The Jakarta method
In a few months, up to a million people were killed for their politics — with lists, quiet encouragement, and approval from Washington. Then the word “Jakarta” became a threat, spray-painted on walls a hemisphere away.
Between late 1965 and 1966, the Indonesian army and allied militias killed an estimated 500,000 to more than a million people — members and suspected sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), along with ethnic Chinese, leftists, and union members. Declassified records show the United States and its allies were not neutral bystanders: the U.S. embassy passed the army lists of thousands of PKI names, offered political reassurance, and stayed publicly silent as the bodies piled up. What makes this a spoke of CIA Crimes rather than a distant tragedy is what came next: as the journalist Vincent Bevins documented, “Jakarta” became a codeword for the planned extermination of the left, invoked as a model by anticommunist forces from Chile to Central America. The dehumanizing doctrine here is anticommunism at its most literal — a whole category of people marked for death as a political hygiene.
What this page is about
In the early 1960s Indonesia had the largest communist party in the world outside the Soviet bloc and China, operating legally under President Sukarno. On 30 September 1965 a murky coup attempt killed six army generals; the army, led by Major General Suharto, blamed the PKI and used it as the pretext for a nationwide purge. Over roughly the next six months, the army and paramilitary death squads — groups like Pancasila Youth — killed an estimated half a million to over a million alleged communists and their families, and imprisoned perhaps a million more without trial. It is one of the largest mass killings of the twentieth century, and one of the least discussed.
The United States and allied Western governments were, in the words of historian Geoffrey Robinson, “not innocent bystanders.” Declassified cables show U.S. officials welcomed the destruction of the PKI, provided the army with lists of Communist Party figures to be hunted down, and deliberately kept quiet in public while the killing proceeded. Afterwards, Suharto's pro-Western “New Order” dictatorship ruled for three decades, and no one was ever held to account. In his 2020 book The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins traced how the operation became a template: across the Cold War, U.S.-aligned regimes in Latin America and elsewhere used “Jakarta” as shorthand for the mass murder of the left — the graffiti “Jakarta is coming” appeared in Chile before Pinochet's coup.
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The Jakarta Method
In a few months, up to a million people were killed for their politics — with lists, quiet encouragement, and approval from Washington. Then 'Jakarta' became a threat spray-painted on walls a hemisphere away.
The claim this page defends
The 1965–66 mass killings in Indonesia were a deliberate, army-led extermination of a political movement — enabled by the United States and its allies through name lists, encouragement, and silence — and the model was consciously exported: “Jakarta” became a Cold War codeword for the planned mass murder of the left. The dehumanizing doctrine was anticommunism carried to its logical end, in which belonging to the wrong political category made a person, and their family, killable.
From a coup pretext to an exported model: 1965 – 1973
- 30 Sept 1965. A coup attempt kills six army generals. Suharto's faction blames the PKI and seizes the initiative.
- Oct 1965–March 1966. The army and militias conduct a nationwide purge; an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000+ people are killed and hundreds of thousands more detained.
- 1965–66. The U.S. embassy passes the army lists of PKI figures; Western governments offer quiet support and stay publicly silent.
- 1966–1967. Sukarno is sidelined; Suharto consolidates the pro-Western “New Order” dictatorship that will last until 1998.
- 1973. In Chile, the graffiti “Jakarta is coming” appears before the coup against Allende — the word already a hemispheric threat.
- 2017. Declassified U.S. embassy files confirm American officials tracked and welcomed the killings in detail — the paper trail of complicity, decades later.
The record, claim by claim
Between 500,000 and over a million people were killed in a few months — one of the century's largest massacres.
FACTAfter the 30 September 1965 coup attempt, the Indonesian army under Suharto and allied paramilitary death squads carried out a nationwide purge of the PKI and anyone associated with the left. The mainstream scholarly estimate of the dead is 500,000 to more than a million, with perhaps a million more imprisoned without trial, often for years. We give the figure as a range rather than a single number. Whichever end is nearer the truth, it ranks among the largest mass killings of the twentieth century — and remains far less known in the West than its scale warrants.
The doctrine was anticommunism as extermination — a political category marked for death.
FACTThis is the dehumanization at the center of the story: not race or religion but politics, treated as a contaminant to be physically removed. PKI members and suspected sympathizers — and, by association, their families and whole villages — were cast as an internal enemy whose elimination was a kind of national cleansing. The killings were often intimate and local, neighbor against neighbor, organized by the army and carried out by militias who were told the communists were subhuman traitors. The premise that belonging to the wrong political movement made a person killable is anticommunism carried to its literal, murderous conclusion.
The U.S. was not a bystander: the embassy handed the army lists of Communists to hunt down.
FACTThe declassified record is explicit. Beyond general Cold War sympathy, U.S. officials actively assisted the purge: an embassy political officer, Robert Martens, compiled and passed to the Indonesian army lists containing the names of thousands of PKI figures, who were then hunted down and killed. As historian Geoffrey Robinson concluded, Western states 'were not innocent bystanders': starting almost immediately after 1 October 1965, the United States, Britain, and allies set in motion a coordinated campaign to help the army destroy the PKI, through backdoor reassurances and a policy of official silence. This is documented complicity, not speculation.
