During the massacre of at least 500,000 alleged communists in 1960s Indonesia , U.S. government officials encouraged and applauded the mass killings while providing covert assistance to the Indonesian military which helped facilitate them . This included the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta supplying Indonesian forces with lists of up to 5,000 names of suspected members of the Communist Party of Indonesia ( PKI ) , who were subsequently killed in the massacres . In 2001 , the CIA attempted to prevent the publication of the State Department volume '' Foreign Relations of the United States , 1964 – 1968 '' , which documents the U.S. role in providing covert assistance to the Indonesian military for the express purpose of the extirpation of the PKI . In July 2016 , an international panel of judges ruled the killings constitute crimes against humanity , and that the US , along with other Western governments , were complicit in these crimes
massacre of at least 500,000 alleged communists
Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66
Foreign policy of the United States