Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia

During the late 1950s, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles provoked a civil war in Indonesia, aimed at transforming the character of its government to fit their own prescription. As great a debacle as the Bay of Pigs affair in Cuba, Eisenhower's covert military intervention in Indonesia helped pave the way for the political explosion of 1965-66 in which General Suharto ousted President Sukarno and at least half a million Indonesians were massacred.