Confronting the Colonies (8 page)

More importantly perhaps, the JIC had insufficiently developed and integrated relations with the Colonial Office. Remarkably, the latter was not even represented at intelligence's top table at the outbreak of the violence. Moreover, the committee was not explicitly responsible for overseas colonial territories and lacked a specific jurisdiction over local colonial intelligence matters. Meanwhile, the Colonial Office itself did not have what Templer called an ‘intelligence-mindedness'—hardly surprising given that they were not represented on the JIC.
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For example, in 1948 the Colonial Office Defence Department began to prepare monthly intelligence reports, and coordinated with the Foreign Office on content, yet these were considered ‘embarrassingly superficial'.
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This created something of a vacuum regarding the provision of warning and channels of its reporting, with the central intelligence machinery expecting such a function would be carried out locally and reported through traditional colonial channels.

Similarly, problems existed regarding the Political Intelligence Journals. As mentioned above, issues of presentation seriously impeded the impact of any warnings. They were, according to one exasperated official, ‘a tangled mass of unspun fibres' and anyone able to draw coherent conclusions from them deserved ‘unstinted admiration'.
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Compounding this, it took far too long for the reports to even reach London. For example, the report covering the first week of March was not received by the Colonial Office until 29 April. Even when the journal reached
London, lack of centralised integration hindered the intelligence community's role. The Political Intelligence Journals could not reach the JIC via the Colonial Office, as the latter was not yet represented on the committee. They were, however, also sent to MI5, but this did little to help matters either. Given their vast length, Sillitoe's animosity towards Dalley and his criticism of the MSS, it is unlikely that they were taken seriously. Moreover, the reports only reached the JIC(FE) indirectly. They were sent to the Governor-General (later Commissioner-General) Malcolm Macdonald in Singapore, whose deputy for colonial affairs sat on the JIC(FE).
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Even if Political Intelligence Journals did reach the JIC system, they would have arrived too late and been too dense to be of use in aiding the committee to provide strategic warnings.

Overall, structural issues and bureaucratic confusion in London compounded by local intelligence failure in Malaya prevented advance warning of the insurgency by the JIC system. Even when Colonial Office papers did reach the JIC, conclusions optimistically dismissed a communist uprising. Instead they stated that communists would work patiently and covertly and that ‘it would be unwise to paint too dark a picture' of the situation.
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On the other hand, the JIC organisation can be exonerated to an extent. Perhaps warning was impossible. There is evidence suggesting that the outbreak of violence was conducted by relatively autonomous units and therefore took even the unprepared MCP leadership by surprise.
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If it began from the bottom up, how could intelligence have been expected to warn of an MCP plot? One could argue that the chiefs of staff were guilty of retrospectively transposing state-centric frameworks of top-down organisational hierarchies onto a fluid non-state actor. Regarding insurgencies, consumers must have a realistic expectation of intelligence. That said, a more strategic warning of the mood of discontent among the population could have realistically been expected. Intelligence could have asked whether conditions were ripe for a spontaneous revolt or an autonomous campaign of violence, which had the potential to be exploited by Chin Peng.

From 1951, the JIC did begin to develop a warning capability. This came in the form of the weekly Review of the Situation Round the Soviet and Satellite Perimeter. These reviews, which eventually became the JIC's Weekly Review of Current Intelligence in the mid-1950s, examined indicators of forthcoming aggression. This important development
in the committee's peacetime role, however, came too late for the outbreak of violence in Malaya. Yet even if the JIC had produced these reports in 1948 it is unlikely that indicators of violence in Malaya would have been adequately provided. Reviews of the Soviet perimeter focused predominantly on Soviet- and Chinese-led and inspired activity, local intelligence in Malaya was weak and the reviews lacked integrated Colonial Office input until 1956. Colonial territories were initially considered as an afterthought to JIC business. Potential insurgencies slipped under the radar.

Strategic intelligence was slow to react to the severity of the threat. This was unsurprising given its reliance on flawed local intelligence and its constraints within an agenda and structure focused on other matters. Authorities initially downplayed the situation in Malaya and possessed an unintentionally optimistic tone; they often implied the conflict would be short-lived. In August 1948, for example, Brigadier Val Boucher, a JIC member representing the director of military intelligence, criticised a JIC(FE) report for being ‘unduly pessimistic'. The following year the JIC opined that ‘the Government's present campaign should be sufficient to deter new sympathisers from joining the Communist gangs'. Similarly, the Colonial Office representative on the JIC assured the committee in 1949 that the situation in Malaya was improving.
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This optimistic outlook was caused by complacency from both below and above. Intelligence received from the colony was weak and based on flawed assessment in that it possessed a tendency to justify the authorities' own performance and ongoing strategy.
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Complacency from above, however, amongst those setting the JIC agenda also figured heavily. The chiefs of staff received optimistic briefings from local authorities too, thereby reducing the need for the situation to feature on the JIC's agenda. Combined with the lack of Colonial Office input into the JIC's agenda, Malaya was neglected in a vicious cycle.

