Director Dulles reported to the NSC on March 13, telling the group that General Nasution personally coordinated several columns converging on Padang. About two weeks later a CIA seaplane reached Sumatra with the first actual troop training mission. Officers Anthony Poshepny and James Haase plus a radioman joined Pat Landry, already in place for almost a month. But the training seemed fruitless—the CIA team drew up a schedule, then no one came. Dean Almy, senior officer on Sumatra, believes the secret warriors progressively became enmeshed in the rebel cause.

  President Eisenhower wanted a full workup of the intelligence, and on March 27 Allen Dulles presented a lengthy White House briefing. After describing the terrain, the CIA assessed rebel strength on Sumatra as much weaker than Nasution’s forces. The navy sent urgent orders to its reconnaissance squadrons in the Pacific, and that day three aircraft flew photo missions over Indonesia. One of them, an AJ-2P Savage piloted by Sy Mendenhall, suffered damage while flying over a PERMESTA base in Sulawesi. The incident, with the plane forced to make an emergency landing in the Philippines, brought another flap.

  On April 8 the Chicago Daily News published an article on American airdrops to the rebels, triggering more consternation in Washington. Secrecy continued only because the Daily News story never spread more widely. Anxious to shore up the rebellion, CIA’s General Cabell made proposals that went too far even for Secretary Dulles. Not satisfied with what they heard from the U.S. Pacific Command regarding its capabilities, Allen Dulles sent Cabell to Honolulu to investigate. Meanwhile the Sukarno forces made steady progress. On April 14 Allen told the NSC he expected an amphibious assault on Padang any day.

  Eisenhower mused that the rebels really needed a submarine or two to parry the invasion fleet. The navy had subs on the scene, notably the Bluegill and Tang, but these received no orders to intervene.

  Usually Ike held NSC meetings on Tuesdays. The session of April 14 came a day early. What happened instead on Tuesday was a fateful decision for CIA to take its gloves off. Director Dulles had been alerted by presidential aide Andrew Goodpaster of “the Boss’[s] deep interest particularly re use of American personnel.” Dulles shot back that his secret warriors were about at the limit of their authority. Allen called Foster, telling his brother of Ike’s concern.

  “We are reaching the hour of decision,” Allen declared. Foster replied that they needed to find a political basis to make the covert operation an overt one.

  Allen went alone to the White House, Foster took two aides. Would the United States recognize PERMESTA as the government or a belligerent? That afternoon, in one of several phone calls with Allen, Foster remarked that the rebels might fight harder if they saw prospects. Should the CIA tell them the United States might accord recognition if they beat back Sukarno’s attack? Could Washington end its restriction on paramilitary teams? Could CIA employ people other than its own? What military assistance could be brought to bear? Eisenhower looked to the idea of “soldiers of fortune” as his avenue to preserve plausible denial, and on April 15 he emphasized that he wanted no U.S. personnel detached from CIA service for the sole purpose of working in Indonesia, but that CIA proprietary personnel like Civil Air Transport pilots would be unobjectionable.

  Secretary Dulles suggested stronger intervention might be necessary—without overt support the rebels could fail. But Foster undercut his own argument, opposing American troops in Sumatra to protect U.S. citizens and the oil fields there. The CIA came away with a green light to stage activities under the “soldier of fortune” rubric. Reporters at a news conference that day asked about diplomatic recognition for the rebels. John Foster Dulles tried to be both obscure and optimistic.

  This action came too late for PERMESTA on Sumatra. Sukarno’s landings took place as foreseen. Allen telephoned Foster on April 17 to report the invasion under way. Among the rebels, some units changed sides; often troops simply ran away. A real battle for Padang, which fell after three days, sealed the rebel defeat. The CIA training team made a hazardous trek to a stretch of unoccupied coast to commandeer a boat and head out to sea, where they were retrieved by the Tang. The cover story that they were big-game hunters caught in the crossfire of the rebellion had to be as ludicrous as the one they had used on land—Poshepny had said the CIA team were scientists hunting exotic butterflies.

