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Feet to the Fire: CIA Covert Operations in Indonesia, 1957-1958. By Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison. Annapolis, Md.: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1999. ISBN 1-55750-193-9. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Index. Pp. vii, 218. $28.95.
Deeply apprehensive about the leftward drift in Indonesian politics throughout the mid-1950s, the United States countered with the audacious Operation Haik. A covert action designed to destabilize, if not overthrow, the regime of President Sukarno, it sanctioned direct support to dissident, separatist-minded military officers centered on Indonesia's outer islands of Sumatra and Sulawaesi. In the end, as is commonly known, the operation proved a colossal failure, one of the Central Intelligence Agency's most ignominious defeats of the Cold War era. What has remained shrouded in mystery, until now, is the genesis and extent of U.S. intervention, the details of the operation, and, to a lesser extent, the reasons for its precipitous collapse.
In this impressive and important work, Kenneth Conboy and...