On Saturday, October 6, 1951, the British High Commissioner in Malaya Sir Henry Gurney and his wife left the steamy administrative capital of Kuala Lumpur for the relative cool of Fraser’s Hill, a mountain retreat about forty miles away. While they were passing through a narrow stretch of road on the way to the hill station, a platoon of thirty-eight communist guerrillas ambushed the car. Gurney fled the vehicle, but was mowed down by bullets as he attempted to seek cover on the side of the road. Gurney’s wife and secretary remained inside the car and miraculously escaped the ambush unharmed. Three weeks after the Gurney assassination, a convoy in the same area was also hit, this time with sixteen killed and scores injured. With the escalated raids, the guerrillas appeared formidable and terrifying. After three years of counterinsurgency warfare, the British effort to defeat the communist insurgents in its Asian colony was at its most despondent moment.

As in many of the cases we have already seen, observers began to question controversial policies, such as forced resettlement, that formed part of the British counterinsurgency repertoire. Yet over the course of the next several years the British were able to handily defeat the insurgents. The story of the British counterinsurgency “success” stands as a firm reminder that dirty war victories are usually not very clean. And as the British learned so well, setbacks tend to be dramatic while progress is usually invisible. This would become an important insight for the United States as it began to navigate its own dirty wars, especially in Vietnam.