Subversion as Foreign Policy

This account of US foreign policy reveals the story of the covert activity in Indonesia undertaken by President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in the late 1950s. Working through the CIA, Eisenhower and Dulles secretly financed, armed and provided air power to dissident Indonesian colonels, thus fomenting a disastrous civil war and creating a foreign policy debacle on the scale of the Bay of Pigs. In the process, thousands of Indonesians - civilians as well as soldiers - were killed, and much of Indonesia's air force and navy destroyed.