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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
It is now fifty years since the so-called “G30S” or “Gestapu” (Gerakan September Tigahpuluh) event of September 30, 1965 in Indonesia, when six members of the Indonesian army general staff were brutally murdered. This event was a decisive moment in Indonesian history: it led to the overthrow of President Sukarno, his replacement by an army general, Suharto, and the subsequent massacre of a half million or more Indonesians targeted as communists. It is also forty years since I first wrote to suggest that the United States was implicated in this horrendous event, and thirty years since I wrote about it again in 1985 in the Canadian journal Pacific Affairs.
1 Death estimates are discussed by Robert Cribb, and compacted into an assessment of “as low as 200,000 or as high as one million.” Robert Cribb, “Unresolved Problems in the Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966,” Asian Survey, July/August 2002, p. 559).
2 Peter Dale Scott, “Exporting Military Economic Development: America and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-67,” in Malcolm Caldwell (ed.), Ten Years' Military Terror in Indonesia (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1975), pp. 209-61.
3 Peter Dale Scott, “Exporting Military-Economic Development,” in Malcolm Caldwell, ed., Ten Years' Military Terror in Indonesia (Nottingham, England: Spokesman Books, 1975), pp. 227-61; “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967,” Pacific Affairs (Vancouver, B.C.) 58.2 (Summer 1985), pp. 239-64.
4 John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: the September 30th Movement and Suharto's Coup d'état in Indonesia (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
5 For full citations of this and other sources in these footnotes, see the text of my article at Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967”.
6 This has been partially corroborated by Andrew Feinstein, but without reference to the 1965 shift in middlemen. See Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (New York: Picador, 2012), pp. 265-66: “In Indonesia in 1965, Lockheed disbursed bribes of $100,000 per plane. However, soon afterwards the CIA assisted the right-wing General Suharto to overthrow the Sukarno government. Lockheed worried that its agent, Isaak [sic] Dasaad, might not be sufficiently well connected to the new regime to be of use. Illustrating the extent of US government complicity in controversial foreign arms sales, the company's marketing executive noted that a Lockheed official ‘went to the US embassy in Jakarta and asked them specifically whether Dasaad could continue, under the new regime, to be of value to Lockheed’. The embassy said yes, leading Lockheed to record that ‘apparently Dasaad has made the transition from Sukarno to Suharto in good shape.‘” Cf. Wimanjaya K. Liotohe, Prima Dosa: Wimanjaya dan rakyat Indonesia menggugat imperium Suharto (Pasarminggu: Yayasan Eka FaktaKata, 1993).
7 Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 119. Lockheed money in Japan went to Sasakawa Ryoichi, a CIA agent of influence, and his friend Kodama Yoshio. In my 1965 essay I noted that Sasakawa had “boasted that he played a role in the coup that overthrew Sukarno.” The Lockheed funds to Sasakawa in Japan were partly handled by a Japanese American, Shig Katayama, whose ID Corp. in the Cayman Islands did unexplained business with the CIA-related Castle Bank in the Bahamas.
8 H. W. Brands, “The Limits of Manipulation: How the United States Didn't Topple Sukarno,” Journal of American History, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Dec, 1989), pp. 785-808 (p. 787). Brands sees Johnson's policy before his election, while still lacking “a personal political mandate,” as a modest mélange between desires to appease Sukarno, and “guiet efforts to encourage action by the army against the PKI” (pp. 791, 793). I believe he understates the importance of these “guiet efforts,” which (as noted above in discussion of Fact No. 3) a memo from Secretary of State Rusk described on July 17, 1964 as “of vital importance to the entire Free World.” And I know of no evidence for or against his claim that Gestapu caught the CIA “by surprise” (p. 787).
9 For an example, see Peter Dale Scott, Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics: Revelations from the CIA Records on the Assassination of JFK (New York: Skyhorse, 2013), pp. 28-29.
