Would Allen
Dulles have resorted to assassinating the President of the United States to
ensure the achievement of his ‘Indonesian strategy’?
Two days
before President John Kennedy’s assassination 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.
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. Soon both countries would experience
mass slaughter engineered by Kennedy’s opponents in the CIA and Pentagon.
Millions would die. Subsequently, starting in December 1975, American installed
Indonesian dictator, Suharto, would slaughter hundreds of thousands
East-Timorese with American weapons after meeting with Henry Kissinger and
President Ford and receiving their approval.
Dulles’s Secret
What JFK
didn’t know was that his plans were threatening a covert long-standing
conspiracy engineered by Allen Dulles to effect regime change in Indonesia
through bloody means. The primary goal of 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.
Dr.
Poulgrain, who teaches Indonesian History, Politics and Society at the
University of Sunshine Coast in Australia, explores in very great detail
historical issues that have critical significance for today. Based on
almost three decades of interviews and research around the world, he has
produced a very densely argued book that reads like a detective novel with
fascinating sub- plots.
The Importance of Indonesia
Most
Americans have little awareness of the strategic and economic importance of
Indonesia. It is the world’s 4th most populous country, is
situated 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 to Grasberg,
the world’s largest copper and gold mine, owned by Freeport-McMoRan of Phoenix,
Arizona. Long a battleground in the Cold War, it remains vitally
important in the New Cold War launched by the Obama administration against
Russia and China, the same antagonists Allen Dulles strove to defeat through
guile and violence. Just recently the Indonesian government, under
pressure from the army that has stymied democratic reforms for 18 years, signed
a defense agreement with Russia for the sharing of intelligence, the sale of
Russian military equipment, including fighter jets, and the manufacturing of
weapons in Indonesia. 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
history.
The Devil in Paradise
His use of
the word “incubus” (an evil spirit that has sexual intercourse with sleeping
women) in the title is appropriate since the sinister character that snakes his
way through this historical analysis is Allen Dulles, the longest serving
Director of the CIA and Kennedy’s arch-enemy. While contextually different
from David Talbot’s portrayal of Dulles in The Devil’s
Chessboard, Poulgrain’s portrait of Dulles within the frame of
Indonesian history is equally condemnatory and nightmarish. Both describe
an evil genius ready to do anything to advance his agenda.
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
mega machine – oil, minerals, gold, etc. Manifest ideological conflicts,
while garnering headlines, often bury the secret of this subterranean devil’s
game.
His story
begins with a discovery that is then kept secret for many decades: “In
the alpine region of Netherlands New Guinea (so named under Dutch colonial rule
– today, West Papua) in 1936, three Dutchmen discovered a mountainous outcrop
of ore with high copper content and very high concentrations of gold.
When later analyzed in the Netherlands, the gold (in gram/ton) proved to be
twice that of Witwatersrand in South Africa, then the world’s richest gold
mine, but this information was not made public.”
The
geologist among the trio, Jean Jacques Dozy, worked for the Netherlands New
Guinea Petroleum Company (NNGPM), ostensibly a Dutch-controlled company based
in The Hague, but whose controlling interest actually lay in the hands of the
Rockefeller family, as did the mining company, Freeport Indonesia (now
Freeport-McMoRan, one of whose Directors from 1988-95 was Henry Kissinger,
Dulles’s and the Rockefeller’s close associate) that began mining operations
there in 1966. It was Allen Dulles, a Paris-based lawyer in the employ of
Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, who in 1935 arranged the controlling interest in
NNGPN for the Rockefellers. And it was Dulles, among a select few others,
who, because of various intervening events, including WW II, that made its
exploitation impossible, kept the secret of the gold mine for almost three
decades, even from President Kennedy. JFK “was never informed of the ‘El
Dorado’ he had unwittingly taken out of Dutch hands with the result that (once
the remaining political hurdles in Indonesia were overcome) Freeport would have
unimpeded access to its mining concession.” Those “political hurdles” – i.e.
regime change – would take a while to effect.
The Indonesia-Cuba Connection
But first
JFK would have to be eliminated, for he had brokered Indonesian sovereignty
over West Papua/West Irian for Sukarno from the Dutch who had ties to Freeport
Sulphur. Freeport was aghast at the potential loss of “El Dorado,”
especially since they had recently had their world’s most advanced nickel
refinery expropriated by Fidel Castro, who had named Che Guevara its new
manager. Freeport’s losses in Cuba made access to Indonesia even more
important. Cuba and Indonesia thus were joined in the deadly game of chess
between Dulles and Kennedy, and someone would have to lose.
While much
has been written about Cuba, Kennedy, and Dulles, the Indonesian side of the
story has been slighted. Poulgrain remedies this with an exhaustive and deeply
researched exploration of these matters. He details the deviousness of the
covert operation Dulles ran in Indonesia during the 1950s and 1960s. He
makes it clear that Kennedy was shocked by Dulles’ actions, yet never fully
grasped the treacherous genius of it all. Dulles was always “working two or
three stages ahead of the present.” Having armed and promoted a rebellion
against Sukarno’s central government in 1958, Dulles made sure it would fail
(shades of the Bay of Pigs to come).
