Eisenhower (47 page)

Ike recognized the situation for what it was: Chiang had deliberately reinforced the offshore islands in order to make his soldiers hostages to just such a crisis, and Mao was bombing those positions to bait the United States into a response that would horrify the world. (The British, in particular, were fearful that the United States would launch a nuclear war over islands of such insignificance and warned the Americans that they would not be able to support such an action.)

Eisenhower was having none of it. He refused to grant Chiang the freedom he hoped to use against Communist China, and he would not declare an attack on the islands as equivalent to an attack on Taiwan itself. In short, he refused everything that Chiang sought. The Taiwanese generalissimo, dependent on the United States for his survival, fumed that Eisenhower’s directives were “inhuman” and “unfair,” that they required him to acquiesce in the shelling of his army and were destructive to the morale of his nation. He was, one American observer reported, “the most violent I have seen him.” Eisenhower was unmoved. Military officials in the Taiwan Strait also begged for a more forceful response, convinced that the shelling was prelude to invasion. Eisenhower refused them as well. General Nathan Twining and the Joint Chiefs lobbied for permission to attack China with “small” nuclear weapons if it proceeded to invade or escalated its bombardment. Eisenhower turned them down, too.

Instead, he pursued a diplomatic solution. Working through intermediaries in governments from Auckland to Warsaw, the administration broached a proposal sure to infuriate Chiang but intended to defuse the crisis: Taiwan would agree to demilitarize the islands if, in exchange, the Chinese would stop their shelling and renounce any possibility of invasion. Not only was such a proposal anathema to Chiang; it was fiercely resisted within the upper reaches of the U.S. military, where some officials preferred World War III to conciliation. “The argument that nothing is worth a world war,” Admiral Arleigh A. Burke, chief of naval operations, stated, “was the reason why the Communists had been winning all along.” Khrushchev underscored that point in a bombastic letter to Eisenhower on September 7, asserting that the Soviet Union was standing firmly with its Chinese ally. Twelve days later, he added: “Those who nurture plans for an atomic attack on [China] should not forget that not only the USA but the other side as well possesses atomic and hydrogen weapons … If such an attack is made on [China], the aggressor will immediately receive a proper repulse with these very means.” Eisenhower did not dignify that with a response.

Beneath the bluster, however, China and the United States were talking. Negotiations began in Warsaw on September 15, and after early posturing, China suspended its bombing on October 6. Taiwan reluctantly agreed—as if it had much choice—to scale back its military presence on the islands, though not to abandon them. China responded with a move that captured the lunatic order of the period. It resumed shelling on October 25, but only on odd-numbered days. Terror devolved into farce; the threat of devastation was transformed, Ike noted, into a “Gilbert and Sullivan war.” The prospect of world war receded.

Eisenhower prevailed, once again overcoming the misgivings of allies, generals, and diplomats. But China also gained; by use of force and violence, it backed down the might arrayed against it. Khrushchev took note.

Despite Eisenhower’s desire to avoid a world war, he was not quiescent in the face of Communism. As had been the case since his first year in office, his national security strategy included an energetic devotion to covert action. In theory, subterfuge offered what his nuclear strategy forswore: the opportunity to roll back Communism without directly confronting the Soviet Union.

Unlike Quemoy and Matsu, outposts of psychological value at best, Indonesia was a nation of strategic consequence. The world’s fourth-largest country, it controlled vast natural resources—rubber, oil, and tin were among its treasures—as well as sea-lanes between Asia and the South Pacific. A hostile Indonesia could bar ships from the Strait of Malacca, disrupt trade, hinder the defense of Singapore, and isolate Australia and New Zealand from Asia.

Indonesia had spent hundreds of years under Dutch rule until 1949, when Ahmed Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta completed a four-year campaign to win national independence. Trained as an architecture student, Sukarno was a nationalist type familiar to Washington: raised in his native culture, in his case that of Java; educated in Dutch colonial schools; and fervid in his rejection of the colonial regime. To the Eisenhower administration, Sukarno seemed a South Asian Nasser, especially when his aims were coupled with his charismatic appeal to his followers and Cold War neutralism. Like Nasser and Nehru, Sukarno refused both subservience to the United States and absorption by the Soviet Union.