10 Victor M. Fic, Anatomy of the Jakarta Coup, October 1, 1965: The Collusion with China Which Destroyed the Army Command, President Sukarno and the Communist Party of Indonesia (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 2004), p. 3.
11 B. R. O'G. Anderson and Ruth McVey, A Preliminary Analysis of the October, 1965, Coup in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1971).
12 For this relationship see Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Threat to U.S. Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014 (pp. 16-17, 22, 127-29.
13 Benedict R. Anderson, “Impunity and Reenactment: Reflections on the 1965 Massacre in Indonesia and its Legacy,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 15, 2013: “Army leaders, helped by advice and half-concealed support from both the Pentagon and the CIA - then reeling under heavy reverses in Vietnam - had long been looking for a justification for a mass destruction of the Party. Now the September 30th Movement and the murder of the six generals provided the opening they awaited.”
14 Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S. Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), p.173, 311n6.
15 Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 260.
16 (1) Peter Dale Scott, Peranan C.I.A. Dalam Penggulingan Bung Karno. Buku ini dilatang beredar oleh KEJAGUNG RI. (West Berlin: Perhimpunan Indonesia, 1988);
(2) Peranan C.I.A. dalam penggulingan Bung Karno Konspirasi Soeharto-CIA: penggulingan Soekarno, 1965-1967 (Surabaya: Pergerakan Mahasiswa Islam Indonesia: Perkumpulan Kebangsaan Anti Diskriminasi, [1998]); (3) An anthology, Gestapu, matinya parajenderal dan peran CIA (Yogyakarta: Cermin, 1999); (4) Peter Dale Scott, CIA dan penggulingan Sukarno (Yogyakarta: Lembaga Analisis Informasi, 1999); (5) Peter Dale Scott, Amerika Serikat dan penggulingan Sukarno 1965-1967
([S.l. : s.n.], 2000); (6) Peter Dale Scott… et. al.; editor, Joesoef Isak], 100 tahun Bung Karno : 6 Juni 1901-2001: sebuah liber (Jakarta : Hasta Mitra, 2001), pp. 278-316; (7) Peter Dale Scott, Peran CIA dalam penggulingan Sukarno (Jakarta: Buku Kita, 2007.
17 Jonathon Green, Encyclopedia of Censorship [New York: Facts on File, 2005], p. 278.
18 Zoe Reynolds, “Putu Oka Sukanta and Poetry from Prison,” Jakarta Post, July 25, 2013: “Others, such as Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and a professor at the University of California, claim that a dalang (or puppet master) — maybe the CIA, maybe Soeharto — was manipulating the events that led to … the bloodletting to come.” This breaking of journalistic silence in Indonesia was the more remarkable, in that an army general was still president.
19 Peter Dale Scott, “How I Came to Jakarta,” Agni, No. 31/32 (1990), p. 297.
20 R. Tanter, “The Totalitarian Ambition: Intelligence Organisations in the Indonesian State,” in State and Civil Society in Indonesia, ed. A.K. Budiman, (Monash: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1990), 218: Jusuf Wanandi, Shades of Grey: A Political Memoir of Modern Indonesia, 1965-1998 (Jakarta: Equinox, 2012), p. 68.
21 In similar CIA-backed plots against Allende in Chile (1970-73), a loyalist Army Chief of Staff was also murdered, making way for a rightwing General Pinochet who would subsequently carry out an army coup and massacre. But these were two plots separated in time, not a single piggy-backed plot.
22 Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, “How We Destroyed Sukarno,” Independent (London), December 1, 1998,
23 Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service (New York: Free Press, 2000), 718: “In cooperation with their colleagues from the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), MI6's Special Political Action group launched up to six different disruptive actions, including… the recruitment of ‘moderate’ elements within the army.”
24 John Roosa, review of Wanandi, Shades of Grey, Inside Indonesia.
25 Cf. Fact No. 5 above
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