LETTERS.

THE REAL MOERDANI

SIR: The main issue in the article by Paul Monk (November 2000), "Balibo: Murdani and the Memory Hole", concerns a supposed Australian Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) intercept of a conversation between General Benny Moerdani in Jakarta and Colonel Dading Kalbuadi in Batugade, East Timor on 15th October 1975. In this conversation, supposedly intercepted and translated by a young analyst in Shoal Bay, Moerdani is said to have ordered the murder of the five Australian-based journalists at Balibo.

Monk's article is a convoluted discussion of the possible ramifications of this supposed intercept which was "revealed" in the recent book by Desmond Ball and Hamish McDonald entitled Death in Balibo, Lies in Canberra: Blood on Whose Hands? which Dr Monk partly reviewed in this article (and which I reviewed at some length in the November 2000 issue of the Asia Pacific Strategy Council's Asia Pacific Report).

Unfortunately, Dr Monk, Professor Ball and McDonald, and a number of other so-called expert commentators, have failed to appreciate the real nature of the relationship between Moerdani and the late Dading Kalbuadi. This was not simply that of a general and a junior officer. Moerdani and Kalbuadi had been friends from youth. They were friends together in the semi-military Students' Army (Tentara Pelajar--TP) in Central Java and they grew up in more or less the same part of Java. They were later close mates during basic military training at the Army Officers' Training Centre (P3AD) in Bandung, then went through the Infantry Instructor School (SPI) at Cimahi together and were then both invited to join the Army Commando Regiment (RPKAD) when it was formed in 1956 when Kalbuadi was twenty-five and Moerdani twenty-four. Moerdani, almost immediately, became an RPKAD company commander with the rank of second lieutenant. In short, the two of them spent their formative years as close friends, commandos and operational intelligence officers.

Kalbuadi was the commanding officer of the secret guerilla force based at Batugade in 1975 not because he had "risen through the ranks" over the years or been posted there by military HQ, but because he had run into his mate Moerdani in Bandung in 1974 en route to Jakarta where he had been posted by military (ABRI) HQ to the Army General Staff. Moerdani simply told him to forget all that and come and join him as his personal assistant, which meant as a commando/intelligence operative. It is quite likely that ABRI HQ and the general awaiting Kalbuadi's arrival in Jakarta never knew where he'd gone to and that not even the Armed Forces Commander at the time knew that he had become Moerdani's man in East Timor. That's the way the Indonesian military works and has always worked. People who imagine--or even worse actually draw up--neat little lines of command diagrams have always been way off the track, ultimately seriously misleading people like Australian prime ministers.

However, the essential point of all of this is that friends of Moerdani and Kalbuadi say that whenever the two of them had a private conversation it was almost invariably in their particular central Javanese dialect spiced with local slang and their own "codes" precisely so that no one else could understand what they were saying. From youth they were intelligence "cranks" and "spy mates". These friends insist that had Moerdani and Kalbuadi been speaking to each other on any sort of telephone or radio link between Jakarta and Batugade in October 1975, it would have been in their own cryptic dialect--especially as they both knew that DSD, and possibly Fretilin, directly or indirectly, might be listening in. Perhaps no one in the world, and certainly not Australia, could have understood and translated what they said--assuming that the conversation ever took place.

It can be safely assumed, therefore, that either the DSD Moerdani intercept never existed or was of no intelligence consequence because it couldn't be understood. And on the basis of Monk's article--and other material--it is also fair to suggest that the evidence for the existence of the "Blue Book" is no stronger. It seems that some people have been inventing "evidence" for things they would like to think existed.