highly likely to implement the aims of his Jakarta trip.
Kennedy was aiming for a seismic shift of Cold War alignment in Southeast Asia bringing Indonesia on side'. As Bradley Simpson stated (in 2008):
One would never know from reading the voluminous recent literature on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and Southeast Asia, for example, that until the mid-1960s most officials [in the US] still considered Indonesia of far greater importance than Vietnam and Laos. 6
Kennedy wanted to ensure that Indonesia was secure before implementing any policy decision regarding the US presence in Vietnam. The two interrelated parts of his action plan after the New Guinea sovereignty dispute involved utilising the predominantly pro-US Indonesian army, and large-scale US aid for development projects in Indonesia. Both Kennedy and his opponents in Washington pursued a paradigm of modernisation which had emerged in the late 1950s using the military as the most cohesively organised group in undeveloped countries. Simpson has outlined how the US government's embrace of military modernization' in the early 1960s followed on from the March 1959 Draper Committee Report which called for using the armed forces of underdeveloped countries as a major transmission belt of socio-economic reform and development'.
Admiral Arleigh Burke and CIA director Allen Dulles argued at a June 18 NSC meeting [1959] that the United States ought to expand military training programs in Asia to include a wide range of civilian responsibilities and to encourage Military Assistance Advisory Groups (MAAGs) to develop useful and appropriate relationships with the rising military leaders and factions in the underdeveloped countries to which they were assigned'. A few months later the semi-governmental RAND Corporation held a conference at which Lucian Pye, Guy Pauker, Edward Shils, and other scholars expanded on these ideas.7
Admiral Arleigh Burke, Dulles and Pauker were promoting the Indonesian armed forces as a modernizing force' (a strategy linked to Dulles' role in the 1958 Outer Islands Rebellion see Chapter 4) and, continues Simpson:
the army simultaneously pursued a counterinsurgency strategy against internal opponents while greatly expanding its political and economic power following the 1957 declaration of martial law and the takeover of Dutch enterprises.
By the time Kennedy came to office, much of Southeast Asia-related US policy was infused with military modernisation theory. Civic action programs figured highly in Kennedy's strategy in Indonesia, utilising the army but also the police, designed to counterbalance the attraction the PKI had for impoverished farmers like moths to a light in the hope of salvation. The infrastructure and poverty reduction programs were tied to US funding and framed around the assessment made by Tufts University Professor Donald Humphrey. He recommended that US aid to Indonesia starting in 1963 should be in the order of US$325390 million. Europe and Japan were to have contributed almost half of this, but Kennedy's aid program soon encountered difficulties in the Congress.
While still acutely wary of policy interference as occurred with the Bay of Pigs like an inaugural wake-up call', Kennedy had no way of ascertaining how his Indonesia strategy actually threatened the Indonesia strategy of his opponents. Nevertheless, the fact that JFK insisted on denying the CIA any part in his own negotiations with Sukarno is an indication of the serious distrust he held by 1963. Earlier in 1961, when Dulles was at the height of his power and JFK had been in office only a few months, he had requested a Briefing Paper from the CIA, prior to President Sukarno's visit in April 1961. The advice given President Kennedy was that we should not now entertain any major increases in the scale of economic or military aid to Indonesia'. Mindful of Allen Dulles and Guy Pauker as the mouthpiece of military modernisation, Kennedy must have interpreted such advice as hypocritical. Similarly, the CIA advice on whether or not Kennedy should support Sukarno's quest to oust the Dutch from New Guinea lacked not so much insight as vision; it offered only a bleak prospect, saying that whichever way the President moved it would not alter the inexorable rise to power of the PKI.
It would be gratifying to be able to propose an alternative course of action by the United States which would stand a good chance of turning the course of events in Indonesia in a constructive direction. Unfortunately, this is a situation in which the influence that the United States can exert, at least in the short run, is extremely limited, if (as must be assumed) crude and violent intervention is excluded.8
Kennedy chose to support Sukarno's claim to the Dutch territory and follow through with precisely the opposite to what the CIA had advised an economic aid program to counter the PKI by addressing poverty through civic aid and development projects. When the funding restrictions imposed by Congress brought JFK's follow-up plan to a standstill and he resolved to make an historic visit to Jakarta to restart the US aid project, the threat to Dulles' strategy left no option. In the same way that Dulles had offered Kennedy no option in the 1961 Briefing Paper, in 1963 Kennedy's decision to visit Jakarta left no option for Dulles (whom JFK had already ushered to the political sidelines). We can surmise how the exit of Dulles in 1961 may have seemed a positive move for Kennedy and one that should have helped him in 1963 implement the Indonesia policy he wanted. While Dulles' removal from office did little to diminish his influence, it could only have exacerbated the threat created by Kennedy's plan to visit Jakarta. Dulles simply had no answer to counter Kennedy's dramatic personal initiative to visit Jakarta: or to re-contextualise the same comment from the 1961 Briefing Paper given Kennedy, Dulles had no answer in 1963 if (as must be assumed) crude and violent intervention is excluded'.
In two crucial aspects, Kennedy's plan clashed with the ongoing strategy of regime change' which DCI Dulles had set in motion six years earlier. Firstly, JFK intended to utilise the Indonesian army as servants of the state' of Indonesia, not for the army to assume power. And secondly, Kennedy's intention was to maintain the presidency of Sukarno. Unbeknown to Kennedy, his plan to use the army was in effect commandeering the same asset intended by Dulles to implement regime change. Not only was JFK usurping the benefits of the transformation occurring as a result of US training of Indonesian army officers a process which David Ransome labelled with the pithy description, a creeping coup d'etat'9 but ensuring Sukarno remained president would prevent the full military option. Kennedy would not simply have overruled his opponent but, in addition, keeping Sukarno as president would have prevented gaining untrammelled access to natural resources, a project which had been many years in the planning. We may surmise Kennedy was partially aware that his overall plan was making use of a military option still in its preparatory stage, simply from the large number of Indonesian army officers being trained in the US. Their common ground was the ideological focus of US officials on the military as a modernizing force', but where Kennedy was starkly at odds with his Washington opponents was his determination to retain Sukarno as President of Indonesia.
The visit to Jakarta was premised on an understanding between Kennedy and Sukarno to bring Malaysian Confrontation to an end, while JFK was in Jakarta. Howard Jones, US Ambassador in Jakarta from 1958, was well acquainted with Sukarno and fully aware that the key to achieving this important political change was Kennedy's charisma, combined with the adulation and respect he commanded. Together, Kennedy and Sukarno could bring about a cessation of Malaysian Confrontation but, as Jones observes in his book Indonesia: the Possible Dream, Sukarno could not initiate a settlement of the dispute himself '.10
JFK's Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, in personal correspondence with me (January 8, 1992)11 wrote: President Kennedy made it clear that confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia should be stopped....' Only after several months of negotiation with the Indonesian President did Kennedy agree to the proposed visit, after three requests by Sukarno. The one precondition set by Kennedy was his insistence on achieving a successful outcome'. Rusk confirmed in writing the arrangement with Sukarno: President Kennedy made it clear that confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia should be stopped, not merely for the duration of Kennedy's visit but on a permanent basis'. However, it was not confrontation that was stopped but rather, the visit by Kennedy himself.
For Sukarno, Kennedy's precondition meant declaring a permanent cessation of hostilities during the actual visit of the American president; while for JFK himself, a successful visit' meant ending the hostilities which were jeopardising the Indonesia strategy he had initiated in 1962 and which Malaysian Confrontation in 1963 was threatening to turn into just another Cold War fatality'.
As part of a wider Southeast Asian tour, the visit was described by JFK as one that would provide a much needed boost to his chances for re- election. This tongue-in-cheek explanation understated the real political significance which the visit held for Kennedy himself. Now with a half- century of hindsight, the adverse repercussions of not making that trip to Jakarta are more clearly delineated in terms of the tragedy that befell Indonesia in 1965. In Cold War terms, Kennedy's Indonesia strategy held every chance of success indeed, the very likelihood of success compelled the decision to prevent the trip. For Dulles' Indonesia strategy, Kennedy's intention to support and prolong the Sukarno presidency was political anathema.
Why Kennedy Retained Allen Dulles
Between election and inauguration, John Kennedy had 72 days to survey the tumult of domestic and international issues soon to be encountered as the 35th President. Some of these, among other issues, included political unrest in the Congo, Laos, Vietnam and Berlin. Two such issues actually ballooned into potential crises during his time as President-elect. One of these involved Cuba, the other Indonesia and both involved Allen Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). President Kennedy for various reasons had retained Dulles from the Eisenhower administration, a fateful inheritance from the ailing incumbent.
When Kennedy began organising his administration as President- elect, the first press announcement he made was that Allen Dulles would remain as DCI. In finding the best person for the job' to meet the multifarious demands of staffing the new administration, staff which finally included fifteen Rhodes scholars, Kennedy often adopted a bipartisan approach. Surely, choosing Dulles indicated that Kennedy did not regard him as being among the opponents in Washington'? Yet within the first three months of the Kennedy presidency, Dulles had inflicted so much political damage this question does not bear answering, but simply prompts another: why, then, did Kennedy retain Dulles as DCI? Dulles was an icon of US intelligence. Since 1916 before John Fitzgerald Kennedy was even born Dulles had served in that specialised field under every US president since Woodrow Wilson.
