Indonesia's Strategic Importance
The strategic and economic importance of Indonesia cannot be exaggerated. It is the world's 4th most populous country (275+ million), is located in a vital shipping lane adjacent to the South China Sea, has the world's largest Muslim population, has vast mineral and oil deposits, and is home in West Papua to Grasberg, the world's largest gold mine and the second largest copper mine, primarily owned by Freeport McMoRan of Phoenix, Arizona, whose past board members have included Henry Kissinger, John Hay Whitney, and Godfrey Rockefeller.
Long a battleground in the Cold War, Indonesia remains vitally important in the New Cold War and the pivot to Asia launched by the Obama administration against China and Russia, the same antagonists Allen Dulles strove to defeat through guile and violence while he engineered coups home and abroad. It is fundamentally important in the Pentagon's Indo-Pacific strategy for what it euphemistically calls a "free and open Indo-Pacific." While not front-page news in the U.S., these facts make Indonesia of great importance today and add to the gravity of Poulgrain's historical account.
JFK
Two days before President John Kennedy was publicly executed by the US national security state led by the CIA on November 22, 1963, he had accepted an invitation from Indonesian President Sukarno to visit that country the following spring. The aim of the visit was to end the conflict (Konfrontasi) between Indonesia and Malaysia and to continue Kennedy's efforts to support post-colonial Indonesia with economic and developmental aid, not military. It was part of his larger strategy of ending conflict throughout Southeast Asia and assisting the growth of democracy in newly liberated post-colonial countries worldwide.
He had forecast his position in a dramatic speech in 1957 when, as a Massachusetts Senator, he told the Senate that he supported the Algerian liberation movement and opposed colonial imperialism worldwide. The speech caused an international uproar and Kennedy was harshly attacked by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even liberals such as Adlai Stevenson. But he was praised throughout the third world.
Poulgrain writes:
Kennedy was aiming for a seismic shift of Cold War alignment in Southeast Asia by bringing Indonesia 'on side.' As Bradley Simpson stated (in 2008), 'One would never know from reading the voluminous recent literature on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and Southeast Asia, for example, that until the mid-1960s most officials [in the US] still considered Indonesia of far greater importance than Vietnam or Laos.
Of course JFK never went to Indonesia in 1964, and his peaceful strategy to bring Indonesia to America's side and to ease tensions in the Cold War was never realized, thanks to Allen Dulles. And Kennedy's proposed withdrawal from Vietnam, which was premised on success in Indonesia, was quickly reversed by Lyndon Johnson after JFK's murder on November 22, 1963. Soon both countries would experience mass slaughter engineered by Kennedy's opponents in the CIA and Pentagon. Millions would die.
While the Indonesian mass slaughter of mainly poor rice farmers (members of the Communist Party - PKI) instigated by Allen Dulles began in October 1965, ten years later, starting in December 1975, the American installed Indonesian dictator Suharto, after meeting with Henry Kissinger and President Ford and receiving their approval, would slaughter hundreds of thousands East-Timorese with American-supplied weapons in a repeat of the slaughter of more than a million Indonesians in 1965 when the CIA engineered the coup d'e'tat that toppled President Sukarno. The American installed dictator Suharto would rule for thirty years of terror. The CIA considers this operation one of its finest accomplishments. It became known as "the Jakarta Method," a model for future violent coups throughout Latin America and the world.
And in-between these U.S. engineered mass atrocities, came the bloody coup in Chile on September 11, 1973 and the ongoing colossal U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
Dulles's Secret
What JFK didn't know was that his plans for a peaceful resolution of the Indonesia situation and an easing of the Cold War were threatening a covert long-standing conspiracy engineered by Allen Dulles to effect regime change in Indonesia through bloody means and to exacerbate the Cold War by concealing from Kennedy the truth that there was a Sino-Soviet split. Another primary goal behind this plan was to gain unimpeded access to the vast load of natural resources that Dulles had kept secret from Kennedy, who thought Indonesia was lacking in natural resources. But Dulles knew that if Kennedy, who was very popular in Indonesia, visited Sukarno, it would deal a death blow to his plan to oust Sukarno, install a CIA replacement (Suharto), exterminate alleged communists, and secure the archipelago for Rockefeller controlled oil and mining interests, for whom he had fronted since the 1920s.
Reading Poulgrain's masterful analysis, one can clearly see how much of modern history is a struggle for control of the underworld where lies the fuel that runs the megamachine - oil, minerals, gold, copper, etc. Manifest ideological conflicts, while garnering headlines, often bury the secret of this subterranean devil's game.
The Discovery of Gold
His murder mystery/detective story begins with a discovery that is then kept secret for many decades. He writes:
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