Allen Lawrence Pope

• 1. Introduction

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  Allen Lawrence Pope was carrying about 30 incriminating documents when Indonesian forces took him prisoner in May 1958. One of them was his own flight log. The papers turned a covert operation into a diplomatic crisis, and they deepened the embarrassment of the Eisenhower administration. Pope was an American pilot, and his presence in Indonesia was supposed to stay secret. This documentary follows the questions he left behind. Who sent him into the skies over eastern Indonesia, and what were they trying to achieve? What did he actually do there? And how does a prisoner in a foreign country find his way home?

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• 2. A Florida Boyhood

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  In Perrine, Florida, just south of Miami, a moderately prosperous fruit grower raised a son who would grow up to fly bombers. Pope was born in Miami on the 20th of October 1928. One account of his youth says he spent time busting broncos in Texas. He graduated from the University of Florida and then entered the United States Air Force. In the Korean War he served as a first lieutenant and flew the Douglas B-26 Invader in combat. The Air Force recognized that service with three Air Medals and a Distinguished Flying Cross. When the fighting ended, the Air Force brought him home to the United States as an instructor. That job did not last. In March 1954 he left the service for a civilian employer that was not quite what it seemed.

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• 3. Điện Biên Phủ

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  On the 13th of March 1954, Việt Minh artillery knocked out the airstrip at Điện Biên Phủ in French Indochina. The French garrison there could now be supplied only by air drop. That same month, Pope joined Civil Air Transport, a front organization for the CIA. He flew one of its Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcars to help supply the besieged French forces. Civil Air Transport pilots flew hundreds of sorties from Cat Bi to the surrounded garrison. On the 6th of May 1954, the day before the French force surrendered, Pope served as co-pilot of the lead aircraft in a group of six C-119s. That formation made the last air drop to the garrison. The First Indochina War ended that August, and Pope stayed with the company. He first made civilian charter flights from Taiwan, then from Saigon. A recall order in April 1958 would end that quiet routine.

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• 4. The Black Bomber

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  At Clark Air Base in the Philippines, Pope was handed a B-26 Invader that had been painted black, with its markings obscured. The company had sent him there after calling him back from Saigon to Taiwan. His destination was Indonesia. The covert operation he was joining aimed to overthrow President Sukarno, whom the planners saw as Communist-leaning, and to topple his Guided Democracy regime. On the ground he was to link up with the Permesta rebels, insurgents led by dissident local army officers. On the 27th of April 1958 Pope landed at Mapanget, a rebel-held Indonesian Air Force base on the Minahassa Peninsula of northern Sulawesi. Another Civil Air Transport pilot and former Air Force officer, William H. Beale, was already there. Beale had been flying a B-26 for the rebels' Angkatan Udara Revolusioner, or Revolutionary Air Force, since the 19th of April. Pope's aircraft was not the only disguised one. Some 20 other rebel aircraft were reported to carry Nationalist Chinese markings hidden under hasty coats of paint. Their pilots were said to be Nationalist Chinese and Americans from the company. The CIA's instructions to its pilots were pointed. Hit commercial shipping, scare foreign merchant ships away from Indonesian waters, and let the damaged economy weaken Sukarno's government.

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• 5. Sorties Over Sulawesi

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  Hours before the rebels landed on the island of Morotai on the 27th of April, Pope bombed its government-held defenses. The next day he turned to Central Sulawesi. One source says that off the port of Donggala he bombed and sank three merchant ships: one Italian, one Greek and one registered in Panama. He then hit Palu, the provincial capital, and destroyed 22 vehicles in a truck park. The record is muddy. The Italian ship Aquila was certainly sunk by a rebel aircraft, yet its wreck has been identified off Ambon Island, more than 500 mi east of Donggala. Another source suggests the Aquila went down on the 1st or the 2nd of May rather than the 28th of April. On the 29th of April Pope struck the air base at Kendari with 500 lb bombs and machine-gun fire. He then strafed the patrol boat KRI Intana, killing five crew and wounding another 23. On the 30th he returned to Palu and Donggala, sinking a ship, destroying a warehouse and demolishing a bridge. His luck turned on the 1st of May at Ambon. His four bombs missed the waterfront and fell in the sea, and then his starboard engine exploded. He aborted the attack and limped back to Mapanget. A replacement engine took several days to arrive. On the 7th of May he hit the Ambon air base and seriously damaged a C-47 Skytrain and a P-51 Mustang. The following day he raided Palu in the morning and the Liang air base on Ambon in the afternoon. There he damaged the runway and destroyed a PBY Catalina. A bomb aimed at a gunboat in Ambon city missed, but his machine guns wounded two crew. Since the 1st of May, Beale had been resting at Clark Air Base, which left Pope's bomber as the only one active. Beale returned on the 9th of May, and Pope flew to Clark for several days of leave. On the 15th of May he attacked the Naiko, a merchant ship pressed into military service. It was carrying a company of Ambonese troops home from East Java. His bomb hit the engine room, killing one crew member and 16 infantrymen. He then went after the barracks in Ambon city. His first bomb exploded in a market-place next door, and his second bounced and went off near an ice factory. Back at Mapanget he found that the Indonesian Air Force had bombed the base in his absence. A Catalina was destroyed and a P-51 damaged. The Indonesian government claimed the market bombing had killed a large number of civilians. That later proved untrue, but the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta protested to the State Department anyway. The department warned the CIA team in Manado, and the rules of engagement tightened to airfields and boats only. Even military buildings were now forbidden.

