Vincent Bevins

The hidden story of the wanton slaughter -- in Indonesia, Latin America, and around the world -- backed by the United States. In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful. In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War.

Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

The Jakarta Method

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“[…] You fought and bled and died for your freedom. How can you possibly support the status quo?” 

After over a decade representing the United States in Asia, Jones had no answer. The behavior of the United States lent weight to the charge, he realized, “that we had become an imperial power ourselves.”

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In 1941, a senator from Missouri named Harry S. Truman said, “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”

And secondly, Moscow presented itself as a geopolitical and ideological rival, an alternative way that poor peoples could rise into modernity without replicating the American experience.

In Germany, the CIA had no problem recruiting former Nazis, including those who had run death squads, as long as they were anticommunist. 

During the resulting three-year stalemate, the US dropped more than six hundred thousand tons of bombs on Korea, more than was used in the entire Pacific theater in World War II, and poured thirty thousand tons of napalm over the landscape. More than 80 percent of North Korea’s buildings were destroyed, and the bombing campaign killed an estimated one million civilians.

In Guatemala, the North Americans did their best to create a pretext for intervention. The CIA planted boxes of rifles marked with communist hammers and sickles so they could be “discovered” as proof of Soviet infiltration. 

But Ngo Dinh Diem, the Catholic leader of majority-Buddhist South Vietnam whom the United States had handpicked before he turned out to be hopelessly corrupt and dictatorial, knew that he would lose badly to Ho Chi Minh. So Diem decided to cancel the vote. Washington went along with this, just as it did when Diem fraudulently declared he had won an election in 1955 with 98.2 percent of the vote. 7 From that moment on, the government in North Vietnam, and many communists in the South, believed they had the right to directly oppose Diem’s US-backed regime.

In his studies, Sakono also developed a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between economic conditions and ideology. “You see, the Communist Party in the United States never grew because it didn’t have the right roots,” he concluded. “But in Indonesia we have so much injustice and exploitation. There’s a relation between the material conditions of our society and the ideology which flowers here. And injustice is very fertile soil for its roots to grow.”

On the left, the Soviet Union was launching something upward: Sputnik, the first satellite ever sent into orbit by humankind, which had been a fabulous propaganda tool for global communism all year. On the right, the United States was dropping something from the sky: bombs, onto Indonesia. 

Instead, the CIA hired pornographic actors, including a very rough Sukarno look-alike, and produced an adult film in a bizarre attempt to destroy his reputation. […]  The thing was never released—not because this was immoral or a bad idea, but because the team couldn’t put together a convincing enough film.

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