Jakarta , October 1965. After a failed coup attempt, the Indonesian army and its allies killed, tortured and imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Indonesians they suspected to be communists, many of them of Chinese descent.  But almost a year before that, in December 1964, the British Foreign Office had already written in an internal memo: "A premature PKI [Communist Party of Indonesia] coup may be the most helpful solution for the West – provided the coup failed.” Today, some historians see the memo as evidence of a broader Cold War strategy. "Provoke the PKI into taking action against the army – or create the impression that it has – then blame the PKI and use that as a pretext to crush them", says Geoffrey B. Robinson, a historian and expert on Western involvement in the Indonesian mass killings. What happened in 1965 On the night of September 30, 1965, a group calling itself the "September 30 Movement" kidnapped and killed six senior Indonesian generals.…