This chapter will turn the spotlight on the strategies devised by General Briggs, Director of Operations (1950–51), to defeat the communists that were incorporated in the eponymous Briggs Plan. It will also review the various directives issued by General Briggs under the Briggs Plan that affected the Special Branch. With the implementation of the Briggs Plan, or to give it its full name, the ‘Federation Plan for the Elimination of the Communist Organisation and Armed Forces in Malaya’, the scene was set to enter a new phase that marked the beginning of the end of the Emergency and the defeat of the communist uprising. The essence of the Briggs Plan was a combined offensive involving the police, the army and the civil administration, working closely together in State and Settlement War Executive Committees, to plan the measures to be taken to destroy the Communist Party of Malaya and its underground guerrilla army, the Malayan National Liberation Army. The Federal War Council in Kuala Lumpur, chaired by Briggs, provided overall policy.

This chapter examines, too, Special Branch involvement in the Briggs’ resettlement plan, involving the removal of some half a million Chinese squatters into New Villages to sever their contact with the communist guerrillas. Chin Peng was to admit subsequently in his autobiography that the Briggs’ resettlement plan was the communists’ Achilles Heel, as it isolated the guerrillas from the squatters, who were their main sources of food and intelligence. Moreover, the sheer necessity of having to obtain food in order to survive in the jungle forced Chin Peng to give instructions for all large-scale terrorist attacks to be scaled back and for the guerrillas to break up into smaller groups in search of food. General Briggs regarded psychological warfare as an extension of intelligence and the functions of the Emergency Information Services (EIS) that he caused to be formed in September 1950 will be discussed.

The appointments in early 1952 of General Sir Gerald Templer as High Commissioner/Director of Operations and Colonel Arthur Young as Commissioner of Police after General Briggs left Malaya represented a distinct pivotal point in the twelve-year long campaign against the CPM/MNLA. This chapter assesses the restructuring of the police and the further development and refinement of the Special Branch and intelligence that took place during Templer's and Young's time. The secondment of JP (Jack) Morton, a senior MI5 officer who was head of Security Intelligence Far East, Singapore, as the Malayan Director of Intelligence, will also be considered. This was a critical period for the Special Branch as the Briggs Plan was implemented; thus the results of the Plan will be examined too.

General Templer arrived in Kuala Lumpur on 7 February 1952, accompanied by the newly appointed Deputy High Commissioner, Donald (later Sir Donald) Charles MacGillvray, who was transferred from the West Indies where he had been Colonial Secretary. It was the first time that a Deputy High Commissioner had been appointed and it was announced that MacGillvray would handle the ‘routine’ administration of the country, leaving General Templer to concentrate on major policy matters and ‘the personal direction of measures to defeat the Communist bandits [sic]’.

Referring to General Templer, Oliver Lyttelton, Secretary of State for the Colonies, emphasised that his wide knowledge and experience of intelligence would be of great use in his assuming the appointment. Following Lyttelton's visit to Malaya a few months earlier, he had already come to the conclusion that the success of the campaign against armed communism would depend more than anything else on the appointment of a ‘supremo’ and the improvement of intelligence provided by the Special Branch.

This chapter provides a second case study of a threat posed by the Malayan communists during the Emergency and the response by the Special Branch. Cross-border terrorism is not new, despite the emphasis on this since the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the US on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. This chapter focuses on the early Malayan–Thai cross-border communist terrorist movements that formed an integral part of the Malayan Emergency in the period 1948–60. In particular, it analyses the efforts made by the Malayan Special Branch to obtain intelligence about the CPM/MNLA in southern Thailand and bring about a closer co-operation between the Malayan and Thai security forces and their Special Branches. The measures taken by the Malayan and Thai governments to mount joint counterinsurgency operations against the CPM/MNLA on the Malayan–Thai frontier and in southern Thailand will also be discussed. It is worth noting that today the same border region also poses a security problem as it has become the centre of a militant Islamic movement in southern Thailand.

This case study is also important as it represents the first time that the Malayan Special Branch operated outside the borders of Malaya and, similarly, the first time that it had established, as will be described, a joint regional Malayan–Thai Special Branch office in Songkhla, southern Thailand. It was essential for the successful prosecution of the war against the Malayan communists for the Malayan security forces to harass and attack them in the bases they were endeavouring to set up in southern Thailand just across the frontier from Malaya, where they intended to reorganise, consolidate their strength, and await a more favourable opportunity to resume operations in Malaya.

