The Men from “South Korea”

 

January, 1967.

A small group of men came off a plane in Israel, and every one of them was lying about who he was.

They were Indonesian. The Israelis knew it, and so did the men themselves. But on paper, and to anyone who might ask, they were South Koreans, a polite little fiction that would hold up about as well as a paper umbrella in a hurricane, if anyone had bothered to look. Nobody did. That was the point.

They toured the factories. They saw the research institutions and the Weizmann Institute. They were allowed to see the nuclear reactor, which tells you how badly somebody wanted something from somebody. And in between, because even secret diplomacy has to fill its evenings, they went to see a performance of King Solomon and sat through a Gottex swimsuit fashion show. The Israelis wrote it all down. Every dinner and every swimsuit, in the files, in the careful bureaucratic hand of people who know that paper outlives everyone.

You have to understand how strange this was. Only a few years earlier, a visit like this would have been unthinkable.

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Let’s go back a bit.

In January of 1950, Israel’s foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, sent a telegram to Mohammad Hatta in Jakarta. It said, in effect: we recognize you, you’re a country now, welcome. Hatta wrote back and said thank you. That was all. He did not say we recognize you, too. It was the diplomatic equivalent of a man shaking your hand and then putting his own hands in his pockets.

In 1952, Jakarta said it again, in case anyone had missed it: no recognition. Under Sukarno, the door didn’t just stay closed, it got bolted. Anticolonialism was the creed of the day, and so was sympathy for the Palestinians. Indonesia and Israel would not be speaking. Not publicly, anyway.

Then came 1965.

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You can’t understand the men from “South Korea” without understanding what happened in Jakarta in the autumn of 1965, and you can’t understand that without looking at what the rest of the world was doing while it unfolded, which was mostly watching, mostly taking notes, and in some cases, quietly hoping.

Take West Germany. The Germans had been thinking hard about Indonesia since the winter before. From December 1964 into January 1965, officials in Bonn sat in rooms and drafted something called the “Action Programme Indonesia.” It had a nice, tidy, bureaucratic name, the kind that makes you think of folders and rubber stamps. Its premise was not tidy at all. Indonesia, the minutes from January 7 said, was seen as a barrier or stepping stone for communism toward Australia.

A barrier or a stepping stone. A country of millions of people, reduced to a piece of furniture in somebody else’s hallway.

The Germans wanted influence in Jakarta, and they paid particular attention to the people they considered friends. Chief among them was the military. In March, Ambassador Luitpold Werz wrote a report describing the Army as a possible counterweight to the communists. By mid-June, the cables said Indonesian officers were waiting for their moment.

Waiting. Just waiting.

Then, on October 4, 1965, a secret telegram went out to Bonn. It was a dry, flat thing. A left-leaning coup attempt, involving part of the Tjakrabirawa Regiment, had failed. Sukarno and Nasution were in control, with government troops. The rebels had kidnapped six generals: Yani, Soeprapto, Parman, Pandjaitan, Hartono, Soetojo. There were unconfirmed reports that Pandjaitan had been shot while resisting. The others, the cable said, were later killed.

And then, at the bottom, tacked onto the end of a document about murdered men, a single word.

ENFIN!

Finally!

I want you to sit with that for a second. Somebody, some functionary, some man with a pen and a desk and a pension plan, finished writing out the facts of a bloodbath and then added an exclamation point. The word doesn’t prove a conspiracy, and it would be dishonest to say it does. What it proves is a mood. It tells you the weather inside the building where the cable was read.

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The killing that followed was the kind that history books handle with a single numb sentence, because there are no good sentences for it. The West German embassy followed the Army’s moves and the spread of the anticommunist violence with growing intensity. On December 14, 1965, Werz noted an estimate: roughly 128,000 people dead since early October.

That figure matters, and so does what it isn’t. It was a diplomat’s guess at the time, a number scribbled in the middle of the horror. It was not the final count. The real toll, as later established, would be far, far higher.

And moving through this story, here and there, like a cold spot in a warm room, is a man named Rudolf Oebsger-Röder.

He called himself O. G. Roeder. He was a journalist, or he held a journalist’s credentials, and he was in Indonesia from July 1964 until March 1966. Before that, he’d been in the SS. After the war, he’d found work with the Gehlen Organization, the outfit that grew into West Germany’s BND. The historian Till Florian Tömmel notes that his official ties to the agency were cut in 1964. But he kept on feeding the BND information from Indonesia all the same, right up until March 31, 1966.

