Chapter five - Agents of change (1949–52)

Summary

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.