On 19 October 2021 a report from The Guardian revealed the role of Britain’s spies in anti-communist slaughter in Indonesia. Documents kept secret far beyond the 20-year limit imposed by British law showed how the work of the Cold War Information Research Department (IRD), set up in 1948 by Ernest Bevin’s Foreign Office, contributed to the United States (US) and British-backed attack on the largest communist party outside of the communist countries. New light has been shed on the overthrow of President Sukarno’s government, one of the leading members of the Non-Aligned Movement. US military, embassy officials and secret forces orchestrated the massacre of up to 3 million Communist Party of Indonesia members, anti-imperialists, humanitarians and ethnic minorities aided by British spies, propagandists and special forces; from October 1965 to March 1966. These documents now show this would not have been possible without the imperialist British Labour Party. NATHAN WILLIAMS reports.
As the second world war came to an end in Europe in 1945 the British and the Dutch began a military campaign to re-establish Dutch control in Indonesia. The Royal Navy was deployed and thousands of troops invaded. CIA covert campaigns in Indonesia were also revealed with the capture of US pilot Allen Pope in 1958. President Sukarno’s national independence programme while in government (1945-67) opposed this attempted re-occupation. This could not be tolerated by Britain. Under Clement Attlee’s Labour government (1945-51), Foreign Secretary Bevin, co-founder and former general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, set up the IRD with the aim: ‘…to give the lead in spiritual, moral and political spheres to all the democratic elements in Western Europe which are anti-Communist.’ The Labour government established the propaganda infrastructure which would be used to destroy national liberation struggles.
Dutch and British combined attacks did not destroy Sukarno’s Indonesia. However, when the US turned its sights on South East Asia the attacks intensified. From 1963-65 the PKI gave military and political support to Sukarno’s Konfrontasi (Confrontation) programme. This resisted SAS, SBS and Gurkha cross-border attacks from within the British crown colonies of North Borneo and Sarawak, territories that later became part of Malaysia. In response, the US led an escalation of the British overt and covert campaign to remove the PKI and overthrow Sukarno. Alongside the deployment of special forces, Britain’s part in this escalation fell to Ed Wynne and his team of propagandists from the IRD.
Wynne’s Singapore-based team complimented the work of the US by preparing Indonesia for imperialist intervention. From Singapore, they wrote pamphlets posing as Indonesian which would then be used by ‘coordinator of political warfare’ Norman Reddaway. Cambridge-educated British diplomat Reddaway boasted he could make the Indonesians work to his will through the lies in these pamphlets. Intercepted Indonesian military signals from GCHQ further strengthened his hand. They provided material which he told GCHQ’s Singapore operative on 30th September 1965 would ‘help the generals to persecute the PKI more effectively’. Wynne and Reddaway’s mission from Britain was made clear by the Foreign Office: ‘A premature PKI coup may be the most helpful solution for the west – provided the coup failed.’
On 30 September 1965, six senior generals of the Indonesian military were kidnapped and assassinated. Anti-communist IRD pamphlets accused the PKI, but there is little other evidence for this claim. The IRD propagandists wrote immediately after the supposed coup attempt to demand: ‘this communist cancer be cut out of the body of the state.’ The PKI had been concerned about rising military control within Indonesia but had focused in previous years on an electoral approach to power. If there were fears of a military coup before 30 September, the following days and weeks justified them. They also demonstrated the deadly effect of Britain’s propaganda and military machine in suppressing revolutionary potential. Up to 3 million Indonesians were killed for being suspected left-wing and anti-imperialist sympathisers in massacres carried out by the Indonesian army under the command of General Suharto. Documents released in 2017 show that the US Embassy in Jakarta handed lists of suspected communists to the Indonesian generals. Even the CIA admitted that the killings after 30 September, ordered by US officials, were ‘one of the worst mass murders of the 20th Century’.
US diplomats ordered the killings, but British lies helped make them possible. The propagandists were brazen in their support for the mass murder. Pamphlets were distributed in 1965 praising ‘the fighting services and the police’ because they were ‘doing an excellent job’. Wynne’s propagandists demanded ever more slaughter from Suharto’s butchers: ‘The work started by the army must be carried on and intensified.’ In a further defence of this enthusiastic – supposedly Indonesian-written – support for murder, they echoed the words of Ernest Bevin’s mission statement in 1948: ‘Unless we maintain a vigorous campaign to eradicate communism … the red menace will envelop us again.’
On the 5 November 1965 one of the most damaging stories ever written by this department was fed through Wynne to the Jakarta Daily Mail. It accused 100 women from the PKI Gerwani women’s organisation of torturing a general in a non-existent Sukarno government torture chamber. This piece of British fiction was meant to place the blame for the bloodshed completely on the PKI; egregiously singling out its peaceful women’s organisation. It became part of the go-to mythology for the defence of Suharto and the demonisation of communism. These myths were not only creating the conditions for the military coup of 1965; they were also rehabilitating the character of General Suharto, the chosen representative of imperialism in Southeast Asia. Following the bloodshed, March 1966 saw President Sukarno replaced by a pro-imperialist military government under Suharto. The incursions finally stopped when Suharto signed a treaty with the newly-formed Malaysia, a proxy for British interests in the region, in August 1966. The lies created by Britain’s IRD pamphlet writers became central to the mythology justifying Suharto’s military coup and subsequent government of Indonesia.
Labour’s role in government was continued by Jim Callaghan’s 1976-79 Labour government which sold Britain’s surplus of Hawk fighter jets to the Indonesian state, used to deadly effect in its war and occupation of East Timor which cost up to 180,000 lives between 1974 and 1999. An estimated 500,000 West Papuans have also been killed by Indonesia’s government since the 1960s. When questioned in 2000 about Reddaway’s actions in Indonesia, Labour’s Defence Secretary (1964-70) Denis Healey denied personal knowledge but said he was ‘certainly’ supportive of them. Attlee, Bevin and Healey of Britain’s Labour party were as much covered in the blood of Indonesians and West Papuans as Suharto, his friend Thatcher and the US.
