My father, Sukarno, the first elected president of Indonesia, was put under house arrest in March 1967 a few days after I was born. He was 67. In the months before, there had been a bloodbath in the country in which he lost many trusted friends and allies. The year before, he had sent my mother, who was pregnant with me, to Japan, her homeland, advising her to return to Indonesia when the situation improved.

It never did. Three years later, in 1970, I saw my father for the first time, on his deathbed. My mother and I had not been allowed to return to the country and we had been living in France. My father died a few hours after our plane from Paris landed. Thanks to the despotic rule of the second president – General Suharto – I was not able to see my father alive, although my mother had tried repeatedly to enter Indonesia.

Declassified documents reveal how in 1965 a shadowy dirty tricks arm of the Foreign Office incited anti-communist massacres that left hundreds of thousands dead

In early 1965 Ed Wynne, an official from the Foreign Office in London in his late 40s, arrived at the door of a two-storey villa set in the discreet calm of a genteel housing estate in colonial Singapore.

But Wynne was no ordinary official. A specialist from the Foreign Office’s cold war propaganda arm, the Information Research Department (IRD), he had been assigned to lead a small team. A junior official, four local people and two “IRD ladies”, seconded to the unit from London, would join him.