In April and May of 1958, Indonesia went through a period of rebellion, as discontent on the peripheral islands, like Sumatra, grew because of lack of support and autonomy from the central government, which is located on the island of Java. Although Sukarno’s government was not communist, it did allow the communists to participate politically. That led the U.S. to covertly support the anti-communist rebels. On May 8 Allen Pope, an American pilot who had been carrying out attacks against the Indonesian military, was captured. This news reached the press and exposed the actions of the CIA in Indonesia. Pope was accused of bombing the rural village of Ambon and sentenced to death.
The CIA was forced to curtail its operations and the rebels were defeated. The Kennedy administration ended up making economic amends to Sukarno’s government. Edward Ingraham and William Harben, both political officers in Jakarta, were each involved in providing support to Pope while he was imprisoned and awaited execution. Paul Gardner was a political officer in the country after Pope was released and learned just how much the U.S. had supported the 1958 rebellion. Gardner, who later became an ambassador, wrote a book about U.S.-Indonesian relations called Shared Hopes, Separate Fears: Fifty Years of US-Indonesian Relations. Ingraham and Gardner were interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy beginning in 1991 and 1992 respectively. Harben’s accounts are excerpted from his memoirs.
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