Tom Atkinson, who has died following an aneurism aged 84, was for a decade the Alastair Campbell of Indonesia, writing all the international speeches of the country's founding President Sukarno. This occurred because, in October 1945, Tom landed in what was then the Netherlands East Indies with his RAF unit. Its nominal objective was to help bring back prisoners of war and internees, though Tom thought the real purpose was to hold the ring until the Dutch could re-establish their regime. Two days after the Japanese surrender, the colony's independence had been declared under Sukarno.
Tom and his friends wanted no part in working with the Dutch. So, with the complicity of their adjutant, they set up a pro-Indonesian group within the RAF. Rations were traded for typewriters and a duplicator, which produced the Indonesian Information bulletin. This, in turn, was sent out in handwritten envelopes and flown to Singapore by sympathetic aircrew. One item concerned still detained Indonesians who had worked as slave labour on Japan's Burma-Thailand railway. The Labour MP Harold Davies read the story and raised the issue in the Commons; the result was the men's repatriation.
Back in London in 1946, Tom used his savings to continue publishing Indonesian Information. Then a former RAF friend from the Netherlands East Indies days, Peter Humphries, turned up with £80 from the Indonesian government department of information. When this ran out, the Indonesian representative in Europe, Dr Subandrio (obituary September 10 2004), stepped in. When I arrived in London in 1950, I found all three - ambassador Subandrio, information officer Atkinson and administrative officer Humphries - ensconced in the impressive Grosvenor Square embassy.
Two years later, Tom was recalled to Jakarta to serve as Sukarno's speechwriter; one of his speeches, delivered to the UN general assembly, got a standing ovation. Initially, Sukarno was satisfied to be a spokesman for the non-aligned bloc of states, but the two men were drifting apart by the late 1950s. By the early 1960s, Sukarno was attacking "British imperialism".
Sukarno listened less and less to his speechwriter's warnings that he was overreaching himself. Indeed, Tom resisted attending one international conference in 1961, claiming he had "nothing to contribute". Overwork brought on one collapse that year - he was repatriated but recalled - and another in 1962, when he returned to Britain for good, along with his wife Rene, who had been working in the information ministry.
In 1965 Indonesia's botched leftwing coup was followed by a bloody counter-coup led by the rightwing General Suharto. The Atkinsons witnessed the horrors from afar as the killings of hundreds of thousands of people ensued. In 1968, an enfeebled Sukarno was replaced by Suharto.
Despite a cut-glass accent, Tom was a policeman's son from Cockfield, a Durham mining village. By his early teens, he was a Young Communist; in 1936, aged 14, he left school and made his way to Spain to enlist in the international brigade. Told to "go home to your mother", he worked as a grocer's assistant
Then, in 1941, he joined the RAF, volunteering for the servicing commandos, whose job was setting up airfields behind the frontline. In December 1944, his unit, SC3210, together with 4,000 other men and 200 WAAFs, sailed on a Dutch transport from Liverpool, where he met his future wife and lifelong love. With the Japanese surrender in August 1945, his unit was deployed in the retaking of Malaya.
After 1962, the Atkinsons ran a northwest Scotland hotel, spent 10 years on a small west Wales farm and returned to Scotland to found the Luath Press, which published Tom's many guides to his beloved west and north of Scotland. He also wrote Napier's History of Herbal Healing: Ancient and Modern (2004) - partly in solidarity with his herbalist daughters - and edited Spectacles, Testicles, Fags and Matches, memoirs of the servicing commandos.
Out of the blue in 1995, Tom and Rene were invited to the 50th anniversary celebrations of Indonesian independence. After some soul-searching, they accepted; they were dismayed by the militarism but delighted to see old friends. Last year, a stroke impaired his vision but did not deter him from starting his autobiography. He is survived by Rene and his daughters, Dee and Chanchal.
· Thomas Wilfred Atkinson, writer and publisher, born August 30 1922; died June 26 2007