I MET Suharto at the Second Army Seminar in 1997. At the first encounter, he struck me as a stern individual. He was courteous but unflinchingly frigid. After the meeting, I and my economist friends, dubbed the Berkeley Mafia, were asked to be special advisors to Suharto. Thereafter I began to see Suharto in a different light.

As his personal staff, he often invited us to go fishing at Pulau Monyet (Monkey Island) in the Thousand Islands off Jak