[Nettime-bold] US official history of involvement in 60's Indonesia

[Harsh Kapoor <aiindex@mnet.fr>]

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB52/
has the following text as well as links to the chapters.

            CIA STALLING STATE DEPARTMENT HISTORIES

            ARCHIVE POSTS ONE OF TWO DISPUTED VOLUMES ON WEB

            STATE HISTORIANS CONCLUDE U.S. PASSED NAMES OF
            COMMUNISTS TO INDONESIAN ARMY,
                  WHICH KILLED AT LEAST 105,000 IN 1965-66

WASHINGTON, D.C., 27 July – George Washington University’s
National Security Archive today posted on the Web (www.nsarchive.org)
one of two State Department documentary histories whose release the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is stalling, even though the documents
included in the volumes were officially declassified in 1998 and 1999,
according to public State Department records.  The two disputed State
Department volumes cover Indonesia-Malaysia-Philippines in the years
1964-68 and Greece-Turkey-Cyprus in the same period.

The CIA, as well as action officers at the State Department, have
prevented the official release of either volume, already printed and bound
by the Government Printing Office.  The National Security Archive
obtained the Indonesia volume posted today when the GPO, apparently
by mistake, shipped copies to various GPO bookstores; but the Greece
volume is still locked up in GPO warehouses.

The Indonesia volume includes significant new documentation on the
Indonesian Army’s campaign against the Indonesia Communist Party
(PKI) in 1965-66, which brought to power the dictator Suharto.
(Ironically, Suharto’s successor, ex-President Wahid, is on his way to
Baltimore this week for medical treatment, and has been replaced by
his vice-president, who is the daughter of the man Suharto overthrew.)
For example, U.S. Embassy reporting on November 13, 1965 passed on
information from the police that “from 50 to 100 PKI members were
being killed every night in East and Central Java….”; and the Embassy
admitted in an April 15, 1966 airgram to Washington that “We frankly do
not know whether the real figure [of PKI killed] is closer to 100,000 or
1,000,000 but believe it wiser to err on the side of the lower estimates,
especially when questioned by the press.”  On page 339, the volume
seems to endorse the figure of 105,000 killed that was proposed in 1970
by foreign service officer Richard Cabot Howland in a classified CIA
publication.

On another highly controversial issue – that of U.S. involvement in the
killings – the volume includes an “Editorial Note” on page 387 describing
Ambassador Marshall Green’s August 10, 1966 airgram to Washington
reporting that an Embassy-prepared list of top Communist leaders with
Embassy attribution removed “is apparently being used by Indonesian
security authorities who seem to lack even the simplest overt
information on PKI leadership at the time….” On December 2, 1965,
Green endorsed a 50 million rupiah covert payment to the Kap-Gestapu
movement leading the repression; but the December 3 CIA response to
State is withheld in full (pp. 379-380).

The CIA’s intervention in the State Department publication is only the
latest in a series of such controversies, dating back to 1990 when the
CIA censored a State volume on Iran in the early 1950s to leave out any
reference to the CIA-backed coup that overthrew Mossadegh in 1953.
The chair of the State Department historical advisory committee
resigned in protest, producing an outcry among academics and
journalists (see “History Bleached at State,” New York Times editorial,
May 16, 1990, p. A26:  “At the very moment that Moscow is coming
clean on Stalin’s massacre of Polish officers, Washington is putting out
history in the old Soviet mode.”).  Congress then passed a law in 1991
requiring the State Department volumes to include covert operations as
well as overt diplomacy, so as to provide an accurate historical picture
of U.S. foreign policy, 30 years after the events.

                                                     ***


                                                   Exhibits:

1. Editorial note from the Indonesia volume on the number of Indonesian
PKI members who were killed in 1965-66, pp. 338-340.

2. Editorial note from the Indonesia volume on the U.S. Embassy’s role
in providing lists to the Indonesian Army of PKI members, pp. 386-387.

2a. Ambassador Green's December 2, 1965 endorsement of a 50 million
rupiah covert payment to the "army-inspired but civilian-staffed action
group [Kap-Gestapu]... still carrying burden of current repressive efforts
targeted against PKI...." The document immediately following,
presumably CIA's response to this proposal from December 3, 1965
(written by William Colby of CIA's Far East division to the State
Department's William Bundy), was withheld in full from the volume.
(pp.379-380)

3. Description of the declassification review of the Indonesia volume,
written by the State Department historian, p. VII.  This includes the
official description of the “High Level Panel” which makes final decisions
on acknowledgement of covert operations.

4. State Department Historical Advisory Committee’s summary as of
September 1, 1999 of the “Status of Johnson and Nixon Era FRUS High
Level Panel Covert Action Cases” (2 pages).  This document shows that
the Panel decided on April 20, 1998 to acknowledge covert action in
Indonesia, that the CIA completed review of the documents on August
28, 1998, and that the volume then went into page proofs, “however,
publication has been delayed.”  The summary also shows that CIA
completed its review of the Cyprus-Greece-Turkey volume on May 14,
1999, that the volume was in revised page proofs as of September 1 and
was expected to be published by December 1999.

5. Excerpts from the House of Representatives' final version of Public
Law 102-138, signed by President George H.W. Bush on October 28,
1991, which requires that the Foreign Relations of the United States
series be a thorough, accurate, and reliable record of major U.S. foreign
policy decisions and significant U.S. diplomatic activity.

6. Title page and table of contents of the Indonesia volume.

                                                     ***


                            Foreign Relations of the
                            United States, 1964-68

                            Volume XXVI

                            Indonesia;
                            Malaysia-Singapore;
                            Philippines

                            Table of Contents

(Note: This table is posted in sections corresponding to the divisions of
the original)

Preface................................................................III

Johnson Administration
Volumes...........................................................IX

Sources ............................................................XIII

Abbreviations .................................................XXI

Persons .......................................................XXVII

Note on U.S. Convert Action Programs .......................XXXIII

Indonesia

Sukarno's confrontation With Malaysia: January-November 1964 ..1

Sukarno's confrontation With the United States: December 1964-
September 1965 ........................................  189

Coup and Counter Reaction: October 1965-March 1966.................  300


The United States and Suharto: April 1966-December 1968 .... 427

Malaysia-Singapore ......................................  577

Philippines....................................................... 649

Index     ................................................. 843


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