Another reason for retaining Dulles was linked to the narrow victory over Republican presidential contender, Richard Nixon. The winning mar- gin of votes only 120,000 out of a total of 69 million12 was attributed to Kennedy's success in the televised debates. Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy's speechwriter and special counsel throughout most of his political career, from Congressman to Senator and then President, described the debates as the primary factor in Kennedy's ultimate victory'.13 The televised debates in October 1960 were the first time such an event was held although nowadays televised debates between presidential candidates are the norm. For Kennedy and Nixon, there were four debates, four unprecedented opportunities to reach millions of Americans, and the first (which was on domestic policy) had an audience of 70 million. The second and third debates were questions and answers, while the fourth debate was on foreign policy, and this was where Allen Dulles played his hand. Castro and Cuba only 90 miles from our shore' had been much in the news during the year of presidential campaigning and claimed an important part of the fourth debate. Nixon already knew that the CIA was planning an invasion of Cuba, but of course could not mention this during the debate; but Dulles had provided Kennedy a strategically timed briefing on Cuba shortly before the debate. Dulles did not divulge information about the invasion that would come at Palm Beach when he was President-elect and during his first week of office but at this stage Dulles gave Kennedy the edge with other intelligence which proved crucial during the debate. And crucial too, it seems, when the time came for Kennedy to decide whether or not to retain Dulles as DCI. Dulles' briefing must have seemed like a godsend when Kennedy was analysing the votes that won him the presidency.
There was still another reason for Dulles being included in the President-elect's first announcement. After winning the Democratic nomination, Kennedy had requested two persons to prepare separate reports on the anticipated transition from Republican to Democratic administration. These two persons were Columbia professor Richard Neustadt and Clark Clifford whom Sorensen described as a Washington attorney'. His former experience, however, included special counsel to President Truman during the 1948 presidential campaign against Thomas E. Dewey. Special counsel for Dewey was Allen Dulles who was also the confidential link on foreign policy matters between the Truman administration and the Dewey campaign'.14 So in 1960, bipartisanship in relation to Allen Dulles was revisiting Clifford's earlier contact with Dulles. In both reports, Kennedy was advised to retain Dulles as DCI (and J. Edgar Hoover as director of the FBI).15 Ironically, in May 1961 after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy invited Clifford into the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to ensure the accuracy and unbiased nature of the intelligence being supplied to the President. Neustadt had recommended the directors of five sensitive positions' remain unchanged, but of these only Dulles and Hoover were retained. Sorensen quipped that, of the five, Kennedy kept only the first two, whom the dinner guests the previous evening had reportedly suggested be the first to be ousted'.16
The intelligence on Cuba, which Dulles provided to Kennedy before the crucial debate with Nixon, gave the Democratic candidate a clear advantage over his Republican rival. More than just highlighting Dulles' familiarity with Cuba, this showed Dulles was investing in the possibility of Kennedy winning the presidency. Perhaps even more than this, it showed Dulles (who through family and social connections knew Jack' Kennedy, his wife and the extended family) already had his measure of the man. Dulles knew that Kennedy would not leave this debt unpaid. As it turned out, the narrower the margin of winning votes, the greater seemed the debt, and if Dulles' briefing before the historic debates could be described as a pre-election psychological strategy, it worked perfectly. Kennedy's perceived familiarity with the issue of Cuba may have proved crucial in winning the debate, but Dulles' duplicity soon became apparent. In Kennedy's first week in office, it was his unfamiliarity with the issue of Cuba, or rather, the CIA's half-baked invasion of Cuba, that proved to be an international embarrassment for the new president. Sorensen commented: The Bay of Pigs had been and would be the worst defeat of his career'.17
Fidel Castro's Cuba, not Indonesian Papua, became the bête noir of US foreign policy after the CIA invasion force foundered in the Bay of Pigs on April 18, 1961. Castro's declaration of a socialist state and the importing of Soviet missiles led to a nuclear standoff. While Kennedy negotiated with Khrushchev, the world, collectively, held its breath. Cuba, however, had not become the touchstone of Cold War tension without the initial input from Allen Dulles.
Apart from the generational difference, JFK and Dulles both were in office alongside their siblings, JFK's younger brother Robert as Attorney General and DCI Dulles' elder brother John Foster Dulles was Eisenhower's Secretary of State. The depth of experience in the two Dulles brothers was unprecedented, starting from the Versailles Treaty with John Foster drawing up the reparations agreement and Allen in the intelligence section. Between them was always a fierce sense of rivalry to achieve results in international affairs, continuing the sibling rivalry that had persisted throughout their childhood. John Foster was firstborn and favourite whereas Allen, born seven years later with a clubfoot, was always trying to prove he was as good as Foster, if not better. It was Allen, not Foster, who had always wanted to be Secretary of State. There had already been two family members in that office an uncle in the Wilson presidency and their maternal grandfather, in the Harrison presidency yet it was John Foster not Allen who achieved that goal when Eisenhower became president in 1953.
If there was any similar in-family rivalry in the Kennedy clan, it disappeared after the deaths of the eldest son during the war and the eldest daughter soon after the war. In the case of John and Robert Kennedy when JFK was president, the two brothers were intensely reliant on each other's abilities and tended to act as one unit, as in Robert's negotiations with President Sukarno and Dutch Foreign Minister Luns in the New Guinea sovereignty dispute. In Kennedy's various elections starting in 1952, culminating in the presidency, Robert was his trusted campaign manager. In the first Eisenhower administration, the link between John Foster as Secretary of State and Allen as Director of Central Intelligence, on both official and family levels, was seen by the media as beneficial to the national interest. The Dulles brothers were perceived as having created their own legend even before serving together under Eisenhower. While acting together, however, they were not one unit as the Kennedys were in the 1960s. The media reaction to this was often expressed in religious terms, JFK being the first Catholic to reach the office of president. John Foster followed his father in the Presbyterian faith, attending church every Sunday, whereas Allen had adulterous affairs for most of his working life without jeopardising his lifelong role in intelligence.
Similar indiscretion by John Kennedy may have led to the political pressure referred to by Frederick Kempe18 for retaining Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover. Allen revelled in intelligence whereas John Foster often chose to adopt the State Department mentality of knowing as little as possible about sordid operational details of intelligence'. Grose expounds this point further, saying that Allen always claimed his duty was intelligence, and policymaking was John Foster's responsibility but Allen was ever imaginative in devising intelligence operations that by their very nature determined the shape of national policy'.19
When John Foster Dulles passed away in April 1959, after two years of failing health because of colon cancer, Allen's covert intelligence operations entered an even more radical stage. Allen began taking bigger risks. John Foster had not wanted Allen to succeed him as Secretary of State and bluntly told him so, closing the door on that lifelong ambition. He recommended that his successor be Christian Herter who was reliant on crutches because of osteoarthritis. Christian Herter and Allen Dulles were not close friends, despite being acquainted since the First World War. With a new Secretary of State for the remaining twenty-one months of the Eisenhower administration, the change in dynamic in the upper echelon of power influenced Allen's mode of operations. As well, John Foster's death no doubt served as a reminder to Allen of his own mortality. He was, after all, almost 67 years old when retained by Kennedy as Director of Central Intelligence. He was reaching the end of his career and the culmination of a major project centred on the Indonesian archipelago which had first caught his attention years earlier. The CIA- assisted covert operation' in Indonesia, the Outer Islands rebellion (otherwise known as the PRRI-Permesta rebellion which is examined in Chapter 4) was but one part of this major project. Allen Dulles has been openly linked with this rebellion which started in February 1958. It ended almost immediately, although for the next few years he maintained a supply of weapons for the rebels because continuing conflict ensured the officially declared state of emergency' also continued. This effectively delayed the holding of elections in Java and precluded the possibility of the Indonesian communist party attaining any increased representation or political power through the ballot box.
As a result of his vast experience in diplomacy, oil, intelligence and state affairs, Allen Dulles had at his disposal a network of contacts which he used in his Indonesia project. Ultimately, he was aiming for regime change, the essential ingredient of which was a central army command. Aware of the immense potential of natural resources in Netherlands New Guinea since pre-war days, Dulles wanted the Dutch territory to become part of Indonesia. While this was achieved on Sukarno's watch, it was done only because the central army command was already amassing in the corridors of power awaiting regime change.
When Kennedy officially ended Dulles' role as Director of Central Intelligence on November 29, 1961, Allen's network of contacts was like an intelligence tsunami held in abeyance. The president described the departing DCI in prophetic terms:
I know of no other American in the history of this country who has served in seven administrations of seven Presidents varying from party to party, from point of view to point of view, from problem to problem, and yet at the end of each administration each President of the United States has paid tribute to his service and also has counted Allen Dulles as their friend. This is an extraordinary record, and I know that all of you who have worked with him understand why this record has been made. I regard Allen Dulles as an almost unique figure in our country.
