Thanks for the links Mike. I guess we can assume that the story was largely unreported before 1990?
It says something that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was the third largest in the world before 1965 and was virtually non existent a few years later.
"...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."
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB52/
The US Ambassador at the time, Marshall Green, later served in Australia during the bloodless, legally-contrived coup against the Whitlam government (1975). According to Clyde Cameron, who was Minister for Labour at the time:
"[O]ne of the first people [Green] called on, after visiting the Prime Minister and having already put in his credentials to the Governor-General, was me. And as he was walking through the door of my office I saluted him in the normal way, `please to meet you your excellency, take a seat,' and before he could take a seat I said `what would you do if our government decided to nationalise the Australian subsidiaries of the various American multinational corporations?' and he'd been caught by surprise, he wasn't accustomed to a minister asking that sort of question whilst he was in the process of taking his seat, and he blurted out: `oh, we'll move in'. I said, `oh, move in? like bringing the marines in?. He said, `oh...' he looked a bit uncomfortable by now, although he's a senior man he didn't expect being caught off guard, he was very uncomfortable and he said, `oh, no, the days of sending the marines has passed but there are plenty of other things we could do'. I said, `for example?'. He said, `well, trade'. And I said, `do you realise that if you stop trading with Australia you would be the loser to the extent of 600 million dollars a year', that was the balance of trade figures at that time. He said, `oh, well, there are other things'. And he didn't elaborate but, of course, there are other things."
www.serendipity.li/cia/cia_oz/cia_oz2.htm www.cia.com.au/vic/cia.2.txt