Confronting the Colonies (10 page)

Owing to a lack of Colonial Office input into the intelligence process, it was the Foreign Office and MI5 view that influenced JIC assessments. The committee argued that Russia had delegated ‘at least some measure of responsibility' to the Chinese Communist Party, which, it claimed
had overseas branches in Malaya.
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The JIC echoed Foreign Office and MI5 concerns of CCP support and their belief ‘that there is an identity of interest and purpose' between the Malayan and Chinese parties.
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Accordingly, the committee further warned that there were signs of the beginnings of direct assistance from the overseas branches of the CCP to indigenous communist parties, including in Malaya.
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Interestingly, however, an annex attached to the JIC report gives a detailed breakdown of communism in Malaya. Unlike the main section of the assessment, the Malaya discussion better reflects Colonial Office views that ‘so far as we know, the Chinese Communist Party did nothing to promote, and is doing nothing to perpetuate, the present campaign of violence in Malaya'.
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Consequently there is no reference to links (even merely at the level of moral support) between the MCP and CCP. This is a fascinating case of intelligence disconnect within a JIC report. It is likely that the Colonial Office wrote the section on Malaya and had it inserted into the JIC assessment without integrated interdepartmental analysis at the JIS level, on which the Colonial Office lacked a full-time representative. This explains why the main section of the report, drafted by the JIS, differed starkly from the annex. This is not to argue necessarily that either the Foreign Office or Colonial Office was right or wrong, but that without Colonial Office integration into the centralised assessment machine, reports could never be truly interdepartmental, coherent and consensus-based. From late 1949 onwards, after the CCP had gained power in China, JIC reports more explicitly warned of Chinese links with the MCP, including in the country-specific annexes. This illustrates more interdepartmental agreement brought about by the changed international circumstances since September 1949.
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Despite the flaws, such regionalised assessments played an important role. They helped policy practitioners coordinate Malaya-specific policies with broader Asian foreign and defence policy. Conversely, they also offered an extra layer of understanding for those responding directly to Malaya. Regarding the Chinese Civil War for example, strategic intelligence assessments argued that communist successes would increase the security threat in Malaya, as government forces would obtain less assistance from the local population. Similarly regarding Korea, the JIC assessed that ‘as a result of United Nations reverses in Korea, the moral [sic] of the indigenous Communists in Burma, Siam and Malaya will be raised considerably, and a deterioration in the situation in these countries must be expected'.
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Interestingly early enunciations of domino theory were also prevalent in strategic intelligence assessments. As early as December 1949, Malcolm Macdonald argued that if Indo-China were lost, Siam and Burma would shortly follow, and international communism would then be on the borders of Malaya.
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As fears of such a scenario mounted, officials in London viewed Indo-China as the key to South-East Asia and this was regularly reflected in JIC assessments that placed Malaya firmly in the context of Indo-China. The committee wrote that ‘the weakness of the French in Indo-China has increased the threat to Siam and Malaya', and in an explicit articulation of domino theory emphasised that ‘if Communists gain control of Indo-China, Siam and Burma will quickly fall and our chances of holding Malaya would then become slender'.
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The JIC believed that the conflict could not be treated in isolation, and that policy practitioners needed to consider regional developments in order to fully appreciate the local situation.

As the conflict progressed, fears of an impending conventional war in the region became entrenched in the agendas of the chiefs of staff—and by extension the JIC. The JIC continued to view Malayan developments in the broader regional context, but from late 1950 and throughout 1951 this was more in relation to broader hypothetical conventional warfare than in counterinsurgency terms. Fear of communist invasion caused the chiefs of staff to examine grander scale defence planning, thus diverting JIC attention away from irregular threats. Driven by the military's agenda, the role of the JIC to internationalise local security fundamentally remained—but the external developments themselves were ominously changing. For example, the JIC wrote that an enemy advance would certainly be considerably assisted by the guerrilla warfare, and that the threat of an advancing communist army would cause a ‘steady increase in the internal security problem in Malaya'.
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As early as January 1949, the chiefs of staff began to plan for a conventional attack on Malaya. They encouraged the JIC to do the same by assessing the scale of potential communist attacks on British colonies. These intelligence appreciations, which were not initially a priority for the committee, had an impressive dissemination list. They reached the chiefs of staff, the colonial secretary, and Henry Gurney, who had since replaced Gent as Malayan high commissioner. As the Cold War intensified, intelligence warned that Malaya would be in danger of an air attack at the outbreak of a potential conventional war and such fears remained
on the JIC agenda throughout the early years of the Malayan conflict.
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Issues were conceptualised within a state-centric militaristic framework. This was a regular pattern in JIC assessments of counterinsurgencies and was not broken until the JIC moved to the Cabinet Office in 1957, by which time it could broaden the scope of its reports to better include political and non-defence-specific threats.

With the Cold War intensifying, there was a tendency to exaggerate international involvement in the Malayan Emergency. Intelligence viewed the conflict predominantly through a Cold War prism and simplistically conflated imperial developments with Cold War developments. Moreover, owing initially to a lack of informants and records, analysts faced a poverty of local intelligence. With little accurate intelligence emanating from the region, JIC assessments were prone to look towards the international framework. This was obviously an important factor; however, local intelligence failure was compounded by three more central interconnected forces to help explain why the JIC adhered to the Cold War orthodoxy: cognitive closure, agenda setting, and structural and organisational factors.

