The Central Intelligence Agency. Deputy Directorate for Plans 1961 Secret Memorandum on Indonesia: A Study in the Politics of Policy Formulation in the Kennedy Administration

The once-secret CIA document published for the first time below has multiple significance for scholars of American-Indonesian relations in the cold war period.1 First and foremost, this long memorandum offers a rare opportunity to gauge the substance and quality of policy analysis in the CIA's Deputy Directorate for Plans (henceforth DDP), whose Far East Division under Desmond Fitzgerald2 prepared it at the order of DDP Director Richard Bissell in mid-March 1961.3 Normally DDP does not produce papers which can be characterized as a mixture of intelligence estimate and policy implications, as Bissell describes the contents of the report in his cover memo. The DDP's formal responsibility within the CIA is exclusively for "clandestine services" of three main types: intelligence collection, counterintelligence and covert actions, involving a whole range of operations (or "dirty