http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB52/

For immediate release, 27 July 2001

For more information: Tom Blanton, 994-7000

CIA STALLING STATE
DEPARTMENT HISTORIES

ARCHIVE POSTS ONE OF TWO DISPUTED
VOLUMES ON WEB

STATE HISTORIANS CONCLUDE U.S. PASSED NAMES OF COMMUNISTS


TO INDONESIAN ARMY, WHICH KILLED AT LEAST 105,000 IN 1965-66

WASHINGTON, D.C., 27 July – George Washington University’s National
Security Archive today posted on the Web (www.nsarchive.org)
one of two State Department documentary histories whose release
the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is stalling, even though the
documents included in the volumes were officially declassified in
1998 and 1999, according to public State Department records.
The two disputed State Department volumes cover Indonesia-Malaysia-Philippines
in the years 1964-68 and Greece-Turkey-Cyprus in the same period.

The CIA, as well as action officers at the State Department,
have prevented the official release of either volume, already
printed and bound by the Government Printing Office. The
National Security Archive obtained the Indonesia volume posted
today when the GPO shipped copies to various GPO bookstores; but
the Greece volume is still locked up in GPO warehouses.

The Indonesia volume includes significant new documentation on
the Indonesian Army’s campaign against the Indonesia Communist
Party (PKI) in 1965-66, which brought to power the dictator Suharto.
(Ironically, Suharto’s successor, ex-President Wahid, is on his
way to Baltimore this week for medical treatment, and has been
replaced by his vice-president, who is the daughter of the man
Suharto overthrew.) For example, 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.” On page
339, the volume seems to endorse the figure of 105,000 killed
that was proposed in 1970 by foreign service officer Richard Cabot
Howland in a classified CIA publication.

On another highly controversial issue – that of U.S. involvement
in the killings – the volume includes an “Editorial Note” on page
387 describing Ambassador Marshall Green’s August 10, 1966
airgram to Washington reporting that an Embassy-prepared list
of top Communist leaders with Embassy attribution removed “is
apparently being used by Indonesian security authorities who seem
to lack even the simplest overt information on PKI leadership
at the time….” On December 2, 1965, Green endorsed a 50 million
rupiah covert payment to the Kap-Gestapu movement leading the
repression; but the December 3 CIA response to State is withheld
in full (pp. 379-380).

The CIA’s intervention in the State Department publication is
only the latest in a series of such controversies, dating back
to 1990 when the CIA censored a State volume on Iran in the early
1950s to leave out any reference to the CIA-backed coup that overthrew
Mossadegh in 1953. The chair of the State Department historical
advisory committee resigned in protest, producing an outcry among
academics and journalists (see “History Bleached at State,” New
York Times editorial, May 16, 1990, p. A26: “At the very
moment that Moscow is coming clean on Stalin’s massacre of Polish
officers, Washington is putting out history in the old Soviet
mode.”). Congress then passed a law in 1991 requiring the
State Department volumes to include covert operations as well
as overt diplomacy, so as to provide an accurate historical picture
of U.S. foreign policy, 30 years after the events.

***

Exhibits:

1. Editorial note from the Indonesia volume on the number of
Indonesian PKI members who were killed in 1965-66, pp.
338-340.

2. Editorial note from the Indonesia volume on the U.S. Embassy’s
role in providing lists to the Indonesian Army of PKI members,
pp. 386-387.

2a. Ambassador Green's December 2, 1965 endorsement of a 50 million
rupiah covert payment to the "army-inspired but civilian-staffed
action group [Kap-Gestapu]... still carrying burden of current
repressive efforts targeted against PKI...." The document immediately
following, presumably CIA's response to this proposal from December
3, 1965 (written by William Colby of CIA's Far East division to
the State Department's William Bundy), was withheld in full from
the volume. (pp.379-380)

3. Description of the declassification review of the Indonesia
volume, written by the State Department historian, p.
VII. This includes the official description of the “High
Level Panel” which makes final decisions on acknowledgement of
covert operations.

4. State Department Historical Advisory Committee’s summary as
of September 1, 1999 of the “Status of
Johnson and Nixon Era FRUS High Level Panel Covert Action Cases”
(2 pages). This document shows that the Panel decided
on April 20, 1998 to acknowledge covert action in Indonesia, that
the CIA completed review of the documents on August 28, 1998,
and that the volume then went into page proofs, “however, publication
has been delayed.” The summary also shows that CIA completed
its review of the Cyprus-Greece-Turkey volume on May 14, 1999,
that the volume was in revised page proofs as of September 1 and
was expected to be published by December 1999.

5. Excerpts from the House of Representatives' final version
of Public Law 102-138, signed by
President George H.W. Bush on October 28, 1991, which requires
that the Foreign Relations of the United States series
be a thorough, accurate, and reliable record of major U.S. foreign
policy decisions and significant U.S. diplomatic activity.

6. Title page and table of contents of the Indonesia volume.

***

Foreign Relations
of the United States, 1964-68

Volume XXVI

Indonesia;

Malaysia-Singapore;

Philippines

Table of Contents

(Note: This table is posted in sections corresponding
to the divisions of the original)

Preface.....................................................................................................III

Johnson Administration Volumes...........................................................IX

Sources .................................................................................................XIII

Abbreviations ......................................................................................XXI

Persons ............................................................................................XXVII

Note on U.S. Covert Action Programs
..........................................XXXIII

Indonesia

Sukarno's confrontation
With Malaysia: January-November 1964 .....
1

Sukarno's
confrontation With the United States: December 1964-

September
1965 .............................................................................
189

Coup and
Counter Reaction: October 1965-March 1966.................
300

The United
States and Suharto: April 1966-December 1968 ............
427

Malaysia-Singapore ...........................................................................
577

Philippines............................................................................................
649

Index .................................................................................................
843

Note from the National Security
Archive: The following documents are very large. If
you have difficulty accessing them, please click here. A mirror
image of the documents may be found on the web site of the Federation
of American Scientists (FAS). We thank the FAS and Steve Aftergood
for their cooperation.