Popular as the hero of his revolution, Sukarno as president held firm against the centrifugal forces of Indonesia, which featured a strong government in Java but a weak hold over the nation’s archipelago. He was not a Washington favorite, but U.S. planners regarded him with concern more than hostility. They recognized that while Sukarno was not under their control, neither was he a Communist. “Although U.S. efforts have been unsuccessful in pulling Indonesia from its neutral position, they have contributed in preventing it from passing into the communist orbit,” American security policy concluded in 1956.

Sukarno, however, remained stubbornly immune to Western overtures and persisted in flirting with Moscow and Beijing. His speeches included ritual denunciation of colonialism. He visited the capitals of America’s enemies and practiced a politics of “guided democracy” that appeared to American leaders to be “inspired by the material accomplishments if not the ideology of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and Communist China.” Moreover, Dulles didn’t like him. He was, the secretary believed, “wholly undependable … dangerous and untrustworthy and by character susceptible to the Communist way of thinking.” Most worryingly, Sukarno welcomed leftist representation in his government, and the nation’s Communist Party, pursuing its goals through legal means, grew in strength to the point that by 1957 it had emerged as the nation’s largest single party. By that year, the analysts’ conflicted assessment of 1956 had given way to a far bleaker view of Sukarno’s “preoccupation with the restoration of ‘national unity,’ ” an obsession that Americans felt came at the “price of communist participation in his government,” and reflected his “infatuation with ‘guided democracy’ as a remedy for Indonesia’s political and economic instability.”

Eisenhower was not prepared to watch Indonesia slide into Moscow’s control. Confiding to Hoffman that summer, Ike wrote: “With Sukarno’s ambitions and his leftish leanings, with his readiness to take Communist support, and his seeming preference for the radicals rather than the more conservative sectors of Moslem people, the situation could well become serious in that area of the world.” The question was: How to resist? The United States could attempt to woo Sukarno, but American refusal to support his claims to West New Guinea, “an issue which is an obsession with Sukarno,” weakened Eisenhower’s influence. The United States could and did attempt to influence Indonesian elections, but when the CIA secretly poured $1 million into the coffers of the Islamic-oriented, anti-Communist Masjumi Party in 1955, the Communists still outpolled the U.S.-supported party. There was always the possibility of invasion, but the administration lacked any pretext for attacking a peaceful, neutral nation. Moreover, military action would harden Indonesian resentment of the United States. Ike personally rejected invasion as an option in September 1957.

Instead, the United States identified two sources of opposition to Sukarno: the nation’s military leadership and the nation’s incoherent but energetic rebel groups, scattered across Indonesia’s outer islands. The trouble was that those two groups were implacably at odds with each other. Nevertheless, Eisenhower authorized a complex covert action built on enticement of the military to check Sukarno while simultaneously supplying “all feasible covert means to strengthen anti-Communist forces in the outer islands.” It was integral to success that neither the military nor the rebels become aware of aid to the other.

Late in 1957, the CIA rolled out the plan. It tapped its accounts for $843,000, a down payment on the planned actions, and the first operatives arrived in Sumatra in early 1958, along with a shipment of weapons to arm eight thousand rebels. The U.S. Navy—an aircraft carrier, two destroyers, and a heavy cruiser—stood by offshore. By the end of February, Indonesia’s civil war was under way.

Despite American support, the rebels struggled. They captured some territory, but the Indonesian military pushed back. On March 12, a dawn raid on a rebel airfield drove the rebels from the area. After they scattered, Indonesian paratroop units discovered a line of abandoned trucks. Thinking that the crates inside contained canned milk, they cracked them open for a drink and found money and food, along with twenty cases of machine guns, bazookas, and rifles, among other weapons. Some of the arms bore stamps identifying them as having been made in Michigan.

Sukarno, still courting U.S. support, chose not to make a major issue of the arms discovery. The mere fact that the weapons were made in the United States, after all, did not necessarily mean that they were wielded by Americans. In conversations with U.S. officials in Jakarta, Sukarno continued to plead that he was not a Communist. He refused, however, to negotiate with the rebels and insisted that there would only be a settlement “as soon as the rebellion is quelled.”