Yet the end
result of CIA interference in Indonesian internal affairs via the 1958
Rebellion was depicted as a failure at the time, and has consistently been
depicted as a failure since that time. This holds true only if the stated
goal of the CIA was the same as the actual goal. Even more than five
decades later, media analysis of the goal of The Outer Island rebels is still
portrayed as a secession, as covert US support for ‘rebels in the Outer Islands
that wished to secede from the central government in Jakarta’. The actual
goal of Allen Dulles had more to do with achieving a centralized army command
in such a way as to appear that the CIA backing for the rebels failed.
The Need for Assassinations
Dulles
betrayed the rebels he armed and encouraged, just as he betrayed friend and foe
alike during his long career. The rebellion that he instigated and
planned to fail was the first stage of a larger intelligence strategy that
would come to fruition in 1965-6 with the ouster of Sukarno (after multiple
unsuccessful assassination attempts) and the institution of a reign of terror
that followed. It was also when – 1966 – Freeport-McMoRan began their
massive mining in West Papua at Grasberg at an elevation of 14,000 feet in the
Alpine region. Dulles was nothing if not patient; he had been at this
game since WW I. Even after Kennedy fired him following the Bay of Pigs,
his plans were executed, just as those who got in his way were. Poulgrain
makes a powerful case that these included JFK, U.N. Secretary General Dag
Hammarskjold (working with Kennedy for a peaceful solution in Indonesia and
other places), and Congolese President Patrice Lumumba.
His focus is
on why they needed to be assassinated (similar in this regard to James
Douglass’s JFK and the
Unspeakable), though, with the exception of Kennedy (since the
how is well-known and obvious), he also presents compelling evidence as to the
how. Hammarskjold, in many ways Kennedy’s spiritual brother, was a
particularly powerful obstacle to Dulles’s plans for Indonesia and countries
throughout the Third World. Like JFK, he was committed to independence
for indigenous and colonial peoples everywhere, and was trying to implement
“his Swedish-style ‘third way’ proposing a form of ‘muscular pacifism’.”
Had the UN
Secretary General succeeded in bringing even half these countries to independence,
he would have transformed the UN into a significant world power and created a
body of nations so large as to be a counter-weight to those embroiled in the
Cold War.
Poulgrain
draws on documents from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(TRC) and Chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu to show the connection between South
Africa’s “Operation Celest” and Dulles’s involvement in Hammarskjold’s murder in
September 1961. While it was reported at the time as an accidental plane
crash, he quotes former President Harry Truman saying, “Dag Hammarskjold was on
the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I
said, ‘When they killed him’.”
Dulles sold
his overt Indonesian strategy as being necessary to thwart a communist takeover
in Indonesian. Cold War rhetoric, like “the war on terrorism” today, served as
his cover. In this he had the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his side; they
considered Kennedy soft on communism, in Indonesia and Cuba and everywhere
else. Dulles’s covert agenda was to serve the interests of his power elite
patrons.
Dulles and George de Mohrenschildt
Poulgrain
adds significantly to our understanding of JFK’s assassination and its
aftermath by presenting new information about George de Mohrenschildt, Lee
Harvey Oswald’s handler in Dallas. Dulles had a long association with the
de Mohrenschildt family, going back to 1920-21 when in Constantinople he
negotiated with Baron Sergius Alexander von Mohrenschildt on behalf of
Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. The Baron’s brother and business partner was
George’s father. Dulles’s law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, “was
virtually the front desk for Standard Oil.” These negotiations on behalf
of elite capitalist interests, in the shadow of the Russian Revolution, became
the template for Dulles’s career: economic exploitation was inseparable from
military concerns, the former concealed behind the anti-communist rhetoric of
the latter. An anti-red thread ran through Dulles’s career, except when
the red was the blood of all those whom he considered expendable. And the
numbers are legion.
“It was
through Standard Oil that a link existed between Dulles [who controlled the
Warren Commission] and de Mohrenschildt, and this should have been brought to
the attention of the Warren Commission but was not made public when Dulles had
so prominent a role.” Poulgrain argues convincingly that De Mohrenschildt
worked in “oil intelligence” before his CIA involvement, and that oil
intelligence was not only Dulles’s work when he first met George’s father,
Sergius, in Baku, but that that “oil intelligence” is a redundancy. The CIA,
after all, is a creation of Wall Street and their interests have always been
joined. The Agency was not formed to provide intelligence to US Presidents;
that was a convenient myth used to cover its real purpose which was to serve
the interests of investment bankers and the power elite.
