Friday Forum: Chris Hulshof – Words as Weapons: British Black Propaganda and Psychological Warfare in Indonesia, 1963–66

Following nearly a decade of failed covert operations targeting Indonesia, the Central Intelligence Agency turned to allies across the Atlantic in the mid-1960s to assist with undermining the government in Jakarta. During this period, the Information Research Department (IRD), the British covert propaganda department hidden deep within the Foreign Office, established a special unit in Singapore innocuously named the Southeast Asia Monitoring Unit (SEAMU) to spearhead a disinformation campaign to destabilize Indonesia in hopes of ushering in a more friendly regime in Jakarta and putting a premature end to Konfronstasi – Indonesia’s low-level border war waged against Malaysia. With the collaboration of the American, Australian, and Malaysian governments, the British psychological warfare campaign not only flooded the Indonesian market with black propaganda leaflets and radio broadcasts, but deftly manipulated the international news circuit to spread Indonesian Army propaganda across the globe to help provide legitimacy to Army claims and help mollify international opinion of the mass murder of up to a million nominally leftist Indonesian citizens.