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• 6. Shot Down Over Ambon

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  At 0300 on the 18th of May 1958, Pope took off from Mapanget for another run at Ambon. Indonesian forces were assembling an invasion fleet in Ambon Bay, with ships arriving from Java since the 16th. Their goal was to counter-attack the islands of Morotai and Halmahera, which the rebels had captured toward the end of April. Pope first bombed the airfield and destroyed the C-47 and the P-51 that he had damaged on the 7th. A short distance west of the bay he found the fleet. It included two 7,000-ton merchant ships serving as troop transports. One of them, the Sawega, was trying to dodge, and his bomb fell in the sea 40 m short. The Indonesian Air Force had a single serviceable P-51 on Ambon, based at Liang. Ignatius Dewanto scrambled in it to drive Pope off. He closed on the B-26 just as Pope was attacking the Sawega. The ships in the convoy took both aircraft for rebels and fired on both. Dewanto also hit the bomber, damaging its starboard wing, and the B-26 caught fire. Pope and his Permesta radio operator, Jan Harry Rantung, bailed out. The bomber was entering a sharp dive, and the slipstream threw Pope against the tail fin. The impact fractured his right leg. The two men came down on the coast of Pulau Hatala, a small island west of Ambon. A landing party from one of the fleet's minesweepers came ashore and captured them. Their captors would soon learn what Pope had been carrying.

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• 7. Verdict and Release

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  U.S. Ambassador Howard P. Jones described Pope as an American "paid soldier of fortune" and expressed regret at his involvement. The record did not make that easy to sustain. Pope admitted to flying only one or two missions, yet his flight log recorded eight, and another source puts the total at 12. One account of the final morning describes him bombing a market, hitting a navy ship and destroying a church, with an official toll of six civilians and seventeen military officers. The same account says he was chasing a ship that carried one thousand Indonesian troops. Pope's injury shaped his captivity. With his right thigh fractured in the bailout, he was not placed in a prison. He was held under house arrest at the small mountain resort of Kaliurang, where he received excellent medical attention. He later said he felt he had been fighting international communism. A four-man Indonesian military court rejected his plea to be treated as a prisoner of war. On the 29th of April 1960 it found him guilty of killing 17 members of Indonesia's armed forces and six civilians. It sentenced him to death. The sentence was never carried out. Instead, Pope became a bargaining chip in Indonesia's negotiations with the United States over arms. He was eventually exchanged for 10 Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport planes. In February 1962, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy visited Sukarno on a goodwill trip and pleaded for the pilot's release. Pope's wife, mother and sister also called on the president, and all three tearfully begged for a pardon. On the 2nd of July 1962, Pope was quietly driven to the airport and put aboard a U.S. plane. Sukarno gave him a parting instruction: "I want no propaganda about it. Now go. Lose yourself in the USA secretly. Don't show yourself publicly. Don't give out news stories. Don't issue statements. Just go home, hide yourself, get lost, and we'll forget the whole thing."

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• 8. After Indonesia

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  Back in Miami in 1962, Pope joined Southern Air Transport. Like Civil Air Transport, it was a CIA front organization flying covert missions in regions that included southeast Asia. On the 24th of February 2005, France's ambassador to the United States, Jean-David Levitte, made the 76-year-old Pope a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur. Six other Civil Air Transport pilots received the same honor. The citation was for their service at Điện Biên Phủ. In 2005 Pope described his own outlook in blunt terms: "I'm a communist fighter. I was born and raised to be against the communists." Of his Indonesian campaign, he had observed on another occasion that he enjoyed it. He claimed that he and his colleagues killed thousands of Communists, even though, in his view, half of them probably did not know what Communism meant. Allen Lawrence Pope died on the 4th of April 2020, at the age of 91. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

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