Buried in Practice
Freeport in West Papua, Indonesia - and the State Department Human Rights Report That Disappeared
What became of the US State Department’s human rights investigation into Freeport-McMoRan in West Papua, Indonesia?
Eyewitness reports of killings near Freeport-McMoRan’s Grasberg mine in West Papua, Indonesia—alleging company involvement—reached Washington. The State Department opened a human rights investigation—then the report vanished from public view.
In this second volume of Archives of a Wall Street Analyst, former Wall Street mining analyst John Wilson follows the paper trail through cables, press reporting, and more than a decade of FOIA requests and litigation—asking what the State Department found, and why the report still has not surfaced.
He widens the lens to “development aggression”: the recurring machinery by which remote extractive projects become zones of coercion, security force violence, displacement, environmental harm, and narrowed Indigenous consent. Reviewing thirty comparative case studies, Wilson shows recurring patterns of allegations, denials, and moral trade-offs repeating across borders and legal systems—revealing how social and political costs are externalized when extraction meets weak oversight and high strategic value.
Wilson also places his own story alongside the archive. After publishing a March 1996 analyst report on Freeport that touched on human rights and political risk, the FBI targeted him with surveillance, workplace interference, attempted entrapment, and intrusion into his personal and professional life. Later disclosures by FBI operatives reveal the motive and extent of the retribution.
Part narrative, part documentary archive, this volume invites readers to test the evidence – and decide what a missing report reveals about power, accountability, and who pays the price.
Note: The book comprises around 60 pages of background and summary narrative in the front, and an extensive archive-appendix in the back (from page 68) that contains a couple of background essays by myself, and supporting documents and records, including human rights and media reports, State Department cables and other documents.
The Untold Story of the FBI - DOJ
Archives of a Wall Street Analyst
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This book and archive documents the efforts of John Wilson to hold the FBI (and partnering agencies in Australia – ASIS/ASIO) to account following his work as a Wall Street mining analyst on US company Freeport-McMoRan’s activities in West Papua, Indonesia.
The book discloses in detail methods US and Australian security agencies use to undermine human rights and chill civil liberties; and Indigenous rights.
Through letters, Declarations and court documents, Wilson recounts FBI tactics to target “dissidents” that include the use of secret surveillance, cancel culture, and gas lighting – furtive activities that undermines American democracy.
Adding a twist to the tale, and background on the FBI’s secretive programs, John Wilson’s long-term girlfriend at the time was a professional environmentalist and an undercover FBI agent. It was also one of his key relationships the FBI targeted. It’s a chilling account of political retribution as dystopian as any in Kafka.
Note: The book comprises around 50 pages of background and summary narrative in the front, and an extensive archive-appendix in the back (from page 62) that contains supporting documents and records.
Books in the Archive Series
Archives of a Wall Street Analyst is a four-volume series that places official paper trails alongside a lived account of retaliation, surveillance, and obstruction. The organizing idea is to show, through documents and first-person testimony, how state agencies and powerful companies responded when serious human rights allegations were raised about Freeport-McMoRan’s Grasberg mine in West Papua—and how those responses affected both Indigenous communities abroad, and critics at home.
Volume 1 (published September 2024) focuses on the Department of Justice, which oversees the FBI. It presents notes and reflections on key aspects of this story, including the FBI’s targeting of civil society, the erosion of oversight, and broader patterns of political repression. It explores the FBI’s reprisals against me in detail, the public’s conditioned fear of authority, and Henry Kissinger’s historic ties to Freeport. It also examines the corruption of Western intelligence agencies, the tools used to suppress civil dissent, and the role of Western-backed governments in committing atrocities against Indigenous populations in West Papua and beyond—to profit from their natural resources.
Volume 2, the present volume, turns to the State Department and West Papua itself. It examines the mid-1990s human rights investigation into Freeport’s operations around Timika, the interim and final reports that followed, and subsequent efforts to obtain those records through FOIA. The focus here is on what the State Department knew, what it wrote, and why that reporting has never been released, despite sustained pressure from researchers, NGOs, and litigants. This volume also adds comparative “case reviews” about other resource company controversies to show that what happened in West Papua is part of a wider pattern, not an isolated failure.
Further archive books are planned. A third will publish the 2003 Café Fiorello covert FBI interrogation transcript and associated material, providing a detailed case study of gaslighting and psychological operations conducted through a covert FBI operation with the support of partnering agencies in Australia – indeed, across the Anglo bloc. A fourth volume will address Australian agencies and oversight bodies—Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) and others—alongside Australia’s handling of, and complicity in, the abuses in West Papua, and related resource controversies, such as the Greater Sunrise affair. Each volume is designed to stand on its own; they can be read in any order, but together they form a single archive.
Across the series, the method is consistent. Each book opens with narrative framing that sets out the context and key questions, followed by primary sources: FOIA correspondence, embassy cables, court filings, complaints to oversight bodies, human rights reports, selected media coverage, and other documents.
Now Available