Yet Dulles still commanded enormous influence. The newly appointed director, John McCone, with legions of staff moved into the new building at Langley. Ironically, in the design and construction of the new head- quarters, Dulles had played a prominent role, but he never occupied the new building. He still kept his former office and, as well, took up another with Sullivan and Cromwell, the legal firm in which he had worked with John Foster in the 1930s, representing Rockefeller oil interests and the myriad of subsidiaries. Allen had not actually married into the Rockefeller family as John Foster had done, but nevertheless his lifelong association with Standard Oil made him an essential member of the extended family. In the years between the First and Second World Wars, there was no legal restriction on someone like Allen Dulles sharing his expertise between private enterprise and the State Department as mentioned by John D. Rockefeller, at 98 years of age, openly expressing his thanks in his pre-Second World War publication, Random Reminiscences of Men
and Events:20
We did not ruthlessly go after the trade of our competitors and attempt to ruin it by cutting prices or instituting a spy system.... One of our greatest helpers has been the State Department in Washington.... I think I can speak thus frankly and enthusiastically because the working out of many of these great plans has developed largely since I retired from the business fourteen years ago.
Rockefeller's reputation as the richest man in history' was not achieved without the acumen of Dulles gaining entry into oil rich regions, from the Near East' to the Far East', when European colonial power was still dominant. The important mining and oil exploration conducted in Netherlands New Guinea shortly before the Second World War (as revealed by Jean Jacques Dozy in Chapter 1) was an important part of the oil-intelligence project' which focused on Indonesia in its entirety. Ensuring West New Guinea changed hands, from Dutch to Indonesian control, became an integral part of Allen Dulles' political strategy which then proceeded with the already advanced plan for regime change' in Indonesia. The problem was: for Dulles' strategy, JFK's notion of visiting Jakarta to support Sukarno, ensuring he would remain president, was political anathema.
Pre-war development in the New Guinea territory was meagre with half a dozen small colonial settlements, scattered around the far-flung coastline. These had begun as a cluster of army encampments at the turn of the century in response to the US gaining control of the nearby Philippines. Within a few years, the giant US company, Standard Oil, which then was inseparable from the name Rockefeller, had initiated a takeover bid for Dutch oil interests in the Indies. The Dutch responded by joining forces with the British in 1907 to form Royal Dutch Shell. This started decades of pressure from Rockefeller oil interests to gain exploration rights in the vast, unmapped Dutch territory of New Guinea. Ultimately, in May 1935, with the formation of the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company21 which had 60% controlling US interest, Standard Oil was successful, but only with the help of their top European- based lawyer, Allen Dulles. NNGPM, as the company was called, was formed with the approval of Sir Henri Deterding, general manager of the Royal Dutch Shell group of companies since 1900. Deterding and Rockefeller, in former days, had been fierce opponents in the global oil business. When Allen joined his brother John Foster Dulles in Sullivan and Cromwell, the top Wall Street legal firm, his first big case in 1928 brought him face to face with Deterding. Despite the silver hair and penetrating black eyes which helped to create a Napoleonic presence, Deterding backed down and Allen Dulles won. Yet by the mid-1930s, when NNGPM was formed, Dulles and Deterding shared a common interest in the new leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler. Dulles had wasted no time in arranging to speak with Hitler personally, soon after he came to power in 1933, and Deterding's friendship with Hitler led to million dollar donations. However, the key element which swayed Dutch opinion in the formation of NNGPM was the evidence that Japanese units were secretly conducting oil exploration in New Guinea territory. Without American assistance the Dutch could do little to assert colonial control and Dulles used the political tension generated by the Japanese incursion of colonial sovereignty to push through the 60% US controlling interest in NNGPM.
Leading up to the Second World War in the Pacific, the Japanese Navy formulated a grand theory of expansion, not merely as an answer to the problems the Japanese army was facing in its program of expansion in China, but as a grand theory of new development. It was called the march to the South' or Nanshin-ron. Here lay the wealth of the Netherlands East Indies; here there was oil, and in populous Java a market for the Japanese product. For natural resources, the eyes of the Japanese Navy turned to New Guinea. They envisaged this vast island (more than twice the total area of all the islands of Nippon) becoming the source of raw materials for a new imperial Japan. Nanshin-ron took shape with industrial speed in the upper echelons of Japanese Naval Intelligence which used a vanguard of fishing ships estimated by Dutch Intelligence to number as many as 500. Admiral Suetsugu, Commander of combined Japanese fleets and later Minister of Home Affairs, described these fishermen' as an integral part of the March South'. Japanese anthropologists were dispatched to collect information on the tribespeople of New Guinea. The concern about Japanese intrusion as expressed by Jean Jacques Dozy (in the interview in Chapter 1) was part of this pre-war expansion utilised by Allen Dulles to gain the 60% US controlling interest in NNGPM.
After the Pacific War, geologists attached to General Douglas Mac- Arthur's forces remained in the Dutch territory for most of the next decade conducting exploration. Only some of their findings were released, such as nickel on Gag Island, which (as mentioned above) was 10% of world nickel reserves. There was no mention of Dozy's gold discovery. During the 1950s, neither Dulles nor the Dutch political hierarchy was willing to admit that the real issue at the centre of the sovereignty dispute, which so loudly proclaimed the territory had no natural resources, was how to gain control over the gold, copper and oil that lay waiting to be discovered. During the 1950s, using the Cold War to his advantage, Allen Dulles' strategy took shape.
At the same time as the Bay of Pigs another crisis was occurring in Indonesia, lesser known but with the same potential for superpower conflict. This dispute between Indonesia and the Netherlands, over sovereignty of the western half of New Guinea, pitted the US-Dutch NATO alliance against Soviet support for Indonesia. Kennedy's settlement of this crisis and his follow-up strategy to bring Indonesia on side' in the Cold War came under threat with Malaysian Confrontation hence the planned visit to Jakarta.
Introducing Indonesia
Before looking at Kennedy's role in the sovereignty crisis, let me re-introduce Indonesia which after China, India and USA now has the fourth largest population in the world. Indonesia had emerged from the colonial era' only a decade before Kennedy's involvement. When he expressed criticism of colonial rule (as he did at the UN General Assembly, September 25, 1961, upon the death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld) he chose his words carefully to apply not only to the colonised peoples of Africa generally but also to Indonesia specifically.
He spoke of the exploitation and subjugation of the weak by the powerful, of the many by the few, of the governed who have given no consent to be governed, whatever their continent, their class, or their color.22
European dominance in navigation, military technology and trade ensured the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago for centuries remained at the beck and call of colonial powers. As described by George Kahin, one of America's most prominent Indonesia specialists, it was probably the world's richest colony ... (or) ranked just after India in the wealth it brought to a colonial power'.23
It is our collective unfamiliarity with this vast country which has led to our failure to ascertain how closely intertwined it was with the fate of President Kennedy. He very early recognised the significance of Indonesia not only in the political destiny of Southeast Asia but also in the outcome of the Cold War.
[FONT=Times]Indonesia is by far the largest country in Southeast Asia, both in population and in area.
The review here of Poulgrain's sequel - and the long except I've printed further below - makes it clear that The Incubus of Intervention is very much a JFK assassination book, and that Poulgrain has approached his study of Dulles' actions in the light of JFK's murder.
Note to Jim D - I had a major computer glitch and lost some work in scanning Poulgrain's earlier book - many apologies and I'm working on fixing that up.
The long chapter printed at the bottom of this post contained much that was new to me.
Quote:Allen Dulles' "Indonesian Strategy" and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
Would Allen Dulles have resorted to assassinating the President of the United States to ensure the achievement of his Indonesian strategy'?
This is the central question addressed by Greg Poulgrain in his extraordinarily important book, The Incubus of Intervention: Conflicting Indonesian Strategies of John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles
Two days before President John Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963, he had accepted an invitation from Indonesian President Sukarno to visit that country the following spring. The aim of the visit was to end the conflict (Konfrontasi) between Indonesia and Malaysia and to continue Kennedy's efforts to support post-colonial Indonesia with economic and developmental aid, not military. It was part of his larger strategy of ending conflict throughout Southeast Asia and assisting the growth of democracy in newly liberated post-colonial countries worldwide.
He had forecast his position in a dramatic speech in 1957 when, as a Massachusetts Senator, he told the Senate that he supported the Algerian liberation movement and opposed colonial imperialism worldwide. The speech caused an international uproar and Kennedy was harshly attacked by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even liberals such as Adlai Stevenson. But he was praised throughout the third world.
Of course JFK never went to Indonesia in 1964, and his peaceful strategy to bring Indonesia to America's side and to ease tensions in the Cold War was never realized, thanks to Allen Dulles. And Kennedy's proposed withdrawal from Vietnam, which was premised on success in Indonesia, was quickly reversed by Lyndon Johnson after JFK's murder. Soon both countries would experience mass slaughter engineered by Kennedy's opponents in the CIA and Pentagon. Millions would die. Subsequently, starting in December 1975, American installed Indonesian dictator, Suharto, would slaughter hundreds of thousands East-Timorese with American weapons after meeting with Henry Kissinger and President Ford and receiving their approval.
Dulles's Secret
What JFK didn't know was that his plans were threatening a covert long-standing conspiracy engineered by Allen Dulles to effect regime change in Indonesia through bloody means. The primary goal behind this plan was to gain unimpeded access to the vast load of natural resources that Dulles had kept secret from Kennedy, who thought Indonesia was lacking in natural resources. But Dulles knew that if Kennedy, who was very popular in Indonesia, visited Sukarno, it would deal a death blow to his plan to oust Sukarno, install a CIA replacement (Suharto), exterminate alleged communists, and secure the archipelago for Rockefeller controlled oil and mining interests, for whom he had fronted since the 1920s.