The inherent nature of colonial intelligence and security also posed challenges to accurate intelligence assessment in London. The committee did receive some warnings from Malaya alerting them to the severity of the situation, but responded dismissively. For example, the JIC received a copy of a security report from December 1948 to March
1949, which warned that ‘the present conditions may carry on for years' and that ‘the long term prospects are even less rosy'. The source, an estate manager of a rubber plantation, accused the Malayan government of being out of touch and overly optimistic. Yet the JIC secretary advised committee members to dismiss it.
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It would be easy to criticise the JIC for acting with complacency by deliberately ignoring this warning. Yet colonial intelligence was a hugely politicised process presenting a difficult problem for a detached body such as the JIC to ascertain ‘objective truth'. As the imperial historian Martin Thomas has convincingly argued, ‘at every stage of the intelligence cycle, threat assessment was inherently politicised by the dominant ideology of imperialism […] The identification of whom or what constituted a danger to the colonial state stigmatised certain individuals, political parties, tribes, religious communities, or even entire ethnic groups'. Intelligence officers and colonial administrators shared these biases, thereby reinforcing political intelligence throughout the cycle.
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The struggle for influence between competing political groups in the colony further politicised security issues. European business interests, for example, were keen to portray a deteriorating security situation so as to push for further draconian measures to be implemented. The JIC would likely have viewed this report in such a context and responded accordingly. Such local pressures made the task of the centralised intelligence assessment mechanisms in Whitehall all the more challenging and vital. Strategic intelligence must be able to step back from local fallacies or biases and use all available sources to offer a balanced assessment. When it came to the politicised world of imperialism, this was particularly tricky.

The JIC was faced with a triumvirate of challenges covering complacency, local politicisation and lack of structural integration with the Colonial Office. Therefore, it was not until the threat became sufficiently serious so as to attract Foreign Office and cabinet attention that the JIC devoted more time to it. In March 1949 the committee explicitly drew the attention of the chiefs of staff to Malaya and warned them of the ‘danger of concentrating on long term plans for Europe and the Middle East to the detriment of plans to ensure that the Communists do not gain control of … Malaya'.
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Little action was taken, however, and JIC requirements in the region remained focused on the South China Sea. As the security situation in Malaya deteriorated, the JIC again lobbied the chiefs of staff in February 1950—this time to broaden
its regional requirements to include Malaya. Captain Baker-Cresswell, representing the director of naval intelligence, argued that ‘it was considered that the “Cold War” in areas of South East Asia such as French Indo-China and Malaya was now of equal, if not greater importance, than the threat to Hong Kong'. And yet the chiefs of staff took Hong Kong very seriously indeed.
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The JIC was successful. The chiefs eventually broadened the committee's requirements accordingly from regular reports looking purely at South China and Hong Kong to a wider examination of South-East Asia, including Malaya. This was clearly a retrospective and reactive response but it allowed the committee to better monitor the situation and deliver regular warnings and updates. Nonetheless, renewed focus on Malaya was fleeting due to the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, which thereafter dominated the regional security and foreign policy agenda.

The JIC's warnings of deterioration in Malaya were distributed to the chiefs of staff and occasionally to the Foreign and Colonial Offices. Meanwhile, as Donald Mackay has written, ‘In some quarters [of Whitehall] … the realisation had finally struck home that matters in Malaya were serious, that there was a strong chance of defeat, and that it was no longer possible to treat the violence as an irritating local problem to be solved by people on the ground without discommoding those in Whitehall with their minds on higher things'.
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It would, of course, be naïve to argue that JIC assessments directly created the simultaneous and subsequent concern with Malaya across Whitehall. Firstly, JIC warnings were far outnumbered by those received by the chiefs of staff and policy practitioners directly from Malaya. Secondly, visits by ministers themselves to Malaya shaped Whitehall assumptions far more than the JIC could ever have hoped to. For example, it was not until June 1950, after James Griffiths accompanied the Secretary of State for War, John Strachey, on a visit to Malaya that the cabinet's Malaya Committee truly began to feel a sense of apprehension and despondency about the conflict.
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Thirdly, JIC warnings of the worsening situation in Malaya were generally tucked away inside broader reports on the spread of communism in the region. They failed to attract significant consumer attention. Therefore, whilst Malaya rose up government agendas, the JIC served passively to gradually build up the background knowledge of the chiefs of staff and
policy practitioners, to facilitate coordination between departments and to supplement local sources.

In terms of threat assessment, the JIC's most prominent function was bringing events in Malaya into the wider regional political and strategic context. This was of course utterly dominated by Cold War considerations. Historians of decolonisation acknowledge the importance of external pressures on British imperial policy. Ronald Hyam, for example, rightly emphasises how ‘the British empire rose, flourished, and declined in a particular set of international contexts'.
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Similarly, Lawrence Butler has written of the changing geopolitical context in which attempts to manage Britain's empire were made. Shifts in international relations during the ideological hostility of the Cold War ‘introduced a new set of global conditions to which […] the British imperial system was obliged to respond and adapt'.
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Such exigencies increased centralisation and it became the role of the metropolis, aided by the JIC, to help coordinate policy through these extraneous constraints.

Theoretically, the JIC system was well placed to apply developments in Malaya to broader political trends for an interdepartmental audience in Whitehall. Firstly, the committee could liaise with local officials and with the JIC(FE). Secondly, it brought together military, political and intelligence representatives. Thirdly, although JIC members were unable to quibble with specific details handed to them by the experts, they supposedly had the judgement and experience necessary to examine the bigger picture. JIC assessments therefore, compiled by departmental specialists and overseen by the committee, allowed consumers to be aware of broader implications when making decisions.

Percy Sillitoe was a fan. He urged the JIC to take further control over interdepartmental issues such as the spread of communism outside the Soviet orbit. Sillitoe recognised that the JIC offered ‘the most efficient way of collating all relevant material on this specific subject'. ‘The JIC machinery', according to the director-general, ‘is well fitted furst [sic] to harness all resources […] and in the last analysis to edit their [SIFE and SIME] products with the assistance of the necessary Foreign Office and other specialists available in London'. Greater JIC control was intended
to increase consideration of all intelligence sources and enhance the attention paid to overseas territories.
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In theory such an approach aided British policymaking in so far as Cold War considerations, colonial policy, foreign policy, defence planning and counterinsurgency strategy were closely intertwined. However, the ultimate utility of internationalising the insurgency wholly depended on the accuracy of threat assessments in determining the relationship between internal and external factors.