At around 7:15 a.m. on Friday, 1 October 1965, Lieutenant Colonel Untung, a battalion commander in President Sukarno's Tjakrabirawa palace guard, issued a startling proclamation over Radio Republik Indonesia. A hitherto unknown “September 30th Movement”, he declared, had saved the head of state from a CIA-backed “Council of Generals” which was plotting to overthrow the government. What Untung did not disclose was that three or four hours earlier Tjakrabirawa troops had murdered the Army Commander, Lieutenant General Achmad Yani, and two other prominent generals in their homes and had kidnapped and murdered, or were about to murder, three more generals. The Defence Minister, General A.H. Nasution, had narrowly escaped assassination; his five-year-old daughter had been mortally wounded, a young lieutenant seized and murdered. By late that afternoon, Major General Soeharto, the commander of the Army Strategic Reserve (Kostrad), had marshalled a counter force, won over a battalion of September 30th troops guarding key locations in central Jakarta and put a second battalion to flight. A botched and brutal strike against army leaders known for their hostility to the large Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) had failed. And although there remained a dangerous standoff in Central Java, where many units had come out in favour of the September 30th Movement, the power balance in Jakarta had changed irrevocably.

On the following Monday, a day of strong emotion and high drama in Indonesia, the army recovered the bodies of the six generals and the lieutenant from a disused well known as the Crocodile Hole. The corpses were bloated and blackened, in most cases barely recognizable. Eleven days later, Soeharto gave a report on recent developments to leaders of the National Front, a left-leaning body Sukarno had established to mobilize political parties and other groups behind government policies. “We have found the bodies of the generals,” he said at one point, in what appears to have been an informal exchange with front members. “But I am also a general and many of you don't know me.” He then gestured towards K.P.H. Haryasudirja Sasraningrat, a thirty-nine-year-old Javanese aristocrat who was Minister for Water Resources in Sukarno's cabinet. “If you have any questions about me,” he continued, “well, Mr Haryasudirja can answer you.”