Then there’s the money.

BND documents cited by the Bundestag record a request in November 1965 from Indonesian security authorities: about 1.2 million German marks, for “special actions.” Those actions were against PKI officials, for orchestrated demonstrations, for anticommunist propaganda. What happened to the money? Nobody knows. The documents don’t say, and the question just hangs there. The files also touch on monitoring Indonesian opposition figures living in West Germany.

Later, the German government said it had reviewed the BND archives and found no evidence that its cooperation with Indonesian services had been used to directly or indirectly help the people responsible for the violence. That’s their statement. I’m only telling you what the record says, and the record also says that by 1968 the two countries were doing business in Indonesian military equipment.

Make of that what you will.

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Meanwhile, in Jakarta, other doors were opening.

Israel had looked at 1965 the way Washington and London did, through the long, narrow lens of the Cold War. And Israel’s intelligence services knew. They knew exactly. Their reports put the dead at somewhere between 300,000 and 700,000, and they named the military, under General Soeharto, as the hand behind it. And those same reports, written in that same cool voice, noted that the crushing of the Indonesian left was good news for Israel’s strategic interests.

That’s the thing about files. They don’t flinch.

So the relationship that had never officially existed began to exist, in the dark. Israeli documents, collections of cables, memos, and secret reports from the Foreign Ministry, the Defense Ministry, and Mossad, covering 1957 to 1967, show a trade-and-money relationship hiding behind code names. Beit Gan, they called it. House and Garden. Pretty name. Goods moved through third parties and third ports, Singapore and Hong Kong, so that nobody would have to stamp the word Israel on anything. The Israelis gathered intelligence on factory owners and managers, on production capacity, on expansion plans, on who needed credit and where the know-how was thin.

Then came January. The “South Koreans.” The swimsuits. The reactor.

In February, the talks moved to Bangkok, where Indonesian representatives met the Israelis to discuss trade, investment, and credit. In April, another Indonesian delegation visited Israel. The subjects were nuts and bolts, almost comically ordinary: a fertilizer plant, a copra factory, tractors, tires, jeeps. Also the problem of how to ship it all without anyone learning where it came from.

In May, according to an investigation by the Berliner Zeitung, a company called Pilot Project Berdikari signed a cooperation contract with an Israeli firm. A commodity loan of $150,000 for a copra processing plant. A revolving commercial credit of up to $1 million, at 5 percent a year. There was talk of soybeans, corn, rubber, pepper, and coffee. There was talk of shipping Indonesian orchids to Europe. There was talk of ships, two or more, on a hire-purchase scheme. The Israelis even threw in medical equipment for a twenty-bed clinic.

Orchids, if you can believe it. Soybeans and orchids and a twenty-bed clinic, sitting right alongside the things that came next.

Because at the end of July, two men arrived in Jerusalem. One was General Suhardiman, chief of Berdikari. The other was Yoga Sugama, head of Bakin, the State Intelligence Coordinating Agency. They sat down with senior Israeli officials, and among them was Meir Amit, chief of Mossad.

They weren’t there to talk about orchids.

They were there to talk about arms.

In October, an Israeli team surveyed farmland across Indonesia. A report dated November 23 noted that the team had left on October 8 and had looked at a 5,000-hectare agricultural project, requiring about $250,000.

What the documents tell us is that all of this, the trade and the credit and the weapons talk, had taken concrete shape by 1966 and 1967. People tend to point at the businessman Saul Eisenberg in the early seventies, or at the Skyhawk jets in 1979. The truth is that the roots go deeper, and they were planted earlier, in the dark.

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So why?

Because Indonesia was broke. That’s the plain, unromantic answer. Inflation had gone through the roof. Foreign debt payments were stacking up like unopened mail. The new government needed credit, investment, technology, and somebody willing to trade with it. In 1966, the Western creditor nations and Japan agreed to reschedule Indonesia’s debts. West Germany was one of them. A year later, aid to Indonesia began to be coordinated through the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia, the IGGI.

And Israel had what Indonesia needed. Credit. Commodities. Agricultural know-how. Cargo ships. Medical equipment. And, somewhere in the conversation, the thing that always seems to come up at the bottom of the page: spare parts for Soviet-made military hardware.

That’s the story the files tell. A country had bled itself white, and in the months afterward, while the ground was still fresh, men in good suits were getting on planes under false passports, to look at a reactor and watch a fashion show.

Finally, the cable had said.

And then the business began.