Dr. Poulgrain, who teaches Indonesian History, Politics and Society at the University of Sunshine Coast in Australia, explores in very great detail historical issues that have critical significance for today. Based on almost three decades of interviews and research around the world, he has produced a very densely argued book that reads like a detective novel with fascinating sub-plots.
The Importance of Indonesia
Most Americans have little awareness of the strategic and economic importance of Indonesia. It is the world's 4[SUP]th[/SUP] most populous country, is situated in a vital shipping lane adjacent to the South China Sea, has the world's largest Muslim population, has vast mineral and oil deposits, and is home to Grasberg, the world's largest copper and gold mine, owned by Freeport McMoRan of Phoenix, Arizona. Long a battleground in the Cold War, it remains vitally important in the New Cold War launched by the Obama administration against Russia and China, the same antagonists Allen Dulles strove to defeat through guile and violence. Just recently the Indonesian government, under pressure from the army that has stymied democratic reforms for 18 years, signed a defense agreement with Russia for the sharing of intelligence, the sale of Russian military equipment, including fighter jets, and the manufacturing of weapons in Indonesia. While not front page news in the U.S., these facts make Indonesia of great importance today and add to the gravity of Poulgrain's history.
The Devil in Paradise
His use of the word "incubus" (an evil spirit that has sexual intercourse with sleeping women) in the title is appropriate since the sinister character that snakes his way through this historical analysis is Allen Dulles, the longest serving Director of the CIA and Kennedy's arch-enemy. While contextually different from David Talbot's portrayal of Dulles in The Devil's Chessboard, Poulgrain's portrait of Dulles within the frame of Indonesian history is equally condemnatory and nightmarish. Both describe an evil genius ready to do anything to advance his agenda.
Reading Poulgrain's masterful analysis, one can clearly see how much of modern history is a struggle for control of the underworld where lies the fuel that runs the megamachine oil, minerals, gold, etc. Manifest ideological conflicts, while garnering headlines, often bury the secret of this subterranean devil's game.
His story begins with a discovery that is then kept secret for many decades: "In the alpine region of Netherlands New Guinea (so named under Dutch colonial rule today, West Papua) in 1936, three Dutchmen discovered a mountainous outcrop of ore with high copper content and very high concentrations of gold. When later analyzed in the Netherlands, the gold (in gram/ton) proved to be twice that of Witwatersrand in South Africa, then the world's richest gold mine, but this information was not made public."
The geologist among the trio, Jean Jacques Dozy, worked for the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company (NNGPM), ostensibly a Dutch-controlled company based in The Hague, but whose controlling interest actually lay in the hands of the Rockefeller family, as did the mining company, Freeport Indonesia (now Freeport McMoRan, one of whose Directors from 1988-95 was Henry Kissinger, Dulles's and the Rockefeller's close associate) that began mining operations there in 1966. It was Allen Dulles, Paris-based lawyer in the employ of Rockefeller's Standard Oil, who in 1935 arranged the controlling interest in NNGPN for the Rockefellers. And it was Dulles, among a select few others, who, because of various intervening events, including WW II, that made its exploitation impossible, kept the secret of the gold mine for almost three decades, even from President Kennedy. JFK "was never informed of the El Dorado' he had unwittingly taken out of Dutch hands with the result that (once the remaining political hurdles in Indonesia were overcome) Freeport would have unimpeded access to its mining concession." Those "political hurdles" i.e. regime change would take a while to effect.
The Indonesia-Cuba Connection
But first JFK would have to be eliminated, for he had brokered Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua/West Irian for Sukarno from the Dutch who had ties to Freeport Sulphur. Freeport was aghast at the potential loss of "El Dorado," especially since they had recently had their world's most advanced nickel refinery expropriated by Fidel Castro, who had named Che Guevara its new manager. Freeport's losses in Cuba made access to Indonesia even more important. Cuba and Indonesia thus were joined in the deadly game of chess between Dulles and Kennedy, and someone would have to lose.
While much has been written about Cuba, Kennedy, and Dulles, the Indonesian side of the story has been slighted. Poulgrain remedies this with an exhaustive and deeply researched exploration of these matters. He details the deviousness of the covert operation Dulles ran in Indonesia during the 1950s and 1960s. He makes it clear that Kennedy was shocked by Dulles' actions, yet never fully grasped the treacherous genius of it all. Dulles was always "working two or three stages ahead of the present." Having armed and promoted a rebellion against Sukarno's central government in 1958, Dulles made sure it would fail (shades of the Bay of Pigs to come).
Yet the end result of CIA interference in Indonesian internal affairs via the 1958 Rebellion was depicted as a failure at the time, and has consistently been depicted as a failure since that time. This holds true only if the stated goal of the CIA was the same as the actual goal. Even more than five decades later, media analysis of the goal of The Outer Island rebels is still portrayed as a secession, as covert US support for rebels in the Outer Islands that wished to secede from the central government in Jakarta'. The actual goal of Allen Dulles had more to do with achieving a centralized army command in such a way as to appear that the CIA backing for the rebels failed.
The Need for Assassinations
Dulles betrayed the rebels he armed and encouraged, just as he betrayed friend and foe alike during his long career. The rebellion that he instigated and planned to fail was the first stage of a larger intelligence strategy that would come to fruition in 1965-6 with the ouster of Sukarno (after multiple unsuccessful assassination attempts) and the institution of a reign of terror that followed. It was also when 1966 Freeport McMoRan began their massive mining in West Papua at Grasberg at an elevation of 14,000 feet in the Alpine region. Dulles was nothing if not patient; he had been at this game since WW I. Even after Kennedy fired him following the Bay of Pigs, his plans were executed, just as those who got in his way were. Poulgrain makes a powerful case that these included JFK, U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold (working with Kennedy for a peaceful solution in Indonesia and other places), and Congolese President Patrice Lumumba.
His focus is on why they needed to be assassinated (similar in this regard to James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable), though with the exception of Kennedy (since the how is well-known and obvious), he also presents compelling evidence as to the how. Hammarskjold, in many ways Kennedy's spiritual brother, was a particularly powerful obstacle to Dulles's plans for Indonesia and countries throughout the Third World. Like JFK, he was committed to independence for indigenous and colonial peoples everywhere, and was trying to implement "his Swedish-style third way' proposing a form of muscular pacifism'."
Had the UN Secretary General succeeded in bringing even half these countries to independence, he would have transformed the UN into a significant world power and created a body of nations so large as to be a counter-weight to those embroiled in the Cold War.
Poulgrain draws on documents from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu to show the connection between South Africa's "Operation Celest" and Dulles's involvement in Hammarskjold's murder in September 1961. While it was reported at the time as an accidental plane crash, he quotes former President Harry Truman saying, "Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said, When they killed him'."
Dulles sold his overt Indonesian strategy as being necessary to thwart a communist takeover in Indonesian. Cold War rhetoric, like "the war on terrorism" today, served as his cover. In this he had the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his side; they considered Kennedy soft on communism, in Indonesia and Cuba and everywhere else. Dulles's covert agenda was to serve the interests of his power elite patrons.
Dulles and George de Mohrenschildt
Poulgrain adds significantly to our understanding of JFK's assassination and its aftermath by presenting new information about George de Mohrenschildt, Lee Harvey Oswald's handler in Dallas. Dulles had a long association with the de Mohrenschildt family, going back to 1920-21 when in Constantinople he negotiated with Baron Sergius Alexander von Mohrenschildt on behalf of Rockefeller's Standard Oil. The Baron's brother and business partner was George's father. Dulles's law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, "was virtually the front desk for Standard Oil." These negotiations on behalf of elite capitalist interests, in the shadow of the Russian Revolution, became the template for Dulles's career: economic exploitation was inseparable from military concerns, the former concealed behind the anti-communist rhetoric of the latter. An anti-red thread ran through Dulles's career, except when the red was the blood of all those whom he considered expendable. And the numbers are legion.
"It was through Standard Oil that a link existed between Dulles [who controlled the Warren Commission] and de Mohrenschildt, and this should have been brought to the attention of the Warren Commission but was not made public when Dulles had so prominent a role." Poulgrain argues convincingly that De Mohrenschildt worked in "oil intelligence" before his CIA involvement, and that oil intelligence was not only Dulles's work when he first met George's father, Sergius, in Baku, but that that "oil intelligence" is a redundancy. The CIA, after all, is a creation of Wall Street and their interests have always been joined. The Agency was not formed to provide intelligence to US Presidents; that was a convenient myth used to cover its real purpose which was to serve the interests of investment bankers and the power elite.
While working in 1941 for Humble Oil (Prescott Bush was a major shareholder, Dulles was his lawyer, and Standard Oil had secretly bought Humble Oil sixteen years before), de Mohrenschildt was caught up in a scandal that involved Vichy (pro-Nazi) French intelligence in selling oil to Germany. This was similar to the Dulles's brothers and Standard Oil's notorious business dealings with Germany.
It was an intricate web of the high cabal with Allen Dulles at the center.