From 1949 onwards, the British government sent several senior officials, a police mission, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), and a Cabinet minister to Malaya to assess and report on the situation on the ground. It was becoming increasingly clear to the government that the communist insurgency could only be defeated by an improvement in the higher direction of the campaign and the re-thinking of the strategy to be followed. This chapter seeks to review the above visits and the impact they had on the Special Branch and the intelligence war. As noted at the end of Chapter 3, reform of the Special Branch was badly needed and it fell to these ‘agents of further change’ to suggest what should be done. In particular, the lack of Chinese-speaking expatriate officers in the Special Branch and the civil administration received special attention.

One of the first senior officers to visit Singapore and Malaya from the Colonial Office after the declaration of Emergency was Colonel WC Johnson, Police Advisor to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. He arrived in Singapore in September 1949. Before being appointed to his Colonial Office post in 1948, Johnson had been one of His Majesty's Inspectors of Constabulary in Britain. He was responsible for reviewing the organisation and performance of the various British colonial police forces, especially the work of the Special Branch. The appointment, which was new one, was made when it became apparent to the British authorities that the Comintern was attempting to stir up ‘disaffection and disturbances in the colonial dependencies of Western “imperialism”’.

It is likely that Johnson's visit resulted from a memo that Ernest Bevan, the British Foreign Secretary, sent to the British Prime Minister in the autumn of 1948 indicating that as ‘our colonial territories are likely to be the principal objectives of communist attack…we should have the best possible intelligence about communist activity’. General Hollis, the Principal Staff Officer to the Ministry of Defence, supported Bevan's submission to the Prime Minister.

Planning for the military administration of Malaya had been carried out in London as early as 1943 by the War Office and the Colonial Office. After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, units of the British Military Administration of Malaya landed in Singapore with the occupying British forces in September 1945. The British Military Administration's main intelligence organisation was the Malayan Security Service. It was responsible for the provision of political and security intelligence, and operated on a pan-Malayan basis, covering both Malaya and Singapore under a Director MSS based in Singapore.

This chapter examines the functions of the Malayan Security Service from September 1945 until it was wound up and handed over to the Malayan and Singapore Special Branches in August 1948. It provides an account, too, of the unsettled security situation that prevailed in Singapore and Malaya at the end of the war, when the MSS returned as part of the British Military Administration. Although the MSS was separate from the BMA Civil Affairs Police and reported directly to the higher echelons of the government in both territories, it liaised closely with the BMA Civil Affairs Police commanding officers in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.

Short describes the MSS as ‘a sort of super intelligence organisation’ that was ‘supernumerary to the police and in particular to the CID’. Aslie and Ibrahim refer to it in their study of the history and role of the Malayan police as the ‘Malayan Secret Service’.

Both these definitions are not far from the truth, but its official charter listed its functions as follows:

1. (a) To collect and collate information on subversive organisations and personalities in Malaya and Singapore.

2. (b) To advise, so far as they [sic] are able, the two Governments [Malaya and Singapore] as to the extent to which Internal Security is threatened by the activities of such an organisation [sic].

3. (c) To keep the two Governments informed of the trends of public opinion which affect, or are likely to affect the Security of Malaya.

4. (d) To maintain a Central Registry of Aliens.

5. (e) To maintain a close liaison with other Security Intelligence Organisations, and the Defence Security Officer [MI5].

This concluding chapter falls into two distinct parts. The first section analyses the experiences of the Special Branch as Britain prepared for the transfer of power to an independent Malayan government in 1957. Special attention was paid to the role the Special Branch was to play in an independent Malaya. As independence approached, and with it the concomitant improvement in the security situation, the Malayanisation of the public service, including the Special Branch, became one of the main platforms of the Malayan National Alliance, the party in power, consisting of the United Malays National Organisation, the Malayan Chinese Association, and the Malayan Indian Congress. In preparation for the envisaged changes, the recruitment of expatriates was wound down and questions about the long-term functions of the Special Branch as a regional training hub were raised. Throughout this period (1956–58), both the British and the independent government continued to put down the remaining insurgents, although by now they constituted remnants rather than a major challenge. This chapter also looks at the last major counterinsurgency operation of the Emergency in which the Special Branch played a significant part, code-named Operation Ginger, that was launched in central Perak in February 1958 and lasted until April 1959.

