Chapter seven - The Special Branch and the Briggs Plan

Summary

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.