  Allen Dulles informed Foster on April 23 that the rebels seemed to have no fight in them. Foster actually speculated on whether the United States should now switch sides and back Sukarno. Aghast, the CIA director cautioned against such a move as premature. Agency officials lifted the original limitation of one team with the rebels. But white faces were not enough—the rebels lacked backbone. Anthony Poshepny had already met Tibetan trainees—fierce partisans. He found the Indonesians quite tame. Frank Wisner agonized in Singapore.

  Reliance on a movement neither cohesive nor unified was to be a key error in Project Haik. The PERMESTA colonels opposed rule from Java, but their political program revealed their motivation as personal. That envisioned a loose federation of regions, essentially major islands and groups of islands in the archipelago. The regions were to retain most of their income, giving only a little to a central government. The plan would have served well in warlord China.

  The same separatism the CIA exploited to create Haik ensured that the rebel movement could not function as an alliance. Difficulties due to the geographic dispersion of the islands precluded joint action. A mismatch also existed between the ideological commitment of CIA’s secret warriors and the less lofty aims of the colonels. This kind of mistake had also been made in Guatemala, but that time Arbenz had panicked. Sukarno stood his ground.

  Another pervasive problem lay in the disparity in means between the rebels and the Indonesian government. Sukarno had a navy, an air force, Marines, paratroops. The rebel colonels had local forces but not much more. The light weapons and ammunition the Americans delivered by submarine or airdrop did not make up the difference.

  Regarding diplomatic recognition, Hugh Cumming’s people had assembled a paper that showed only weak legal grounds for such a move. Then came the battle of Padang and rebel defeat. Allen Dulles gave Foster details in a lunchtime phone call. Foster remarked that Sukarno’s invasion “has happened with far greater efficiency, speed and precision than he had expected.” Allen, not surprised at the defeat, warned, “We have to be careful not to get too far out on a limb.” A few days later Foster speculated on recognizing a Sumatran state, but Allen advised waiting. Sure enough, on April 28 word came that “the East is boiling.” The last rebel capital of Sumatra fell on May 4.

  The CIA did what it could to stiffen the rebellion. With the end on Sumatra the rebel capital moved to Manado on Sulawesi. A most conspicuous facet remained the rebel air force. Indonesian airmen stayed loyal to Sukarno, making it hard to explain how a PERMESTA air force had materialized almost overnight. Of course these were the men of Civil Air Transport, or, more precisely, CAT aircrews who left the proprietary to keep the CIA hand hidden. There were also Chinese Nationalists, Poles, and one Hungarian who had worked directly for the CIA; plus a couple of Filipino pilots, who earned more each month than the Philippines paid in a year. At Clark airbase the U.S. Air Force in 1957 had declared surplus some seventy-three B-26 bombers, twin-engine propeller-driven aircraft. Phased out of U.S. service or returned by France after Indochina, the planes had good range and load. The CIA selected three of the bombers and acquired several P-51 fighters from the Philippines, which had converted to jet fighters.

  The U.S. Air Force refurbished the planes for the agency, arming the bombers with nose cowlings covering half a dozen heavy-caliber machine guns, with an equal number emplaced in the wings. Agency officer Cecil Cartwright supervised air operations. A separate airlift run by Thorsrud and McCarthy used larger cargo planes to deliver weapons. When all had been prepared, the aircraft moved to a base at Manado.

  “Rebels” were first reported as bombing Bandung in late March. But the initial CIA air strike came against Makassar on April 13. Two B-26 bombers participated and one of them crashed, killing two Polish aircrew. The plane would be replaced but not the pilots. The Poles were not used again in Project Haik. Instead the CIA brought in two more Civil Air Transport pilots, Allen L. Pope and William H. Beale, to fly the remaining B-26s. Filipinos Antonio Dedal and Rex Reyes flew the P-51s. More than a dozen raids followed. When the airmen seemed close to exhaustion, Richard Bissell actually reached down into his U-2 spyplane unit to recruit two more pilots, Carmine Vito and James Cherbonneaux. The security breach if either were captured would have been enormous, and for that very reason they were never permitted on a combat mission. Nationalist Chinese helped with air services, staying to work with PERMESTA even after the CIA left and, for a time, flying their own B-26 bomber.

