Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

One day in 1971, about a week before my scheduled departure for Indonesia, I arrived at Claudine’s place to find the small dining room table set with an assortment of cheeses and breads, and there was a fine bottle of Beaujolais. She toasted me.

“You’ve made it.” She smiled, but somehow it seemed less than sincere. “You’re now one of us.”

We chatted casually for half an hour or so; then, as we were finishing off the wine, she gave me a look unlike any I had seen before. “Never admit to anyone about our meetings,” she said in a stern voice. “I won’t forgive you if you do, ever, and I’ll deny I ever met you.” She glared at me—perhaps the only time I felt threatened by her—and then gave a cold laugh. “Talking about us would make life dangerous for you.”

I was stunned. I felt terrible. But later, as I walked alone back to the Prudential Center, I had to admit to the cleverness of the scheme. The fact is that all our time together had been spent in her apartment. There was not a trace of evidence about our relationship, and no one at MAIN was implicated in any way. There was also part of me that appreciated her honesty; she had not deceived me the way my parents had about Tilton and Middlebury.

CHAPTER 4. Saving a Country from Communism

I had a romanticized vision of Indonesia, the country where I was to live for the next three months. Some of the books I read featured photographs of beautiful women in brightly colored sarongs, exotic Balinese dancers, shamans blowing fire, and warriors paddling long dugout canoes in emerald waters at the foot of smoking volcanoes. Particularly striking was a series on the magnificent black-sailed galleons of the infamous Bugi pirates, who still sailed the seas of the archipelago, and who had so terrorized early European sailors that they returned home to warn their children, “Behave yourselves, or the Bugimen will get you.” Oh, how those pictures stirred my soul.

The history and legends of that country represent a cornucopia of larger-than-life figures: wrathful gods, Komodo dragons, tribal sultans, and ancient tales that long before the birth of Christ had traveled across Asian mountains, through Persian deserts, and over the Mediterranean to embed themselves in the deepest realms of our collective psyche. The very names of its fabled islands—Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi—seduced the mind. Here was a land of mysticism, myth, and erotic beauty; an elusive treasure sought but never found by Columbus; a princess wooed yet never possessed by Spain, by Holland, by Portugal, by Japan; a fantasy and a dream.

My expectations were high, and I suppose they mirrored those of the great explorers. Like Columbus, though, I should have known to temper my fantasies. Perhaps I could have guessed that the beacon shines on a destiny that is not always the one we envision. Indonesia offered treasures, but it was not the chest of panaceas I had come to expect. In fact, my first days in Indonesia’s steamy capital, Jakarta, in the summer of 1971, were shocking.

The beauty was certainly present. Gorgeous women sporting colorful sarongs. Lush gardens ablaze with tropical flowers. Exotic Balinese dancers. Bicycle cabs with fanciful, rainbow-colored scenes painted on the sides of the high seats, where passengers reclined in front of the pedaling drivers. Dutch Colonial mansions and turreted mosques. But there was also an ugly, tragic side to the city. Lepers holding out bloodied stumps instead of hands. Young girls offering their bodies for a few coins. Once-splendid Dutch canals turned into cesspools. Cardboard hovels where entire families lived along the trash-lined banks of black rivers. Blaring horns and choking fumes. The beautiful and the ugly, the elegant and the vulgar, the spiritual and the profane. This was Jakarta, where the enticing scent of cloves and orchid blossoms battled the miasma of open sewers for dominance.

I had seen poverty before. Some of my New Hampshire classmates lived in cold-water tarpaper shacks and arrived at school wearing thin jackets and frayed tennis shoes on subzero winter days, their unwashed bodies reeking of old sweat and manure. I had lived in mud shacks with Andean peasants whose diet consisted almost entirely of dried corn and potatoes, and where it sometimes seemed that a newborn was as likely to die as to experience a birthday. I had seen poverty, but nothing to prepare me for Jakarta.

Our team, of course, was quartered in the country’s fanciest hotel, the Hotel InterContinental Indonesia. Owned by Pan American Airways, like the rest of the InterContinental chain scattered around the globe, it catered to the whims of wealthy foreigners, especially oil executives and their families. On the evening of our first day, our project manager Charlie Illingworth hosted a dinner for us in the elegant restaurant on the top floor.