Paper - the CIA's (non)Observance of Plausible Deniability in Indonesia

The case of the United States’ covert involvement in revolutionary actions in Indonesia in the 1950s provides an example of an action in which the premise of plausible deniability was ostensibly maintained; however, several key details of the operation show that although the United States’ involvement never became brazenly apparent, the operation could be said to have a veneer of secrecy at best. The United States, as detailed in ‘Feet to the Fire’ by Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, provided several types of covert support to guerrilla and revolutionary troops rebelling against the regime of President Sukarno of Indonesia. Although the United States eventually lost its cover of secrecy, the fact that Indonesia did not have exceedingly close ties to the Soviet Union led to limited short-term adverse consequences for the USA. Additionally, swift remedial action through public diplomacy actually led to an improvement of relations between the United States and Suharto. Thus, although the operation in Indonesia did not achieve a high level of tactical success, it nevertheless can be considered a mid-term strategic victory for the United States, with the significant caveat that the covert action and subsequent support of Suharto created ‘palpable’ long-term animosity towards the United States from the general populace of Indonesia.

The CIA’s covert action in Indonesia during the 1950s used many of the different covert action tools that serve as staples of US covert foreign policy in Asia. First of all, the United States supplied significant material aid to rebels in Sumatra and in Sulawesi, including arms, vehicles, ammunition, and money. Additionally, the CIA supplied logistical assistance and advisors to the Indonesian rebellion. Finally, the CIA directly provided covert paramilitary air support to the rebellion.

Naturally,the CIA meant to keep their aid to the rebellions in Indonesia secret; however, examples abounded of deliveries which were intended to be kept secret being revealed in quite public manner. For example, an arms delivery of two barges full of weapons to Sumatra gathered a crowd ‘like a circus’. Clearly, the cloak of secrecy on the operation had a few holes from the very beginning.

In some instances, meetings between the leaders of the rebellion and the CIA were openly observable. For example, the resident officer at the US consulate in Medan, located in North Sumatra, observed minimal security precautions as he drove alone across Sumatra for a day with a bag containing the Indonesian-currency equivalent of US$50,000 sitting in the front seat next to him. Eventually, the agent pulled into a house in the city of Bukittinggi and met directly with Colonel Maludin Simbolon, the leader of the Sumatran rebellion. The agent did not describe how he planned to guard the money in the event that he had been stopped at any of the armed checkpoints along the Medan-Bukittinggi road.

In the case of the use of the pilot group code-named ‘Ostiary’ the CIA could maintain plausible deniability, because all of the pilots in the group did not come from the United States. Unfortunately, an unexpected fatal crash killed two of the four pilots in the group. Subsequently, the remaining two pilots decided that they wanted to leave Indonesia. In their place came two pilots from the CIA’s proprietary airline, Civil Air Transport. The new pilots had a different background than the Polish pilots who had preceded them at the Ostiary group- the new pilots were American. For a time, the new pilots operated with relative ease in the Sulawesi region of Indonesia. To hide the American origins of the pilots and planes, the planes and pilots flew ‘sterile’, which is to say they had no markings or documentation that could be used to identify them in the event that they were shot down. However, when one of the CAT pilots was shot down and captured close to Ambon island in May 1958, he carried a variety of identifying documents with him. The capture of the American airman thoroughly removed the tool of plausible deniability from the United States’ tool shed. The Indonesian government held a public trial of the airman, causing embarrassment to the United States. Eventually the airman received a death sentence, which caused him to languish in an Indonesian jail until his release in 1972. In order to mitigate the unmasked international incident, the United States was forced to engage in emergency public diplomacy, with the ultimate consequence that the United States would send a token amount of military aid to the government of President Sukarno in Jakarta. However, it is difficult to say whether the aid sent by the United States actually drew Sukarno closer to the United States or pushed him closer to the Soviet Union. Therefore, at least in the medium term, the CIA operation in Indonesia detailed in ‘Feet to the Fire’ cannot be considered a total disaster- the overt goal of the United States was an anti-Soviet client state in Indonesia, and the eventual unmasking of the operation actually did not cripple that goal. However, ties between Indonesia and the United States did not warm particularly for the duration of the Eisenhower administration. Rather, they improved under the following administration of John F. Kennedy. After considering the case of the CIA’s operations in India, it is interesting that the Indonesian government did not draw closer to the Soviet Union even after the revelation of CIA involvement. One might even be tempted to think that a Manichean view towards nations as either for or against communism might have produced an imperfect interaction of covert and overt policy towards Indonesia in the late 1950s. In this case, the damage done did not reach critical levels, but still the case of Indonesia provides a strong object lesson of the need to have a clearly defined objective in place when conducting a covert action.