San Flaviano was built by Cammell Laird at their Birkenhead shipyard on the River Mersey, launched on June 12, 1956, and completed that September. She was a steamship, driven by twin turbines producing a combined 8,250 shaft horsepower through a single propeller. Her owner was the Eagle Oil and Shipping Company, a British subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell, and she was part of a substantial fleet renewal -- the company took delivery of at least sixteen new tankers between 1950 and 1960. San Flaviano had a sister ship built by Cammell Laird the same year. Registered in London with official number 187459, she was barely two years old when she arrived at Balikpapan to discharge her cargo. A modern vessel, well-crewed, doing routine work in a port that had been handling oil shipments for decades. Nothing about the assignment suggested danger.

The B-26 Invader that destroyed San Flaviano was one of several aircraft the CIA had supplied to support the Permesta rebellion against President Sukarno's Indonesian government. The pilot, William H. Beale, was a former U.S. Army Air Forces lieutenant colonel employed by Civil Air Transport, a Taiwan-based airline that served as a CIA front organization. His co-pilot was Colonel Muharto of the Permesta movement's insurgent air force, but the airplane, its bombs, and Beale himself had come through CIA channels. The agency's strategy was blunt: attack commercial shipping to drive foreign merchant vessels away from Indonesian waters, weakening the economy and destabilizing Sukarno. San Flaviano was not collateral damage. She was the target. Shell's tanker fleet servicing Balikpapan represented exactly the kind of foreign commercial presence the CIA wanted to frighten away -- and sinking one of their ships was calculated to do precisely that.

The plan worked. Royal Dutch Shell immediately suspended its tanker service to Balikpapan and began evacuating shore-based wives and families to Singapore. Most of San Flaviano's crew were sent to Singapore as well, traveling on two oil tankers belonging to Anglo-Saxon Petroleum, another Shell subsidiary. The first twenty-six crew members left on the same day as the attack, aboard a vessel that had itself narrowly escaped the same air raid. Another twenty-four followed a few days later. Only the master, Captain Jack Bright, and his senior officers remained in Balikpapan. The port that had survived Japanese occupation, Allied bombardment, and years of postwar reconstruction was being abandoned -- not because of war, but because of a covert operation run out of Washington that no government was willing to acknowledge publicly.

In June 1958, both the Indonesian and British governments publicly attributed the attack to Indonesian rebels. This was a lie, and both governments knew it. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd had for months supported American policy to aid the Permesta rebellion. On May 6, 1958 -- more than a week after the CIA sank San Flaviano -- Lloyd secretly assured U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that Britain still backed the effort. On May 18, Indonesian forces shot down a different Permesta B-26 and captured its CIA pilot, Allen Pope, exposing the American role in the insurgency. Yet even after Pope's capture made the CIA connection undeniable, both Indonesia and Britain maintained the fiction that the aircraft that destroyed San Flaviano had been flown by rebels. A British-flagged ship, sunk by an American pilot, covered up by a British government that had quietly endorsed the very operation that killed her. The crew of San Flaviano -- who had four minutes to save their lives and managed it -- were never given a public accounting of why their ship was on the bottom of Balikpapan harbour.