Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [210]
‘BEWARE, THE DANGER FROMTHE MOUNTAIN’
The British followed all this from a distance. The available sources suggest that Lai Teck did indeed stay hidden in Singapore for a few months before heading to Bangkok and Hong Kong. But then he disappeared from view. Conflicting reports surfaced from time to time. In June 1948 the Malayan Security Service reported that Lai Teck’s whereabouts were unknown, but that he might yet attempt to return to power.75 Chin Peng heard later that a British Special Branch officer had also set up a rendezvous with Lai Teck in Bangkok during his last days, one that Lai Teck was unable to keep. It is unclear how much the British ultimately gained from their association with Lai Teck, beyond a false sense of security followed by ‘the confusion of darkness when… the light at the top of the stairs went out’.76 Colonial intelligence had been badly damaged by the war. The Malayan Security Service had been founded only in 1939; many of its local officers were killed, or compromised by the Japanese, and its secret archive was destroyed. In 1946 it had only four European officers, as opposed to twenty-one in 1941; this climbed to thirteen by the beginning of 1948, but only one of them spoke Chinese. The head of the Security Service, John Dalley, the man responsible for arming the communists in ‘Dalforce’ in 1941, had made his reputation by policing Malay secret societies in the Perak river during the interwar years.77 For much of 1947 the principal obsession of British intelligence was not the Malayan Communist Party but the Indonesian revolution.
To read the ‘Political Intelligence Journal’ of the Malayan Security Service was to enter a strange underworld of sinister, liminal figures: spies, subversives and deviants, peddling conspiracy and preaching violence. They took the outward form of traders, medicine men and itinerants, jumping off from Indonesia into the village-cities of Singapore, Malacca and Balik Pulau – the Malay settlement at the ‘back of the island’ from colonial George Town – areas that were nurseries of radical politics. The British paid their informers on a piece rate and presumably collected their intelligence from Malays who were deeply suspicious of these influences. In the overwrought imagination of colonial officials, fleeting contacts and loose social networks became a co-ordinated web of subversion that underpinned radicals groups such as the Malay Nationalist Party and its youth wing, API. It was later a serious charge against Dalley that he became too obsessed with the Malay and Indonesian underground and neglected the more obvious danger presented by the Malayan Communist Party. But the danger seemed real enough at the time. In late 1946 the armed gangs of the Sumatran social revolution – the gagak hitam, ‘black crows’ or kerbau hitam, ‘black buffaloes’ – were reported to be making their presence felt on the peninsula. Smuggling had become more sophisticated and more political. Opium sales largely financed the Indonesian Republic’s diplomatic and clandestine operations. At one point the baggage of delegates to an inter-Asia women’s congress in India, and that of Sutan Sjahrir himself, was found to be carrying ‘black rice’. A variety of Indonesian intelligence organizations operated in Singapore, some of them the creations of self-serving fantasists. In July 1947 an Indonesian trader and a clerk were convicted of conspiracy to steal Lord Killearn’s papers.78 Official concern deepened as violence in Indonesia again escalated in the wake of the first of the Dutch ‘police actions’ in July and August of 1947. The British feared it might sweep aside the fragile Anglo-Malay entente, upon which their remaining power in Asia ultimately rested.
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