In the midst of the scandal, de Mohrenschildt, suspected of being a Vichy French intelligence agent, "disappeared" for a while. He later told the Warren Commission that he decided to take up oil drilling, without mentioning the name of Humble Oil that employed him again, this time as a roustabout.
"Just when George needed to disappear', Humble Oil was providing an oil exploration team to be subcontracted to NNGPM the company Allen Dulles had set up five years earlier to work in Netherlands New Guinea." Poulgrain makes a powerful circumstantial evidence case (certain documents are still unavailable) that de Mohrenschildt, in order to avoid appearing in court, went in communicado in Netherlands New Guinea's in mid-1941 where he made a record oil discovery and received a $10,000 bonus from Humble Oil.
"Avoiding adverse publicity about his role in selling oil to Vichy France was the main priority; for George, a brief drilling adventure in remote Netherlands New Guinea would have been a timely and strategic exit." And who best to help him in this escape than Allen Dulles indirectly, of course; for Dulles's modus operandi was to maintain his "distance" from his contacts, often over many decades.
In other words, Dulles and de Mohrenschildt were intimately involved for a long time prior to JFK's assassination. Poulgrain rightly claims that "the entire focus of the Kennedy investigation would have shifted had the [Warren] Commission become aware of the 40-year link between Allen Dulles and de Mohrenschildt." Their relationship involved oil, spying, Indonesia, Nazi Germany, the Rockefellers, Cuba, Haiti, etc. It was an international web of intrigue that involved a cast of characters stranger than fiction, a high cabal of the usual and unusual operatives.
Two unusual ones are worth mentioning: Michael Fomenko and Michael Rockefeller. The eccentric Fomenko aka "Tarzan" is the Russian-Australian nephew of de Mohrenschildt's wife, Jean Fomenko. His arrest and deportation from Netherlands New Guinea in 1959, where he had travelled from Australia in a canoe, and his subsequent life, are fascinating and sad. It's the stuff of a bizarre film. It seems he was one of those victims who had to be silenced because he knew a secret about George's 1941 oil discovery that was not his to share. "In April 1964, at the same time George de Mohrenschildt was facing the Warren Commission a time when any publicity regarding Sele 40 [George's record oil discovery] could have changed history it was decided that electro-convulsive therapy would be used on Michael Fomenko." He was then imprisoned at the Ipswich Special Mental Hospital.
Equally interesting is the media myth surrounding the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, Nelson's son and heir to the Standard Oil fortune, who was allegedly eaten by cannibals in New Guinea in 1961. His tale became front-page news, "a media event closed off to any other explanation and the political implications of his disappearance became an ongoing tragedy for the Papuan people." To this very day, the West Papuan people, whose land was described by Standard Oil official Richard Archbold in 1938 as "Shangri-la," are fighting for their independence.
Poulgrain offers most interesting takes on these two characters and shows how their stories are connected to the larger tale of intrigue.
This is a very important and compelling book. Difficult and dense at times, more expansive at others, it greatly adds to our understanding of why JFK was murdered. With its Indonesian focus, it shows us how Allen Dulles's sinister purview was wide-spread and long-standing; how it included so much more than Cuba, Guatemala, Iran, etc.; specifically, how important far-distant Indonesia was in his thinking, and how that thinking clashed with President Kennedy's on a crucial issue. It forces us to consider how different the world would be if JFK had lived.
The Incubus of Intervention sheds new light on Indonesian history and America's complicity in its tragedy. It is essential reading today when Barack Obama is executing his pivot to Asia and promoting conflict with China and Russia. Although not explored in Poulgrain's book, it's interesting to note that Obama's Indonesian step-father, Lolo Soetero, left Obama and his mother in Hawaii in that crucial year of 1966 when mass killings were underway to return to Indonesia to map Western New Guinea (West Papua) for the Indonesian government. After Dulles's regime change was accomplished and Suharto had replaced Sukarno, he went to work for Unocal, the first oil company to sign a production sharing agreement with Suharto. Strange coincidences, bitter fruit.
Is Poulgrain correct? Did Allen Dulles direct the assassination of President Kennedy to ensure his, rather the Kennedy's, Indonesian strategy would succeed?
We know the CIA coordinated the assassination of President Kennedy. We know that Allen Dulles was involved. We know that Indonesia was one reason why.
Was it "the reason"?
Read this wonderful book and decide.
Poulgrain's book is very hard to locate. Poulgrain has posted online a complete chapter from it, and I've reprinted this below.[size=12]
[size=12]
Chapter 2: JFK, Dulles and Hammarskjöld
Kennedy's Planned Trip to Jakarta
In the Foreword to my book on Malaysian Confrontation, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, one of Indonesia's leading writers, commented on President Kennedy's anticipated visit to Jakarta in early 1964:
Kennedy's plans to meet Sukarno in Indonesia never came to pass: that we all know, for he was murdered....
Pramoedya drew attention to the planned visit without elaborating, apart from saying that Kennedy, and Indonesia's President Sukarno, had to disappear from the stage of history. Half a century has elapsed since these two leaders disappeared' and with them the political positivity of the now forgotten plan to visit Jakarta. Instead, in the mid-1960s, a proliferation of violence and military mentality suffused the nation. Indonesia still bears the scars. This outcome was in stark contrast to the Indonesia strategy' Kennedy was planning in 1963. Working in conjunction with Sukarno whose perennial aim was to unify his nation, JFK's intended visit was lost in the turgid history of that time.
Kennedy's proposed visit to Jakarta in April or May of 1964' according to the long serving US ambassador in Indonesia, Howard Jones, was a strategy to end Malaysian Confrontation. This period of hostility between Indonesia and Malaysia, involving armed skirmishes and provocative political posturing, fell short of war. It started in early 1963 as Indonesian protest' against the British format of decolonisation which was simply lumping together its disparate colonial possessions in Southeast Asia to ensure the numbers of Chinese overall were in the minority. The reaction in Washington to Confrontation resulted in US aid to Indonesia being reduced to a trickle. Reopening these aid channels was part of Kennedy's rationale in making the trip because Indonesia was a vital component of his larger strategy in Southeast Asia. Planning the visit to Jakarta involved several months of negotiation before Kennedy and Sukarno reached an agreement; then on November 20th the visit was formally announced. Because of the tragedy in Dallas a few days later, the visit did not occur. The assassin's bullet put an end to our plans and disposed of the immediate prospects for settlement of the Malaysia dispute,' wrote Jones.1 Confrontation continued up to 1965/6 when President Sukarno was ousted by General Suharto.
As shown in my book The Genesis of Konfrontasi, from archival evidence and interviews, Sukarno was not the instigator of Malaysian Confrontation. Instead, the principal Indonesian player was the Foreign Minister, Subandrio, who ran the largest intelligence service in Indonesia and fully expected to be the next president. As well, Confrontation did not start without various covert actions by persons linked to both British intelligence (MI6) and American intelligence (CIA), centered in Singapore and operating outside the aegis of government.
President Sukarno's role in Confrontation underwent a change after Kennedy's assassination. Initially, when Indonesia became embroiled in the conflict not of his doing, Sukarno's public statements were designed to steer a course through dangerous political currents beyond his control, whereas after November 1963 he was attempting to regain leadership of this anti-British, anti-colonial campaign. This change in Sukarno was reflected in the expression Ganjang Malaysia', popularised in Western media as Crush Malaysia'. Earlier, Sukarno had disagreed with this interpretation, and actually performed for the media to demonstrate his meaning. Ganjang', he explained, was like nibbling food in your mouth to check it for taste as would a politician, checking for any disagreeable taste of colonialism then spitting it out! Territorial acquisition was not on the menu in Malaysian Confrontation. Nevertheless critics of Indonesia2 readily depicted Confrontation as expansionism because it came hard on the heels of Sukarno's sovereignty dispute over Netherlands New Guinea, a dispute in which President Kennedy's role had proved crucial. Sukarno commanded great respect as the founding father of Indonesian independence, but he himself was unable to halt Confrontation because it was driven by domestic political rivalry. Having ousted the Dutch from New Guinea, Indonesia in 1963 was still seething with anti- colonial venom. There were three rival streams of Indonesian opposition to Malaysia one linked with Subandrio, another with the Indonesian communist party (PKI) and another with the Indonesian army. These three disparate groups were involved in the initial border skirmishes with Sarawak in east Malaysia' being defended by British troops, in the throes of decolonisation. The intermittent conflict drew criticism from Washington through the US ambassador in Jakarta who explained that the US government agreed that Malaysia' was the best format for decolonisation. Then, in September 1963, after the burning of the British Embassy in Jakarta, bilateral relations with USA were strained to the point where aid for Indonesia was reduced to a minimum. Kennedy's efforts to ensure his aid program would not falter now attracted criticism from British officials who told the White House with increasing frequency that UK and US interests regarding Indonesia were beginning fundamentally to diverge.'3 Republican Congressman William S. Broomfield claimed that Indonesia was misusing US assistance. Support to cut US aid came from a clique of other Congressmen including Mathias, Gross and Findley.
Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon then endorsed the Broomfield amendment', demanding that Indonesia be dropped from the list of recipients of US aid. 'I say we should wipe it off the aid program', he declared.4
Kennedy's planned visit to Jakarta was a radical move to re-open all funding as this was a vital part of the follow-up strategy' he had set in place after intervening in 1962 in the anti-colonial dispute with the Dutch. In Indonesia, Kennedy's intervention had stirred popular euphoria in his favour, and this continued into 1963, such was the young American president's charisma. The Bay of Pigs, the Congo, Berlin, Laos, Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis the Cold War crises confronting him were making global headlines which for Indonesian readers kept JFK news' current, well past the highpoint of the New York Agreement in August 1962. In terms of implementing his follow-up strategy' to the sovereignty crisis, the ideal time to exploit pro-JFK sentiment was in 1963, yet the proposed date for the visit to Jakarta in early 1964 would still benefit from the kudos surrounding President John F. Kennedy. His footprint of fame' had been greatly enhanced by intervening in the New Guinea dispute: unresolved since independence in 1949, it had created its own anti-colonial niche in Indonesia's collective psyche.
Malaysian Confrontation in 1963 had caused the delay and then the Bloomfield Amendment, cutting the funding for his Indonesia strategy, left JFK no alternative. Only then did he resolve to make the Jakarta visit and employ his charisma as the last political weapon at his disposal. Success for Kennedy's visit to Jakarta depended upon the response of the Indonesian populace; and this (in late 1963) was still very positive. So it seemed a forgone conclusion that he would have achieved his goal because of the degree of veneration for JFK in Indonesia, combined with the eloquence of Indonesia's President Sukarno for whom there was still widespread adulation. The politics of personality was the only weapon at the disposal of both Kennedy and Sukarno to bring Confrontation to a stop, and it was their intention to employ it jointly, and to the full, once the US president was in Jakarta. During his three years in office, Kennedy's image and reputation had acquired a very positive aura throughout Asia and Africa far surpassing his predecessor, President Eisenhower. The 43-year old president was seen as pro-Indonesian his new political stance and willingness to act decisively, capped off by his intervention in the sovereignty dispute, was in stark contrast to the blatant political interference of his 70-year old predecessor.
Indonesians and especially Sukarno, whose oratorical skill was well-honed over four decades, welcomed the new style, the new era, as heralded in the inaugural address.
...Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace....
JFK's political opponents ensconced in Washington throughout the 1950s were unaccustomed to a president asserting such personal control. It was his forte, especially in foreign policy. Kennedy's instinctive style which was one of personal and intimate command'5 took on unprecedented importance and became a threat to the political strategy of his opponent because it meant he was highly likely to implement the aims of his Jakarta trip.
Kennedy was aiming for a seismic shift of Cold War alignment in Southeast Asia bringing Indonesia on side'. As Bradley Simpson stated (in 2008):
One would never know from reading the voluminous recent literature on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and Southeast Asia, for example, that until the mid-1960s most officials [in the US] still considered Indonesia of far greater importance than Vietnam and Laos. 6
Kennedy wanted to ensure that Indonesia was secure before implementing any policy decision regarding the US presence in Vietnam. The two interrelated parts of his action plan after the New Guinea sovereignty dispute involved utilising the predominantly pro-US Indonesian army, and large-scale US aid for development projects in Indonesia. Both Kennedy and his opponents in Washington pursued a paradigm of modernisation which had emerged in the late 1950s using the military as the most cohesively organised group in undeveloped countries. Simpson has outlined how the US government's embrace of military modernization' in the early 1960s followed on from the March 1959 Draper Committee Report which called for using the armed forces of underdeveloped countries as a major transmission belt of socio-economic reform and development'.
Admiral Arleigh Burke and CIA director Allen Dulles argued at a June 18 NSC meeting [1959] that the United States ought to expand military training programs in Asia to include a wide range of civilian responsibilities and to encourage Military Assistance Advisory Groups (MAAGs) to develop useful and appropriate relationships with the rising military leaders and factions in the underdeveloped countries to which they were assigned'. A few months later the semi-governmental RAND Corporation held a conference at which Lucian Pye, Guy Pauker, Edward Shils, and other scholars expanded on these ideas.7
Admiral Arleigh Burke, Dulles and Pauker were promoting the Indonesian armed forces as a modernizing force' (a strategy linked to Dulles' role in the 1958 Outer Islands Rebellion see Chapter 4) and, continues Simpson:
the army simultaneously pursued a counterinsurgency strategy against internal opponents while greatly expanding its political and economic power following the 1957 declaration of martial law and the takeover of Dutch enterprises.
By the time Kennedy came to office, much of Southeast Asia-related US policy was infused with military modernisation theory. Civic action programs figured highly in Kennedy's strategy in Indonesia, utilising the army but also the police, designed to counterbalance the attraction the PKI had for impoverished farmers like moths to a light in the hope of salvation. The infrastructure and poverty reduction programs were tied to US funding and framed around the assessment made by Tufts University Professor Donald Humphrey. He recommended that US aid to Indonesia starting in 1963 should be in the order of US$325390 million. Europe and Japan were to have contributed almost half of this, but Kennedy's aid program soon encountered difficulties in the Congress.
While still acutely wary of policy interference as occurred with the Bay of Pigs like an inaugural wake-up call', Kennedy had no way of ascertaining how his Indonesia strategy actually threatened the Indonesia strategy of his opponents. Nevertheless, the fact that JFK insisted on denying the CIA any part in his own negotiations with Sukarno is an indication of the serious distrust he held by 1963. Earlier in 1961, when Dulles was at the height of his power and JFK had been in office only a few months, he had requested a Briefing Paper from the CIA, prior to President Sukarno's visit in April 1961. The advice given President Kennedy was that we should not now entertain any major increases in the scale of economic or military aid to Indonesia'. Mindful of Allen Dulles and Guy Pauker as the mouthpiece of military modernisation, Kennedy must have interpreted such advice as hypocritical. Similarly, the CIA advice on whether or not Kennedy should support Sukarno's quest to oust the Dutch from New Guinea lacked not so much insight as vision; it offered only a bleak prospect, saying that whichever way the President moved it would not alter the inexorable rise to power of the PKI.
It would be gratifying to be able to propose an alternative course of action by the United States which would stand a good chance of turning the course of events in Indonesia in a constructive direction. Unfortunately, this is a situation in which the influence that the United States can exert, at least in the short run, is extremely limited, if (as must be assumed) crude and violent intervention is excluded.8
Kennedy chose to support Sukarno's claim to the Dutch territory and follow through with precisely the opposite to what the CIA had advised an economic aid program to counter the PKI by addressing poverty through civic aid and development projects. When the funding restrictions imposed by Congress brought JFK's follow-up plan to a standstill and he resolved to make an historic visit to Jakarta to restart the US aid project, the threat to Dulles' strategy left no option. In the same way that Dulles had offered Kennedy no option in the 1961 Briefing Paper, in 1963 Kennedy's decision to visit Jakarta left no option for Dulles (whom JFK had already ushered to the political sidelines). We can surmise how the exit of Dulles in 1961 may have seemed a positive move for Kennedy and one that should have helped him in 1963 implement the Indonesia policy he wanted. While Dulles' removal from office did little to diminish his influence, it could only have exacerbated the threat created by Kennedy's plan to visit Jakarta. Dulles simply had no answer to counter Kennedy's dramatic personal initiative to visit Jakarta: or to re-contextualise the same comment from the 1961 Briefing Paper given Kennedy, Dulles had no answer in 1963 if (as must be assumed) crude and violent intervention is excluded'.
In two crucial aspects, Kennedy's plan clashed with the ongoing strategy of regime change' which DCI Dulles had set in motion six years earlier. Firstly, JFK intended to utilise the Indonesian army as servants of the state' of Indonesia, not for the army to assume power. And secondly, Kennedy's intention was to maintain the presidency of Sukarno. Unbeknown to Kennedy, his plan to use the army was in effect commandeering the same asset intended by Dulles to implement regime change. Not only was JFK usurping the benefits of the transformation occurring as a result of US training of Indonesian army officers a process which David Ransome labelled with the pithy description, a creeping coup d'etat'9 but ensuring Sukarno remained president would prevent the full military option. Kennedy would not simply have overruled his opponent but, in addition, keeping Sukarno as president would have prevented gaining untrammelled access to natural resources, a project which had been many years in the planning. We may surmise Kennedy was partially aware that his overall plan was making use of a military option still in its preparatory stage, simply from the large number of Indonesian army officers being trained in the US. Their common ground was the ideological focus of US officials on the military as a modernizing force', but where Kennedy was starkly at odds with his Washington opponents was his determination to retain Sukarno as President of Indonesia.
The visit to Jakarta was premised on an understanding between Kennedy and Sukarno to bring Malaysian Confrontation to an end, while JFK was in Jakarta. Howard Jones, US Ambassador in Jakarta from 1958, was well acquainted with Sukarno and fully aware that the key to achieving this important political change was Kennedy's charisma, combined with the adulation and respect he commanded. Together, Kennedy and Sukarno could bring about a cessation of Malaysian Confrontation but, as Jones observes in his book Indonesia: the Possible Dream, Sukarno could not initiate a settlement of the dispute himself '.10
JFK's Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, in personal correspondence with me (January 8, 1992)11 wrote: President Kennedy made it clear that confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia should be stopped....' Only after several months of negotiation with the Indonesian President did Kennedy agree to the proposed visit, after three requests by Sukarno. The one precondition set by Kennedy was his insistence on achieving a successful outcome'. Rusk confirmed in writing the arrangement with Sukarno: President Kennedy made it clear that confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia should be stopped, not merely for the duration of Kennedy's visit but on a permanent basis'. However, it was not confrontation that was stopped but rather, the visit by Kennedy himself.
