Trial, Conviction and Release
US Ambassador Howard Jones portrayed Pope as an American "paid soldier of fortune" and expressed his regret at the involvement of an American. However, Pope was carrying about 30 incriminating documents that added to the embarrassment of the Eisenhower administration in the USA when he was captured.
Pope admitted only to flying one or two missions, but his flight log (which was among the 30 documents that he was carrying when he was captured) recorded eight and another source states that he flew a total of 12 missions. Pope "spent the early hours of Sunday, May 18, over Ambon City in eastern Indonesia, sinking a navy ship, bombing a market, and destroying a church. The official death toll was six civilians and seventeen military officers". When Pope was shot down by anti-aircraft fire, he was pursuing a ship carrying one thousand Indonesian troops. "His last bomb missed the troopship by about forty feet, sparing hundreds of lives".
After fracturing his right thigh when bailing out, Pope was held not in prison but under house arrest at the small mountain resort of Kaliurang, where his injury was given "excellent medical attention". He said he felt he was fighting international communism. An Indonesian four-man military court rejected Pope's plea that he be considered a prisoner of war. On April 29, 1960 it found him guilty of killing 17 members of Indonesia's armed forces and six civilians and sentenced him to death.
The death sentence was not carried out, and Pope remained under house arrest. In February 1962 US Attorney General Robert Kennedy paid President Sukarno a goodwill visit and pleaded for Pope's release. Sukarno also received a visit from Pope's wife, mother and sister who all tearfully pleaded for his pardon. On July 2, 1962 Pope was quietly driven to the airport and put on a US plane out of Indonesia. Sukarno himself told Pope:
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.Pope later said of himself:
I enjoyed killing Communists… They said Indonesia was a failure. But we knocked the shit out of them. We killed thousands of Communists, even though half of them probably didn't even know what Communism meant.Read more about this topic: Allen Lawrence Pope
Famous quotes containing the words conviction and/or release:
“If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I’d have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven’t even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The near touch of death may be a release into life; if only it will break the egoistic will, and release that other flow.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)