“In short, Western states were not innocent bystanders … the United States, the United Kingdom, and several of their allies set in motion a coordinated campaign to assist the Army in the political and physical destruction of the PKI. — Geoffrey Robinson, The Killing Season (2018)”
'Jakarta' became an exported codeword for the planned murder of the left.
FACTWhat turns this from a national atrocity into a Cold War method is its afterlife, documented by journalist Vincent Bevins in 'The Jakarta Method.' The Indonesian killings were studied and admired by anticommunist forces elsewhere as a model of how to physically annihilate a political opposition — and the word 'Jakarta' itself became a threat. In Chile, before the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, the slogan 'Jakarta is coming' was painted on walls; similar invocations appeared in other Latin American 'dirty wars.' We attribute the framing of a single 'Jakarta Method' to Bevins, resting it on the documented, real-world use of the term as a promise of extermination.
“Jakarta is coming. — anticommunist graffiti in Chile before the 1973 coup, as documented in Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method (2020)”
No one was held to account — the killers won, and ruled for three decades.
FACTUnlike most recognized genocides, this one produced no reckoning. Suharto's 'New Order' regime — installed on the back of the killings and welcomed by the West as a bulwark against communism — governed Indonesia until 1998, and neither its architects nor the militia leaders were ever prosecuted. The official Indonesian narrative long cast the massacre as a heroic defence against a communist plot. That impunity, and the West's continued embrace of Suharto, is part of why the killings remain so little known — the winners wrote the history, and their foreign sponsors had every reason not to revisit it.
What we don't claim: that the CIA itself pulled the triggers or 'ran' the massacre.
SOME SMOKEHere we fence, to keep the documented complicity clean. The strongest version of the story — that the United States planned and directed the killings — goes beyond what the record establishes. What is documented is grave enough: the name lists, the encouragement, the coordinated Western support, and the silence. The claim that Washington was the author rather than the accomplice of the massacre is not proven by the declassified files, so we grade it SOME SMOKE — real questions, serious circumstantial weight, but not a verdict — and rest the page on the complicity that is fact. The distinction matters precisely because the true, provable role is damning on its own.
The lines we hold
- Complicity is documented; authorship is fenced. The name lists, encouragement, and silence are fact. “The U.S. ran it” is graded SOME SMOKE, not asserted.
- The toll is a range. 500,000 to over a million is the mainstream span; we give the range rather than the largest number.
- The killers were Indonesian. The army and militias did the killing. That does not absolve the foreign governments that helped and cheered — both are true.
- ‘The Jakarta Method’ is Bevins' frame. We attribute it, and rest it on the documented use of “Jakarta” as a real-world threat elsewhere.
When a massacre becomes a method
This page belongs in CIA Crimes because it is the Cold War's clearest case of the United States helping to destroy a political movement by mass murder and then treating the result as a success to be repeated. It is the operational sibling of the Dulles blueprint— the doctrine that any government or movement Washington deemed a communist threat could be removed by any means — taken past the coup and into the killing field. The most chilling detail is not the scale but the export: that “Jakarta” could become a word you paint on a wall to promise your neighbors death, and that the sponsors of the original never had to answer for it. A method that is never punished is a method that gets used again, which is exactly why naming it matters.
Questions worth taking seriously
Did the CIA actually carry out the killings?
No — the killers were the Indonesian army and Indonesian militias. What the declassified record shows is complicity: U.S. officials welcomed the purge, an embassy officer passed the army lists of thousands of PKI names to be hunted down, and Western governments offered quiet support and stayed publicly silent. We grade that complicity as fact and treat the stronger claim that Washington directed the massacre as contested, not proven.
How many people really died?
The mainstream scholarly estimate is between 500,000 and more than a million killed in roughly six months, with perhaps a million more imprisoned without trial. We give it as a range rather than a single figure. Either way it is one of the largest mass killings of the twentieth century, and one of the least discussed in the West.
Is 'the Jakarta Method' a real thing or just a book title?
It is a framing coined by journalist Vincent Bevins, and we attribute it to him — but it rests on documented reality. Anticommunist forces elsewhere treated the Indonesian killings as a model, and the word “Jakarta” itself was used as a threat: “Jakarta is coming” was painted on walls in Chile before the 1973 coup. The book's argument is that this was a repeatable Cold War template, and the real-world use of the term is the evidence.
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This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The record
- Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 — the scale, the targets, and the impunity
- The United States and the Indonesian mass killings — the embassy name lists and complicity
- National Security Archive — declassified U.S. embassy files on the 1965 mass murder (2017)
- Vincent Bevins, “The Jakarta Method” — the export of the model and the codeword
- Geoffrey Robinson, “The Killing Season” — a history of the massacres
- Black Book Audit — The Dulles Blueprint (the covert-regime-change doctrine)
- Black Book Audit — CIA Crimes (hub)