But after seven years of close cooperation with Washington, the military was already well equipped. You also don’t need very advanced weaponry to arrest civilians who provide almost no resistance. What officials in the embassy and the CIA decided the Army really did need, however, was information. Working with CIA analysts, embassy political officer Robert Martens prepared lists with the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists, and handed them over to the Army, so that these people could be murdered and “checked off” the list.
As far as we know, this was at least the third time in history that US officials had supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to allies, so that they could round them up and kill them. The first was in Guatemala in 1954, the second was in Iraq in 1963, and now, on a much larger scale, was Indonesia 1965.
“It really was a big help to the army,” said Martens, who was a member of the US embassy’s political section. “I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.”
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