http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62289-2001Jul27? Papers Show U.S. Role in Indonesian Purge
By George Lardner Jr. Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, July 28, 2001; Page A08 U.S. officials are trying to recall an official history of U.S. dealings with Indonesia that documents some American responsibility for the killing of thousands of Indonesian communists in the mid-1960s, including a cable recommending payments to army-backed death squads. CIA and State Department officials had agreed in May to postpone release of the recently printed volume, part of State's often embattled "Foreign Relations of the United States" series. But officials said yesterday it was inadvertently distributed by the Government Printing Office to libraries throughout the world. A GPO spokesman said yesterday that it is now trying to get the books back, on orders from the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. The spokesman, Andy Sherman, acknowledged that it might be difficult to retrieve the microfiche copies that have been sent abroad. He said an order not to distribute the book arrived too late. "They're trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research group at George Washington University. His group bought a copy of the 830-page history Thursday and put it on its Web site, www.nsarchive.org , yesterday. Blanton accused the CIA of trying to suppress this book, covering Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines from 1964 to 1968, and another, covering Greece, Turkey and Cyprus in the same period, even though the documents they contain were declassified two to three years ago. A CIA spokesman, Mark Mansfield, denied sole responsibility. "The notion that the CIA has unilaterally blocked the release of these histories is simply not the case," he said. "We work closely with the State Department on these matters. All of us are intent on complying with the law, while at the same time protecting classified information that if disclosed could be damaging to us." The documentary history dealing with Greece, Cyprus and Turkey was printed in February 2000, but is locked up at GPO under the label: "Embargo: This publication cannot be released." Officials declined to say why. The volume on Indonesia contains documents indicating that 35 years ago, U.S. officials supplied the names of thousands of members of the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, to the army in Jakarta, which was tracking them down and killing them. Estimates of the numbers assassinated range from 100,000 to a million. U.S. officials later said they had simply plucked the names of top PKI leaders and senior cadres from public records, but the history shows the lists were highly useful to the Indonesian military. In an Aug. 10, 1966, airgram to Washington, U.S. Ambassador Marshall Green reported that an embassy-prepared list of top Communist leaders "is apparently being used by Indonesian security authorities who seem to lack even the simplest overt information on PKI leadership at the time." An earlier memo from Green, on Dec. 2, 1965, recommended payment of 50 million rupiahs to a leader of the Kap-Gestapu, an army-inspired but civilian-staffed group that "is still carrying the burden of current repressive efforts targeted against PKI, particularly in central Java." A memo the next day from CIA Far East Division chief William E. Colby remains classified. "That leaves a strong impression that we did something," Blanton said. Fifty million rupiahs at the official exchange rate was worth about $1.1 million, but visiting tourists could buy that much for $6,250. Green's cable said "our contribution" would be a "comparatively small sum" but would still help Kap-Gestapu "considerably." A U.S. official who asked not to be named said the recent political turmoil in Indonesia prompted an interagency panel in May to postpone release of the volume. The United States was at odds 35 years ago with the Communist-backed Indonesian strongman Sukarno. This week, his daughter, Megawati Sukarnoputri, was installed as president. The attempt to block the Indonesian history is only the latest battle between State Department historians, on one hand, and the CIA and secrecy-minded State Department officials, on the other, over what should be printed in the "Foreign Relations of the United States." The prestigious series, which began in 1861, says in the preface to each volume that it includes, "subject to necessary security considerations, all documents needed to give a comprehensive record of the major foreign policy decisions of the United States." The last major controversy over the program arose in 1990 with publication of a history on Iran that made no mention of the widely known CIA-backed coup in 1953 that restored the shah to his Peacock Throne. Congress responded the next year with a law explicitly requiring that each volume be "a thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record." That appears to have shifted much of the wrangling from what the histories say to when they can be released. Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.