  In the April 28 attack on the oil port of Balikpapan, a British tanker suffered hits along with an Indonesian gunboat, a virtual replay of the CIA snafu with the freighter Springfjord during the Guatemala operation. Rebel troops from Manado seized Morotai and its airfield to bring more targets into range of the P-51s, as Director Dulles told the NSC on May 1. Allen ruefully admitted, in a reference to foreign ships, that the attacks had been “almost too effective in certain instances.” Targets included Makassar, Morotai, Balikpapan, and Ambon. On other occasions ships were attacked at sea.

  The danger of CIA exposure continued to be extremely high. Indonesian intelligence learned a fair amount and tried to discredit PERMESTA. Sukarno propaganda reported airdrops on several occasions, at least once linking the Australian air force to a flight. The government accused American and Chinese “adventurers” of working for the rebels and later announced it had sent Washington a list naming names.

  In response, President Eisenhower at his news conference of April 30 commented publicly for the first time. Ike declared that the United States remained neutral and added, “Now on the other hand, every rebellion that I have ever heard of has its soldiers of fortune.” Ike felt he had done so well that he called Foster to brag, the only time during the entire operation that the two discussed Project Haik on the telephone. Foster Dulles followed up the next day, saying the United States had no legal obligation to control American soldiers of fortune.

  The soldier-of-fortune argument turned out to be disastrous. On May 18 a rebel B-26 bomber attacked Ambon, hitting a crowded village marketplace where people were on their way to church. This tenth raid on Ambon found ready government defenses. Damaged over its next target, an airfield, the bomber’s right wing caught fire. The crew bailed out and were captured. The bombardier was Indonesian but the pilot an American, Allen Lawrence Pope. Within the day, Washington knew of Pope’s detention. General Cabell told Foster Dulles the CIA had “a lot of confidence in the man.” Pope had flown in Korea and helped the French in Indochina, including fifty-seven missions to Dien Bien Phu. In Saigon in December 1957 he had been recruited for the Indonesia operation. His first PERMESTA mission took place in March 1958.

  Director Dulles met with his brother to discuss the setback, taking Pearre Cabell with him. Despite the danger, they argued for another strike at the same target. Sukarno and Nasution were preparing to attack the last rebel strongholds. Secretary Dulles shot back that either the rebels had to succeed in winning political support or the United States would have to consider intervention. Pinprick air raids were not about to do the job. On May 19 Foster separately discussed the Pope shoot-down in phone calls with Allen, Cabell, and his Far East assistant secretary, Walter S. Robertson. The latter remarked that perhaps the time had come to bring the Australians up to date on Project Haik.

  The loss of Pope’s B-26, bad as it had been, marked only part of an even worse day. There had been a second bomber on the mission, one that confronted an Indonesian interceptor and crashed on landing. That left the rebels with no effective air arm since several days earlier Sukarno’s planes had successfully wiped out the rebel’s C-54s and the CIA’s P-51s on the ground. Allen Dulles and Pearre Cabell met Foster late that afternoon at the secretary’s home. Field commanders were now pressing for attacks to blunt Nasution’s buildup in eastern Indonesia. Foster insisted the Indonesians’ political front had to be more coherent or, again, there must be overt intervention. Covert operations had run their course. At Quarters Eye, Director Dulles reluctantly told John Mason’s deputy, James Glerum, “We’re pulling the plug.” Three successive headquarters cables were necessary to get the field people to understand Haik had truly reached its end.

  Suddenly, on May 20, John Foster Dulles stood before the press to say the rebellion should be resolved without foreign involvement.

  The next day Allen Dulles sent the secretary of state a note confirming the U.S. people had all been pulled out. Separately Allen added the text of a letter from Sumual, one of the colonels, who had seen off the agency’s men, declaring his Indonesians would fight to the end, expressing the surety they would meet again and again, “anywhere this struggle is being fought and more especially when the chances of winning it are seemingly very thin.” Foster acknowledged the rebel leader had lofty sentiments he put in an inspiring way.

