The Malayan Emergency lasted from 1948 to 1960. During these tumultuous years, following so soon after the Japanese surrender at the end of the Second World War, the whole country was once more turned upside down and the lives of the people changed. The war against the Communist Party of Malaya's determined efforts to overthrow the Malayan government involved the whole population in one form or another. Dr Comber analyses the pivotal role of the Malayan Police's Special Branch, the government's supreme intelligence agency, in defeating the communist uprising and safeguarding the security of the country. He shows for the first time how the Special Branch was organised and how it worked in providing the security forces with political and operational intelligence. His book represents a major contribution to our understanding of the Emergency and will be of great interest to all students of Malay(si)a's recent history as well as counter-guerrilla operations. It can profitably be mined, too, to see what lessons can be learned for counterinsurgency operations in other parts of the world.

This book fills an important gap in the history and intelligence canvas of Singapore and Malaya immediately after the surrender of the Japanese in August 1945. It deals with the establishment of the domestic intelligence service known as the Malayan Security Service (MSS), which was pan-Malayan covering both Singapore and Malaya, and the colourful and controversial career of Lieutenant Colonel John Dalley, the Commander of Dalforce in the WWII battle for Singapore and the post-war Director of MSS. It also documents the little-known rivalry between MI5 in London and MSS in Singapore, which led to the demise of the MSS and Dalley’s retirement.

This book examines the full range of counterinsurgency intelligence during the Malayan Emergency. It explores the involvement of the Security Service, the Joint Intelligence Committee (Far East), the Malayan Security Service, Special Branch and wider police service, and military intelligence, to examine how British and Malayan authorities tackled the insurgent challenge posed by the Malayan Communist Party. This study assesses the nature of the intelligence apparatus prior to the declaration of emergency in 1948 and considers how officials attempted to reconstruct the intelligence structures in the Far East after the surrender of the Japanese in 1945. These plans were largely based upon the legacy of the Second World War but quickly ran into difficultly because of ill-defined remits and personality clashes. Nevertheless, officials did provide prescient warning of the existential threat posed by the Malayan Communist Party from the earliest days of British reoccupation of Malaya. Once a state of emergency had been declared, officials struggled to find the right combination of methods, strategy and management structures to eliminate the threat posed by the Communist insurgents. This book argues that the development of an effective counterinsurgency intelligence strategy involved many more organisations than just Special Branch. It was a multifaceted, dynamic effort that took far longer and was more problematic than previous accounts suggest. The Emergency remains central to counterinsurgency theory and thus this wide-ranging analysis sheds crucial light not only on the period, but on contemporary doctrine and security practices today.

No modern intervention is intended to endure indefinitely; indeed some fashion of exit is always envisioned from the outset. This commitment to an exit is normally informed by an exit strategy. Whilst strategies of closure have been scrutinised recently, not least in light of charges of defective intentions and planning, the relations between the strategies, operations and tactics of exit have not been contextualised. Focus on the local, specific and bottom-up manifestations of transitions offers significant enhances to historical, theoretical and applied understandings. This book is an introduction not just to the issues of transition, handover and withdrawal, but to exit as a package of theoretical concepts and how these have been understood, shaped and employed in historic and contemporary perspective. Drawing on a wide range of post-1945 examples derived from a variety of regions and periods, At the End of Military Intervention provides researchers and practitioners with a source book on what forms a crucial and often overlooked element of past and present interventions.

Identifying “lessons learned” is not new—the military has been doing it for decades. However, members of the worldwide intelligence community have been slow to extract wider lessons gathered from the past and apply them to contemporary challenges. Learning from the Secret Past is a collection of ten carefully selected cases from post-World War II British intelligence history. Some of the cases include the Malayan Emergency, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Northern Ireland, and the lead up to the Iraq War. Each case, accompanied by authentic documents, illuminates important lessons that today's intelligence officers and policymakers—in Britain and elsewhere—should heed. Written by former and current intelligence officers, high-ranking government officials, and scholars, the case studies in this book detail intelligence successes and failures, discuss effective structuring of the intelligence community, examine the effective use of intelligence in counterinsurgency, explore the ethical dilemmas and practical gains of interrogation, and highlight the value of human intelligence and the dangers of the politicization of intelligence. The lessons learned from this book stress the value of past experience and point the way toward running effective intelligence agencies in a democratic society. Scholars and professionals worldwide who specialize in intelligence, defense and security studies, and international relations will find this book to be extremely valuable.

"Behind Barbed Wire looks behind the façade to ask what it was really like to be moved to, and live in, a 'New Village'. Tan, who himself lived in New Villages growing up, combines archival sources and oral history to give us a rounded account . . . We need Tan's book, because up to now the outsider's view has predominated, and outsiders have their own agenda." Karl Hack, in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society This unique book revisits the moment in the Malayan Emergency when some 500,000 women, children and men were uprooted from their homes and moved into new settlements, guarded day and night by police and troops. A majority were rural Chinese: market gardeners, shopkeepers, rice farmers, tin miners and rubber tappers who had long made Malaya their home and had lived through the hardships of the Japanese Occupation. Based upon newly accessible archival materials and painstaking multilingual interviews with more than 80 informants in four New Villages, Tan Teng Phee rewrites the history of the Emergency, exposing the voices of those at the heart of this lauded ‘social experiment’. In Francis Loh’s words, these were ordinary villagers ‘caught in the crossfire between the British security forces and the Malayan Communist Party’ whose lives were turned inside-out and re-ordered completely, with daily curfews, body searches and food controls alongside the carrots and sticks of registration, (re)education, sanitation, psychological warfare and swift punishment. Highlighting the disciplinary aims of British policy, as well as the ways in which villagers resisted this discipline through ‘weapons of the weak’, this book forms a unique history from below of the Malayan Emergency, and of a resettlement programme which shaped the social and geographical landscape of Malaysia for generations to come.

Reliable information on potential security threats is not just the result of diligent intelligence work but also a product of context and culture. The volume explores the nexus between the intelligence process and strategic culture. How can and does the strategic outlook of the United States and the United Kingdom in particular, influence the intelligence gathering, assessment and dissemination process? This book contains an assessment of how political agendas and ideological outlook have significant influence on both the content and process of intelligence. It looks in particular at the premise of hearts and minds policies, culture and intelligence gathering in counterinsurgency operations; at case studies from imperial Malaya and Iran in the 1950s and at instances of intelligence failure, e.g. the case of Iraq in 2003. How was intelligence, or the lack thereof, a product of political culture and how did it play a role in the political praxis? The book shows that political agendas and the ideological outlook have a significant influence upon both the content and process of intelligence. This book was originally published as a special issue of Intelligence and National Security.