The second part of this conclusion reflects on the key factors that characterised the evolution of the Special Branch and its successful response to the Malayan Emergency. It is interesting to note that as the current situation in Iraq's internal affairs increasingly spins out of control, a growing number of references have been made to the failed American intervention in Vietnam and the successful British and Malayan interventions during the First Malayan Insurgency. The most recent reference at the time of completing this study was made by the Governor-General of Australia, Major General Michael Jeffery, who commented that the difficulties in countering ‘the predictable insurgency’ that followed the fall of Baghdad in March 2003 ‘should encourage us all to revisit the appropriate lessons from the Malayan and Vietnam campaigns’. In his address to a Chief of Army conference dinner in Canberra on 22 September 2005, General Jeffery said that HUMINT and large-numbers of well-trained troops and police were essential ingredients for success in fighting an insurgency.

In this chapter, the methods used by the Special Branch in obtaining intelligence will be discussed, together with the system used to evaluate and grade information. A description will be provided, too, of the CPM's/MNLA's hierarchical structure and organisation. This chapter will also examine how intelligence collected in the Malayan region, including Special Branch intelligence, fitted in with the overall British intelligence picture. The role of SIFE, the combined MI5/MI6 intelligence centre for the Far East, based in the sprawling Singapore offices of the British Commissioner-General for South East Asia will be looked at, as well as SIFE's relationship with the British Joint Intelligence Committee (Far East).

Throughout the Emergency, the Special Branch depended heavily on what is referred to in the intelligence community as HUMINT, or human intelligence, rather than technical intelligence. Although the Special Branch was successful in planting agents in the Min Yuen, in detention camps and New Villages, and penetrating the communist courier system, it did not meet with the same success in planting agents in the ranks of the CPM and its military arm, the MNLA, in the jungle. The CTs were extremely suspicious of outsiders. Rather, the Special Branch was able to construct de novo a comprehensive picture of the CPM's/MNLA's structure and organisation from information obtained from the interrogation of captured and surrendered guerrillas, as well as the careful examination and analysis of captured communist documents. Captured and surrendered CTs were an unrivalled and unique source of intelligence, as they were able to provide information about the inner workings of the CPM/MNLA that was not available from any other source in the intelligence war.

The watershed years for the reorganisation, restructuring and training of the Malayan Police and its Special Branch may well be said to have been between 1950 and 1954. The overall structure of the Special Branch that finally emerged after 1954 was, in fact, to remain unchanged, except for minor variations, until the end of the Emergency in 1960. During this time, several important figures emerged on the Malayan scene, and the recommendations they made concerning the development of the police, and the Special Branch in particular, were examined in the previous chapter. This chapter seeks to analyse the important part played by Sir William Jenkin and identify his achievements in reorganising and strengthening the Special Branch during his relatively short stay of one-and-a-half years in Malaya before he resigned. It will examine, too, the attention he paid to coastal and border security, his codification of the work of the Special Branch, and the joint police–military operational intelligence rooms that he established.

Jenkin had a distinguished career in the Indian Police Special Branch and the highly regarded Indian Intelligence Bureau in Simla before coming to Malaya and he was the first trained professional intelligence officer to take over the Malayan Special Branch. He arrived in Kuala Lumpur to take up his appointment as ‘Adviser of the Special Branch/CID’ on 22 June 1950. At this stage, the Special Branch was still subsumed in to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). At the end of the year, his appointment was redesignated as Director of Intelligence to facilitate his work in advising and assisting in the reorganisation of the Special Branch/CID. He was the first officer to hold the appointment of Director of Intelligence in Malaya.

Jenkin quickly realised the vital importance of strengthening the Special Branch by increasing the intake of Chinese officers, a matter that had been recommended several times in the past, but with little being done about it. He proposed that an additional 215 Chinese probationary inspectors should be appointed to the Special Branch as soon as possible and argued that this was absolutely essential if the Special Branch was to carry out effectively its function as the government's main intelligence agency and provide the military with operational intelligence. He reasoned that if more Chinese personnel were employed in the Special Branch, it would be easier to obtain intelligence.