  Certain its pilots could stand up to torture, the CIA “sanitized” its B-26 bombers to prevent them being linked to U.S. inventories, and the pilots underwent strip searches to ensure they carried no incriminating evidence. The Americans did not think Sukarno could prove Allen Pope’s official relationship. But the pilot had concealed papers aboard the aircraft. The Indonesians captured Pope’s flight log, air force and CAT identification cards, his contract, and a post exchange privilege card for Clark Air Force Base. On May 27 the papers, and Pope, appeared before the world press at Djakarta. Both Eisenhower and Foster Dulles had been caught in a lie.

  Some reports suggest that the CIA secretly assembled a team at Clark to snatch Allen Pope out of his Indonesian prison. Supposedly agents would smuggle him an escape suit and he would be lifted out by an ingenious ground-air pickup system; but the mission was never attempted.

  The Pope shoot-down spelled the end for “Archipelago.” An officer at FE/5 heard Allen Dulles use the phrase “we must disengage” as the director ordered a stand-down for CIA’s field force. The CIA phase of PERMESTA’s revolt ended with the fall of Manado to Sukarno forces on June 26. The final result strengthened his hand; in the words of the historian Brian May: “The American intervention was a gift to Sukarno.” The Indonesians fought on for years in a sort of low-intensity harassment campaign. So long as the Nationalist Chinese stayed with them, they had some outside backing. After that the rebels depended on proceeds from smuggling and whatever they could raise from sympathizers. The smuggling annoyed the British, who had to live on in Malaya after the CIA went home, and whose officials were supposed to enforce the law impartially.

  Haik strained relations with the British and Australian intelligence services, but no one at CIA was cashiered. The man who made the original contact with the colonels, given his choice of posts, took London. Al Ulmer headed to a prestige post as station chief in Paris. A prime undercover officer went on to Algeria. Desmond FitzGerald got the Far East Division. Even Allen Pope, tried in December 1959 and sentenced to life in an Indonesian prison, would fly again for the CIA.

  The disaster did finally sap the strength of Frank Wisner. Returning from Singapore in June, at the airport Wisner encountered Des FitzGerald, who found him alternately disconnected or aggressive. Even Frank’s wife Polly saw the problem, and she quietly asked FitzGerald and Gordon Gray for help. His biographer, Evan Thomas, believes Wisner succumbed to manic depression. One day in September Wisner basically went berserk. Agency employees were astonished to see him led away in a straightjacket. Following a lengthy recovery, Wisner became London chief of station. Richard Bissell succeeded him as CIA’s new deputy director for operations.

  The advent of Richard Bissell changed many things for the Directorate for Operations, but one stayed the same: the worries of the president’s watchdogs, again expressed within a few short months. Reporting at the end of October, they made veiled reference to Frank Wisner’s departure, then went on: “this unfortunate situation highlights the necessity for reviewing, and perhaps recasting, some of the virtually autonomous functions presently assigned” to the DO. The Hull Board—Jim Killian’s place as chairman now taken by retired general John E. Hull—especially objected to the Directorate for Operations being solely responsible for review of its own activities. This evaluation function—which also applied to the review of covert action proposals before they went to the 5412 Group—made the CIA the arbiter of what covert operations were suitable and how to carry them out, plus the effective judge of how well they had been executed. This same ground had been plowed by David Bruce and Robert Lovett two years earlier.

  General Hull and others made these points to President Eisenhower when the PBCFIA met with him on December 16, 1958. They urged Ike to take the function away from the CIA, especially for political-psychological and paramilitary operations. Project Haik served as an example of how things could go wrong. Robert Lovett, co-author of the board’s previous covert action study, pressed Eisenhower to transfer review authority to the 5412 Group. Gordon Gray, recently named national security adviser, noted the group had not been very active reviewers in the past—actually it mostly had just sat back to listen when CIA appeared twice a year to run down a laundry list of covert ops. President Eisenhower insisted his 5412 Group should meet as a court, implying a capacity to review operations. He then told Gray to study the entire relationship between the CIA and the 5412 Group and report back.