For Sukarno, Kennedy's precondition meant declaring a permanent cessation of hostilities during the actual visit of the American president; while for JFK himself, a successful visit' meant ending the hostilities which were jeopardising the Indonesia strategy he had initiated in 1962 and which Malaysian Confrontation in 1963 was threatening to turn into just another Cold War fatality'.
As part of a wider Southeast Asian tour, the visit was described by JFK as one that would provide a much needed boost to his chances for re- election. This tongue-in-cheek explanation understated the real political significance which the visit held for Kennedy himself. Now with a half- century of hindsight, the adverse repercussions of not making that trip to Jakarta are more clearly delineated in terms of the tragedy that befell Indonesia in 1965. In Cold War terms, Kennedy's Indonesia strategy held every chance of success indeed, the very likelihood of success compelled the decision to prevent the trip. For Dulles' Indonesia strategy, Kennedy's intention to support and prolong the Sukarno presidency was political anathema.
Why Kennedy Retained Allen Dulles
Between election and inauguration, John Kennedy had 72 days to survey the tumult of domestic and international issues soon to be encountered as the 35th President. Some of these, among other issues, included political unrest in the Congo, Laos, Vietnam and Berlin. Two such issues actually ballooned into potential crises during his time as President-elect. One of these involved Cuba, the other Indonesia and both involved Allen Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). President Kennedy for various reasons had retained Dulles from the Eisenhower administration, a fateful inheritance from the ailing incumbent.
When Kennedy began organising his administration as President- elect, the first press announcement he made was that Allen Dulles would remain as DCI. In finding the best person for the job' to meet the multifarious demands of staffing the new administration, staff which finally included fifteen Rhodes scholars, Kennedy often adopted a bipartisan approach. Surely, choosing Dulles indicated that Kennedy did not regard him as being among the opponents in Washington'? Yet within the first three months of the Kennedy presidency, Dulles had inflicted so much political damage this question does not bear answering, but simply prompts another: why, then, did Kennedy retain Dulles as DCI? Dulles was an icon of US intelligence. Since 1916 before John Fitzgerald Kennedy was even born Dulles had served in that specialised field under every US president since Woodrow Wilson.
Another reason for retaining Dulles was linked to the narrow victory over Republican presidential contender, Richard Nixon. The winning mar- gin of votes only 120,000 out of a total of 69 million12 was attributed to Kennedy's success in the televised debates. Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy's speechwriter and special counsel throughout most of his political career, from Congressman to Senator and then President, described the debates as the primary factor in Kennedy's ultimate victory'.13 The televised debates in October 1960 were the first time such an event was held although nowadays televised debates between presidential candidates are the norm. For Kennedy and Nixon, there were four debates, four unprecedented opportunities to reach millions of Americans, and the first (which was on domestic policy) had an audience of 70 million. The second and third debates were questions and answers, while the fourth debate was on foreign policy, and this was where Allen Dulles played his hand. Castro and Cuba only 90 miles from our shore' had been much in the news during the year of presidential campaigning and claimed an important part of the fourth debate. Nixon already knew that the CIA was planning an invasion of Cuba, but of course could not mention this during the debate; but Dulles had provided Kennedy a strategically timed briefing on Cuba shortly before the debate. Dulles did not divulge information about the invasion that would come at Palm Beach when he was President-elect and during his first week of office but at this stage Dulles gave Kennedy the edge with other intelligence which proved crucial during the debate. And crucial too, it seems, when the time came for Kennedy to decide whether or not to retain Dulles as DCI. Dulles' briefing must have seemed like a godsend when Kennedy was analysing the votes that won him the presidency.
There was still another reason for Dulles being included in the President-elect's first announcement. After winning the Democratic nomination, Kennedy had requested two persons to prepare separate reports on the anticipated transition from Republican to Democratic administration. These two persons were Columbia professor Richard Neustadt and Clark Clifford whom Sorensen described as a Washington attorney'. His former experience, however, included special counsel to President Truman during the 1948 presidential campaign against Thomas E. Dewey. Special counsel for Dewey was Allen Dulles who was also the confidential link on foreign policy matters between the Truman administration and the Dewey campaign'.14 So in 1960, bipartisanship in relation to Allen Dulles was revisiting Clifford's earlier contact with Dulles. In both reports, Kennedy was advised to retain Dulles as DCI (and J. Edgar Hoover as director of the FBI).15 Ironically, in May 1961 after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy invited Clifford into the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to ensure the accuracy and unbiased nature of the intelligence being supplied to the President. Neustadt had recommended the directors of five sensitive positions' remain unchanged, but of these only Dulles and Hoover were retained. Sorensen quipped that, of the five, Kennedy kept only the first two, whom the dinner guests the previous evening had reportedly suggested be the first to be ousted'.16
The intelligence on Cuba, which Dulles provided to Kennedy before the crucial debate with Nixon, gave the Democratic candidate a clear advantage over his Republican rival. More than just highlighting Dulles' familiarity with Cuba, this showed Dulles was investing in the possibility of Kennedy winning the presidency. Perhaps even more than this, it showed Dulles (who through family and social connections knew Jack' Kennedy, his wife and the extended family) already had his measure of the man. Dulles knew that Kennedy would not leave this debt unpaid. As it turned out, the narrower the margin of winning votes, the greater seemed the debt, and if Dulles' briefing before the historic debates could be described as a pre-election psychological strategy, it worked perfectly. Kennedy's perceived familiarity with the issue of Cuba may have proved crucial in winning the debate, but Dulles' duplicity soon became apparent. In Kennedy's first week in office, it was his unfamiliarity with the issue of Cuba, or rather, the CIA's half-baked invasion of Cuba, that proved to be an international embarrassment for the new president. Sorensen commented: The Bay of Pigs had been and would be the worst defeat of his career'.17
Fidel Castro's Cuba, not Indonesian Papua, became the bête noir of US foreign policy after the CIA invasion force foundered in the Bay of Pigs on April 18, 1961. Castro's declaration of a socialist state and the importing of Soviet missiles led to a nuclear standoff. While Kennedy negotiated with Khrushchev, the world, collectively, held its breath. Cuba, however, had not become the touchstone of Cold War tension without the initial input from Allen Dulles.
Apart from the generational difference, JFK and Dulles both were in office alongside their siblings, JFK's younger brother Robert as Attorney General and DCI Dulles' elder brother John Foster Dulles was Eisenhower's Secretary of State. The depth of experience in the two Dulles brothers was unprecedented, starting from the Versailles Treaty with John Foster drawing up the reparations agreement and Allen in the intelligence section. Between them was always a fierce sense of rivalry to achieve results in international affairs, continuing the sibling rivalry that had persisted throughout their childhood. John Foster was firstborn and favourite whereas Allen, born seven years later with a clubfoot, was always trying to prove he was as good as Foster, if not better. It was Allen, not Foster, who had always wanted to be Secretary of State. There had already been two family members in that office an uncle in the Wilson presidency and their maternal grandfather, in the Harrison presidency yet it was John Foster not Allen who achieved that goal when Eisenhower became president in 1953.
If there was any similar in-family rivalry in the Kennedy clan, it disappeared after the deaths of the eldest son during the war and the eldest daughter soon after the war. In the case of John and Robert Kennedy when JFK was president, the two brothers were intensely reliant on each other's abilities and tended to act as one unit, as in Robert's negotiations with President Sukarno and Dutch Foreign Minister Luns in the New Guinea sovereignty dispute. In Kennedy's various elections starting in 1952, culminating in the presidency, Robert was his trusted campaign manager. In the first Eisenhower administration, the link between John Foster as Secretary of State and Allen as Director of Central Intelligence, on both official and family levels, was seen by the media as beneficial to the national interest. The Dulles brothers were perceived as having created their own legend even before serving together under Eisenhower. While acting together, however, they were not one unit as the Kennedys were in the 1960s. The media reaction to this was often expressed in religious terms, JFK being the first Catholic to reach the office of president. John Foster followed his father in the Presbyterian faith, attending church every Sunday, whereas Allen had adulterous affairs for most of his working life without jeopardising his lifelong role in intelligence.