In Washington, Eisenhower and his advisers were not yet ready to give up. The National Security Council meeting on March 20 opened with Allen Dulles briefing the members on the Indonesian civil war. Dulles said the rebellion was hampered by poor communications and inadequate aircraft. Although Eisenhower was skeptical of how aircraft could be effectively used in the Indonesian jungle, Dulles argued for supplying U.S. planes. Ike entertained the idea and, a few weeks later, even suggested that the rebels might also benefit from “a submarine or two.”

The rebels did not get all they wanted, but Ike agreed to let Americans join the fight. Recognizing the risk to the covert operations if Americans should be captured, he insisted that they not be drawn from the military, but if “private persons operating on their own” should join up with Indonesian rebels, who was the U.S. government to object? Eisenhower well knew that he was approving the use of CIA agents, and the CIA wasted no time dispatching two pilots nominally working for a Taiwanese company but in fact on the agency’s payroll.

From that point forward, all that had gone right in Iran and Guatemala went wrong in Indonesia. The rebels proved disorganized and unwilling to fight, even when CIA “advisers” started shooting. On April 30, the Indonesian forces captured documents that revealed foreign support in arming the rebels and even in piloting rebel aircraft. The documents showed the Sumatran rebels had received ten thousand small arms, along with bazookas, artillery, and at least five airplanes, ample evidence that “the rebels were … receiving actual assistance in the form of military equipment from foreign government sources.” Although the Indonesian government did not specifically accuse the U.S. government of complicity, the Indonesian foreign minister warned the American ambassador the planes were being piloted by Americans and Chinese. Eisenhower continued to feign ignorance, protesting that the U.S. government could not control the actions of soldiers of fortune. The noose was closing.

Goaded by their American advisers, the rebels staged a series of strikes in early May and appeared to be making headway. But the government struck back on May 15, wiping out much of the rebel air fleet. That same day, an American CIA pilot, Allen Lawrence Pope, dropped a bomb on an Indonesian transport ship; sixteen soldiers and a member of the ship’s crew were killed. A few minutes later, he attempted to bomb a military camp onshore; he instead hit an adjacent market and ice factory.

Over the next few days, Pope played an active role in the back-and-forth fighting between the government and the rebels. Then, as he was flying his B-26 on a bombing run in the city of Ambon, a government pilot shot the right wing of Pope’s plane, which burst into flame. Pope bailed out, hitting the tail fin as he ejected and plummeting toward the jungle. Government forces hurried to the area and captured the operative suspended from his parachute. He was still alive.

The next afternoon in Washington, Allen Dulles learned that Pope had been missing for half a day. He listened quietly, puffing on his pipe, then called his brother. “I could not see in the long run any possibility of this being a winning course,” he recalled in a memorandum later, after he’d met with the secretary of state in person that afternoon. To the agents in the room, he was more direct: “We’re pulling the plug.”

Unlike in Iran or Guatemala, the CIA action in Indonesia failed to topple the regime that agitated Washington. In Indonesia, however, the administration’s all-but-open support for the rebel movement achieved some of what it sought indirectly. After resisting Washington’s entreaties to purge his government of Communists, Sukarno eventually did shake up his administration. Though it was too slow for Washington’s taste, Sukarno consolidated his own power and stayed clear of Moscow’s designs. Then, in 1965, Indonesia’s Communists staged an attempted putsch with coordinated attacks on the nation’s leading generals. Sukarno sided with the Communists and was deposed when the coup failed. He was replaced by President Suharto, who outlawed the Communist Party once and for all and placed Sukarno under house arrest, where he remained until his death in 1970.

The covert action in Indonesia was exceptionally sloppy, but it produced what Eisenhower wanted of it: an independent Indonesia, free from Soviet control. Even Pope was ultimately repatriated: sentenced to death, he remained in prison through the end of the Eisenhower administration but was released after Kennedy took office. Sukarno’s parting words: “Just go home, hide yourself, get lost, and we’ll forget the whole thing.”