[2] During the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies, Simatupang rented a house with Sitorus and Hutapea in the Tanah Tinggi district of Batavia.
[1] He notes that other Batak youth called them De Drie Musketiers, that they were often together attending lectures by people such as Sutan Sjahrir and collecting books about independence movements in other countries.
[1] In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Hutapea emerged as a close ally of Aidit as the party rebuilt its organization which was still in shambles after the 1948 Madiun Affair.
Among the new generation of communists who came to Jakarta in 1949 after the old guard was imprisoned, Lukman and Sudisman arrived, followed shortly after by Njoto and Hutapea from East Java.
In 1951 police made several raids of houses of Communists and other leftists in East Java, which Hutapea had called a "politics of demoralization" being waged against them by the government.
[4] These prisoners were interned in a concentration camp in Kediri, where they complained about poor quality food and no access to medicine or reading materials.
[7] The Dutch communist party newspaper De Waarheid claimed that Hutapea himself was instrumental in organizing the prisoners into various sports and education committees, and to campaign for better treatment.
In a 1960 article in Bintang Merah, the party's magazine of theory, he condemned revisionists in the Second International who had proposed a non-revolutionary road to power.