While
working in 1941 for Humble Oil (Prescott Bush was a major shareholder,
Dulles was his lawyer, and Standard Oil had secretly bought Humble Oil sixteen
years before), de Mohrenschildt was caught up in a scandal that involved Vichy
(pro-Nazi) French intelligence in selling oil to Germany. This was
similar to the Dulles’s brothers and Standard Oil’s notorious business dealings
with Germany.
It was an
intricate web of the high cabal with Allen Dulles at the center.
In the midst
of the scandal, de Mohrenschildt, suspected of being a Vichy French
intelligence agent, “disappeared” for a while. He later told the Warren
Commission that he decided to take up oil drilling, without mentioning the name
of Humble Oil that employed him again, this time as a roustabout.
“Just when
George needed to ‘disappear’, Humble Oil was providing an oil exploration team
to be subcontracted to NNGPM – the company Allen Dulles had set up five years
earlier to work in Netherlands New Guinea.” Poulgrain makes a powerful
circumstantial evidence case (certain documents are still unavailable) that de
Mohrenschildt, in order to avoid appearing in court, went in communicado in
Netherlands New Guinea’s in mid-1941 where he made a record oil discovery and
received a $10,000 bonus from Humble Oil.
“Avoiding
adverse publicity about his role in selling oil to Vichy France was the main
priority; for George, a brief drilling adventure in remote Netherlands New
Guinea would have been a timely and strategic exit.” And who best to help
him in this escape than Allen Dulles – indirectly, of course; for Dulles’s
modus operandi was to maintain his “distance” from his contacts, often over
many decades.
In other
words, Dulles and de Mohrenschildt were intimately involved for a long time
prior to JFK’s assassination. Poulgrain rightly claims that “the entire focus
of the Kennedy investigation would have shifted had the [Warren] Commission
become aware of the 40-year link between Allen Dulles and de Mohrenschildt.”
Their relationship involved oil, spying, Indonesia, Nazi Germany, the
Rockefellers, Cuba, Haiti, etc. It was an international web of intrigue
that involved a cast of characters stranger than fiction, a high cabal of the
usual and unusual operatives.
Two unusual
ones are worth mentioning: Michael Fomenko and Michael Rockefeller. The
eccentric Fomenko – aka “Tarzan” – is the Russian-Australian nephew of de
Mohrenschildt’s wife, Jean Fomenko. His arrest and deportation from
Netherlands New Guinea in 1959, where he had traveled from Australia in a canoe
and his subsequent life, are fascinating and sad. It’s the stuff of a bizarre
film. It seems he was one of those victims who had to be silenced because he
knew a secret about George’s 1941 oil discovery that was not his to share. “In
April 1964, at the same time George de Mohrenschildt was facing the Warren
Commission – a time when any publicity regarding Sele 40 [George’s record oil
discovery] could have changed history – it was decided that electroconvulsive
therapy would be used on Michael Fomenko.” He was then imprisoned at the
Ipswich Special Mental Hospital.
Equally
interesting is the media myth surrounding the disappearance of Michael
Rockefeller, Nelson’s son and heir to the Standard Oil fortune, who was
allegedly eaten by cannibals in New Guinea in 1961. His tale became front-page
news, “a media event closed off to any other explanation and the political
implications of his disappearance became an ongoing tragedy for the Papuan
people.” To this very day, the West Papuan people, whose land was
described by Standard Oil official Richard Archbold in 1938 as “Shangri-la,”
are fighting for their independence.
Poulgrain
offers most interesting takes on these two characters and shows how their
stories are connected to the larger tale of intrigue.
This is a
very important and compelling book. Difficult and dense at times, more
expansive at others, it greatly adds to our understanding of why JFK was
murdered. With its Indonesian focus, it shows us how Allen Dulles’s
sinister purview was widespread and long-standing; how it included so much more
than Cuba, Guatemala, Iran, etc.; specifically, how important far-distant
Indonesia was in his thinking, and how that thinking clashed with President
Kennedy’s on a crucial issue. It forces us to consider how different the
world would be if JFK had lived.
The Incubus
of Intervention sheds new light on Indonesian history and
America’s complicity in its tragedy. It is essential reading today when
Barack Obama is executing his pivot to Asia and promoting conflict with China
and Russia. Although not explored in Poulgrain’s book, it’s interesting
to note that Obama’s Indonesian step-father, Lolo Soetoro, left Obama and his
mother in Hawaii in that crucial year of 1966 when mass killings were underway
to return to Indonesia to map Western New Guinea (West Papua) for the
Indonesian government. After Dulles’s regime change was accomplished and
Suharto had replaced Sukarno, he went to work for Unocal, the first oil company
to sign a production sharing agreement with Suharto. Strange
coincidences, bitter fruit.
Is Poulgrain
correct? Did Allen Dulles direct the assassination of President Kennedy
to ensure his, rather the Kennedy’s, Indonesian strategy would succeed?
We know the
CIA coordinated the assassination of President Kennedy. We know that
Allen Dulles was involved. We know that Indonesia was one reason why.
Was it “the
reason”?
Reprinted
with permission from GlobalResearch.ca.
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