Similar indiscretion by John Kennedy may have led to the political pressure referred to by Frederick Kempe18 for retaining Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover. Allen revelled in intelligence whereas John Foster often chose to adopt the State Department mentality of knowing as little as possible about sordid operational details of intelligence'. Grose expounds this point further, saying that Allen always claimed his duty was intelligence, and policymaking was John Foster's responsibility but Allen was ever imaginative in devising intelligence operations that by their very nature determined the shape of national policy'.19
When John Foster Dulles passed away in April 1959, after two years of failing health because of colon cancer, Allen's covert intelligence operations entered an even more radical stage. Allen began taking bigger risks. John Foster had not wanted Allen to succeed him as Secretary of State and bluntly told him so, closing the door on that lifelong ambition. He recommended that his successor be Christian Herter who was reliant on crutches because of osteoarthritis. Christian Herter and Allen Dulles were not close friends, despite being acquainted since the First World War. With a new Secretary of State for the remaining twenty-one months of the Eisenhower administration, the change in dynamic in the upper echelon of power influenced Allen's mode of operations. As well, John Foster's death no doubt served as a reminder to Allen of his own mortality. He was, after all, almost 67 years old when retained by Kennedy as Director of Central Intelligence. He was reaching the end of his career and the culmination of a major project centred on the Indonesian archipelago which had first caught his attention years earlier. The CIA- assisted covert operation' in Indonesia, the Outer Islands rebellion (otherwise known as the PRRI-Permesta rebellion which is examined in Chapter 4) was but one part of this major project. Allen Dulles has been openly linked with this rebellion which started in February 1958. It ended almost immediately, although for the next few years he maintained a supply of weapons for the rebels because continuing conflict ensured the officially declared state of emergency' also continued. This effectively delayed the holding of elections in Java and precluded the possibility of the Indonesian communist party attaining any increased representation or political power through the ballot box.
As a result of his vast experience in diplomacy, oil, intelligence and state affairs, Allen Dulles had at his disposal a network of contacts which he used in his Indonesia project. Ultimately, he was aiming for regime change, the essential ingredient of which was a central army command. Aware of the immense potential of natural resources in Netherlands New Guinea since pre-war days, Dulles wanted the Dutch territory to become part of Indonesia. While this was achieved on Sukarno's watch, it was done only because the central army command was already amassing in the corridors of power awaiting regime change.
When Kennedy officially ended Dulles' role as Director of Central Intelligence on November 29, 1961, Allen's network of contacts was like an intelligence tsunami held in abeyance. The president described the departing DCI in prophetic terms:
I know of no other American in the history of this country who has served in seven administrations of seven Presidents varying from party to party, from point of view to point of view, from problem to problem, and yet at the end of each administration each President of the United States has paid tribute to his service and also has counted Allen Dulles as their friend. This is an extraordinary record, and I know that all of you who have worked with him understand why this record has been made. I regard Allen Dulles as an almost unique figure in our country.
Yet Dulles still commanded enormous influence. The newly appointed director, John McCone, with legions of staff moved into the new building at Langley. Ironically, in the design and construction of the new head- quarters, Dulles had played a prominent role, but he never occupied the new building. He still kept his former office and, as well, took up another with Sullivan and Cromwell, the legal firm in which he had worked with John Foster in the 1930s, representing Rockefeller oil interests and the myriad of subsidiaries. Allen had not actually married into the Rockefeller family as John Foster had done, but nevertheless his lifelong association with Standard Oil made him an essential member of the extended family. In the years between the First and Second World Wars, there was no legal restriction on someone like Allen Dulles sharing his expertise between private enterprise and the State Department as mentioned by John D. Rockefeller, at 98 years of age, openly expressing his thanks in his pre-Second World War publication, Random Reminiscences of Men
and Events:20
We did not ruthlessly go after the trade of our competitors and attempt to ruin it by cutting prices or instituting a spy system.... One of our greatest helpers has been the State Department in Washington.... I think I can speak thus frankly and enthusiastically because the working out of many of these great plans has developed largely since I retired from the business fourteen years ago.
Rockefeller's reputation as the richest man in history' was not achieved without the acumen of Dulles gaining entry into oil rich regions, from the Near East' to the Far East', when European colonial power was still dominant. The important mining and oil exploration conducted in Netherlands New Guinea shortly before the Second World War (as revealed by Jean Jacques Dozy in Chapter 1) was an important part of the oil-intelligence project' which focused on Indonesia in its entirety. Ensuring West New Guinea changed hands, from Dutch to Indonesian control, became an integral part of Allen Dulles' political strategy which then proceeded with the already advanced plan for regime change' in Indonesia. The problem was: for Dulles' strategy, JFK's notion of visiting Jakarta to support Sukarno, ensuring he would remain president, was political anathema.
Pre-war development in the New Guinea territory was meagre with half a dozen small colonial settlements, scattered around the far-flung coastline. These had begun as a cluster of army encampments at the turn of the century in response to the US gaining control of the nearby Philippines. Within a few years, the giant US company, Standard Oil, which then was inseparable from the name Rockefeller, had initiated a takeover bid for Dutch oil interests in the Indies. The Dutch responded by joining forces with the British in 1907 to form Royal Dutch Shell. This started decades of pressure from Rockefeller oil interests to gain exploration rights in the vast, unmapped Dutch territory of New Guinea. Ultimately, in May 1935, with the formation of the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company21 which had 60% controlling US interest, Standard Oil was successful, but only with the help of their top European- based lawyer, Allen Dulles. NNGPM, as the company was called, was formed with the approval of Sir Henri Deterding, general manager of the Royal Dutch Shell group of companies since 1900. Deterding and Rockefeller, in former days, had been fierce opponents in the global oil business. When Allen joined his brother John Foster Dulles in Sullivan and Cromwell, the top Wall Street legal firm, his first big case in 1928 brought him face to face with Deterding. Despite the silver hair and penetrating black eyes which helped to create a Napoleonic presence, Deterding backed down and Allen Dulles won. Yet by the mid-1930s, when NNGPM was formed, Dulles and Deterding shared a common interest in the new leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler. Dulles had wasted no time in arranging to speak with Hitler personally, soon after he came to power in 1933, and Deterding's friendship with Hitler led to million dollar donations. However, the key element which swayed Dutch opinion in the formation of NNGPM was the evidence that Japanese units were secretly conducting oil exploration in New Guinea territory. Without American assistance the Dutch could do little to assert colonial control and Dulles used the political tension generated by the Japanese incursion of colonial sovereignty to push through the 60% US controlling interest in NNGPM.
Leading up to the Second World War in the Pacific, the Japanese Navy formulated a grand theory of expansion, not merely as an answer to the problems the Japanese army was facing in its program of expansion in China, but as a grand theory of new development. It was called the march to the South' or Nanshin-ron. Here lay the wealth of the Netherlands East Indies; here there was oil, and in populous Java a market for the Japanese product. For natural resources, the eyes of the Japanese Navy turned to New Guinea. They envisaged this vast island (more than twice the total area of all the islands of Nippon) becoming the source of raw materials for a new imperial Japan. Nanshin-ron took shape with industrial speed in the upper echelons of Japanese Naval Intelligence which used a vanguard of fishing ships estimated by Dutch Intelligence to number as many as 500. Admiral Suetsugu, Commander of combined Japanese fleets and later Minister of Home Affairs, described these fishermen' as an integral part of the March South'. Japanese anthropologists were dispatched to collect information on the tribespeople of New Guinea. The concern about Japanese intrusion as expressed by Jean Jacques Dozy (in the interview in Chapter 1) was part of this pre-war expansion utilised by Allen Dulles to gain the 60% US controlling interest in NNGPM.
After the Pacific War, geologists attached to General Douglas Mac- Arthur's forces remained in the Dutch territory for most of the next decade conducting exploration. Only some of their findings were released, such as nickel on Gag Island, which (as mentioned above) was 10% of world nickel reserves. There was no mention of Dozy's gold discovery. During the 1950s, neither Dulles nor the Dutch political hierarchy was willing to admit that the real issue at the centre of the sovereignty dispute, which so loudly proclaimed the territory had no natural resources, was how to gain control over the gold, copper and oil that lay waiting to be discovered. During the 1950s, using the Cold War to his advantage, Allen Dulles' strategy took shape.
At the same time as the Bay of Pigs another crisis was occurring in Indonesia, lesser known but with the same potential for superpower conflict. This dispute between Indonesia and the Netherlands, over sovereignty of the western half of New Guinea, pitted the US-Dutch NATO alliance against Soviet support for Indonesia. Kennedy's settlement of this crisis and his follow-up strategy to bring Indonesia on side' in the Cold War came under threat with Malaysian Confrontation hence the planned visit to Jakarta.
Introducing Indonesia
Before looking at Kennedy's role in the sovereignty crisis, let me re-introduce Indonesia which after China, India and USA now has the fourth largest population in the world. Indonesia had emerged from the colonial era' only a decade before Kennedy's involvement. When he expressed criticism of colonial rule (as he did at the UN General Assembly, September 25, 1961, upon the death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld) he chose his words carefully to apply not only to the colonised peoples of Africa generally but also to Indonesia specifically.
He spoke of the exploitation and subjugation of the weak by the powerful, of the many by the few, of the governed who have given no consent to be governed, whatever their continent, their class, or their color.22
European dominance in navigation, military technology and trade ensured the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago for centuries remained at the beck and call of colonial powers. As described by George Kahin, one of America's most prominent Indonesia specialists, it was probably the world's richest colony ... (or) ranked just after India in the wealth it brought to a colonial power'.23
It is our collective unfamiliarity with this vast country which has led to our failure to ascertain how closely intertwined it was with the fate of President Kennedy. He very early recognised the significance of Indonesia not only in the political destiny of Southeast Asia but also in the outcome of the Cold War.
[FONT=Times]Indonesia is by far the largest country in Southeast Asia, both in population and in area.