The Malayan Emergency was a name given by the British colonial government to the uprising of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) which lasted from 1948 to 1960. The objective of the CPM was to establish a Communist People's Democratic Republic of Malaya. In all but name, it was a War remarkable for the fiercely-fought counterinsurgency operations fought in the Malayan jungle between the government security forces and the CPM's guerrilla army, the Malayan National Liberation Army. The jungle fighting was waged concurrently with the political struggle for the hearts and minds of the Malayan people. Coming so soon after the end of the Second World War, the Emergency had wide-reaching effects and shook the country to its very foundations. Throughout the campaign, the Malayan Police played a vital part and, indeed, paid heavily for it as the police suffered more casualties (killed and wounded) than any of the other security forces.

The intelligence branch of the Malayan Police, the Special Branch, was recognised by the government as its supreme intelligence organisation. It was tasked with providing the government with political and security intelligence and made responsible, too, for providing the army with operational intelligence on which counterinsurgency operations could be mounted.

This is the story of the critical part played by the Special Branch in waging the intelligence war against the Communist Party of Malaya, which led to its defeat in July 1960 and the withdrawal of the remnants of its greatly-shattered forces into southern Thailand.

Leon Comber knows how Special Branch works, knows what happened during the Emergency, what went right and what went wrong. He knows because he was there from the beginning and because he has studied, collected, collated and assessed his material for a large part of his life.

This is a profile of what has been the most successful intelligence agency in Southeast Asia for almost sixty years. For those used nowadays in Britain and America to the subordination of intelligence to political purposes, it all seems rather old-fashioned; a view of intelligence as it was and as it was intended to be. Piece the evidence together. If you don't know, don't pretend that you do. Let the professionals get on with their job and don't tell them what to do or how to do it.

Conventional wisdom now on the Malayan ‘Emergency’—an equally conventional expression for a largely communist insurrection that lasted for twelve years—is that intelligence was the key that locked counterinsurgency in place. Or, more precisely, intelligence was what eventually turned a largely unknown and alien force into numbers, names, locations and capabilities of a recognisable and credible enemy order-of-battle. Before and without that, the army would struggle and sweat all over the country in the hope of generating their own intelligence, the police would offer themselves in their unarmed vehicles as targets in a shooting gallery, and civilians, mostly Chinese, would suffer by far the heaviest casualties.

To begin with, in 1948, post-war intelligence in the shape of the Malayan Security Service was undoubtedly looking the wrong way and had little idea of an impending Malayan–Chinese insurrection. Hardly surprising, suggests Dr Comber, when they were fifty per cent under strength, and only a dozen or so British police officers were able to carry on a simple conversation in Chinese. For the next year or so it was an open question whether the police or the army were in charge of counterinsurgency. Intelligence, which was not always shared, quite often just disappeared and was seldom of immediate operational use. Not until 1950 did the late, great General Briggs produce his master plan in which army, police and civil affairs were totally integrated and in which intelligence began to be recognised as being of supreme importance.

It is a quarter of a century ago that Japanese armed forces left Southeast Asia, yet even now our knowledge about the occupation years can be likened to a jigsaw puzzle in which far too many pieces are still missing. Happily, the number of researchers devoting themselves to the study of wartime Southeast Asia is increasing. More than that, many if not most of them are better trained than the handful of scholars who preceded them. Thus, though there are entire countries about which we know as yet lamentably little, others, or parts of others at least, have emerged into ever-clearer perspective. This is particularly true of what might be called “macro-political” studies, which focus on the centres of political and administrative power, if not also on the largest, or dominant, population groups. Far less is known about regional and local developments beyond the capital cities, about smaller ethnic groups and, at least equally important, about racial minorities. It is surely remarkable that no monograph on the Chinese in wartime Southeast Asia has yet appeared, and that in spite of the highly complex relationships between Nanyang Chinese and Japanese.

The more fortunate, then, that we now have before us the first detailed study by a Western scholar of the second largest alien Asian minority in Southeast Asia, the Indians. It most ably supplements and complements K. K. Ghosh's The Indian National Army: Second Front of the Indian Independence Movement, published in India in 1969. Indeed, Dr Lebra's major concern is not with the Indian communities in Malaya, Burma and Thailand as such. Rather, it is with a peculiarly fascinating and turbulent chapter in modern Indian history—a history that happened for the greater part to take place in Southeast Asia (some of it of course also in Japan and one agonizing moment even in India proper). And though several prominent Indian residents in the region played a far from negligible part in the events of the 1940s, which also involved tens of thousands of their local compatriots, the real leadership lay with others.