Intelligence assessments were faced with increasing global complexities, a delicate interplay between internal and external factors and the lack of a counterinsurgency model to aid deductive analysis. As a result intelligence forced these ambiguities into a pre-existing, stable and structured framework—that of the Cold War—so as to reduce uncertainty. Recent research into the psychology of intelligence assessments indicates that there is often a desire for a definitive and fixed answer (even if flawed), over ambiguities and confusion. Such cognitive closure can provide succour in a complicated world.
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This persuasive argument builds on CIA veteran Richard Heuer's seminal research, which argued that ‘when evidence is lacking or ambiguous, the analyst evaluates hypotheses by applying his or her general background knowledge concerning the nature of political systems and behaviour'.
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That the threats facing Britain in the years following the Second World War were complicated and ambiguous cannot be denied, as they involved a mixture of nationalist uprisings, traditional imperial defence, external communist subversion and the threat of conventional warfare.

Similarly, it has been argued that ‘to experience anti-colonial disorder as a consequence of the Cold War was to flatter the self-image of the imperial mind'. It was therefore understandable for policy practitioners
and intelligence analysts to interpret unrest as a consequence of external subversion, ‘not as an explosion of spontaneous, and indigenous, anger'.
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Recognising the local roots of colonial rebellions would have entailed acknowledging serious grievances. This was likely to have been unacceptable to the official mind as any such recognition would have implied serious flaws in Britain's imperial model. Neither of these cognitive flaws in intelligence assessment necessarily resulted from the deliberate manipulation of evidence to support the overarching policy and strategic context: such politicisation can be subconscious and a result of cognitive closure. Interestingly a JIC(FE) report of 1950 appeared to rule out local agency altogether. It concluded that ‘owing to the importance of external factors and the impossibility of predicting developments in surrounding territories further ahead, it was not considered that an attempt to forecast the course of events in Malaya in 1951 and 1952 would be of any use'. Perhaps proximity to the colony heightened this strand in JIC(FE) thinking. The assessment was, however, very favourably received by MI5 in London.
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The Cold War mindset impacted upon the intelligence agenda and the manner in which issues were framed. Although the JIC did possess some scope to set its own agenda, intelligence assessments were predominantly commissioned by the chiefs of staff, who were gravely concerned about international communism. Accordingly, their strategic appreciations were understandably dominated by the Soviet threat.
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As an interdepartmental committee, the JIC was not expected to issue detailed reports solely on Malaya—that was the job of the Colonial Office. The JIC therefore was expected to place developments in Malaya into a broader political context: a context that was dominated by the Cold War and fear of the spread of communism, thereby creating a politicised cycle in which the dominant view was continually reinforced. To offer just a few examples, the JIC was commissioned to write reports on topics such as communist influence in the Far East in April 1949 and again a year later. The committee wrote a regular series of reports monitoring ‘The Chinese Communist Threat in the Far East and South-East Asia' throughout 1950. The answers received depended heavily on the questions asked and issues were framed in such a way that any discussion of Malaya would naturally emphasise external communism.

JIC assessments followed a similar pattern until the end of the Malayan Emergency in 1960. The committee's attention did gradually
turn elsewhere, however. The Korean War dominated the agenda in the early 1950s and as the violence in Malaya was increasingly brought under control, the JIC focused on other insurgencies, such as Cyprus. When considering Malaya in the mid-1950s, the JIC continued to place assessment within the broader context of South-East Asia as a whole and against the backgrounds of international communist intentions. The committee continued to offer brief updates of the counterinsurgency campaign, but only as part of its annual reviews of international communism. In doing so, the JIC noted in 1952 and 1953 that the government was gaining the upper hand. Demonstrating much evolution from 1948, it also acknowledged the importance of winning over the local population in Malaya.
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The committee increasingly saw Indo-China as the key to the region, fearing that if it fell to the communists then Siam might follow. Between 1952 and 1956, Malayan security was predominantly assessed in this light.
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Moreover, intelligence continued to examine Malaya in the context of a potential global war. The JIC was concerned about the impact of the security situation on the UK's ability to play its full part in the regional South-East Asian defence plan. Intelligence commented on SEATO papers, considered possible air threats to Malaya and assessed the form of a potential (if unlikely) Chinese attack.

In spite of regular output, JIC threat assessments on Malaya often lacked policy impact. Between 1948 and 1951, the JIC remained a relatively young committee and was inexperienced in its peacetime role. Although committee reports were later used as an interdepartmentally agreed foundation for policy discussions, the committee's assessments of irregular threats during the years after the Second World War were somewhat neglected. This was a result of the committee's constraint within the chiefs of staff military structure, lack of integration with the Colonial Office and confusion both amongst consumers and within the JIC itself about the committee's role.

Despite Foreign Office chairmanship, the JIC was ostensibly a military committee with wartime experience, but by 1948 was constrained by its military shackles as it sought a peacetime role. Dominance of military personnel around the intelligence top table caused the committee to be
pulled in a military direction at the expense of broader interdepartmental assessments. For example, in August 1949 the JIC was coordinating with the Foreign Office on a report covering the implications of Chinese communist successes. However, Charles Packard, the director of military intelligence, criticised the report for not being militaristic enough and for not being of enough use to military consumers such as the Joint Planning Staff (JPS) and, by extension, the chiefs of staff.
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Similarly, the next director of military intelligence, Arthur Shortt, again tried to pull the JIC in a military direction the following year. In an attempt to reduce the volume of JIC work, he argued that the JIC should not ‘undertake the preparation of reports of a political character'.
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This was a continuing theme amongst military members of the JIC.

Chairman Patrick Reilly swiftly overruled Shortt's suggestion. Illustrating tension within the committee about threat prioritisation and the nature of the JIC's peacetime role, Reilly rightly stated that ‘political considerations were tending to become more and more closely related to military affairs and, from the planning point of view, the political aspect was an important factor in dealing with a large number of current factors'.
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Reilly's comments emphasised how the Cold War had blurred traditional political and military intelligence boundaries, including regarding insurgency in Malaya. Despite laying the conceptual foundations for later reforms, the comments were met with hesitance from military representatives.