Confronting the Colonies (5 page)

JIC product reflects two characteristics that are central to the British ‘way' in intelligence: all-source assessment and consensus. Intelligence assessments draw on all available sources in order to provide consumers with comprehensive and coordinated information, from which informed policy decisions can be made. This includes open source material, diplomatic reporting and secret intelligence acquired from the British collecting agencies, or via the Americans with whom London has a long history of sharing information. There is no tradition of dissenting minority judgements within the British system. Indeed, the quest for consensus (as well as the committee system on which it operates) has evolved out of the Whitehall culture of government and its emphasis on collective decision-making. As such, the desire to seek an agreed view has its origins in the creation of the centralised cabinet system in 1916.
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JIC output rests on the foundation that those formulating policy should be provided with one universally-agreed assessment. This differs to the American system of National Intelligence Estimates, which allow dissent via a system of footnotes. At the same time, however, the JIC is (and has always been) a group of individuals representing a range of departments with competing interests and agendas. Divergences had to be overcome within the intelligence assessment process outlined above. As the committee's official historian, Michael Goodman, has put it: ‘the organisation of British intelligence is a microcosm of the political system within which it operates'.
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Consequently, intra-committee relations and relations between the JIC and other political, intelligence or military actors are crucial. They significantly impacted upon threat assessment and understandings of the broader international framework within which insurgencies broke out.

Operating at the apex of the British intelligence system, the JIC's assessments are often strategic in nature. Indeed, the British government's Strategic Defence and Security Review in 2010 emphasised a key role of intelligence as ‘providing strategic insight and understanding to inform policy and decision-making'.
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Much of the committee's output relating to insurgencies dealt with high-level assessments of violence within the regional context which potentially affected British strategic policy. It is important to note that its intelligence assessments therefore did not centre on local details and updates on daily battles. These were, for obvious reasons, conducted by tactical units on the ground close to the action.

By contrast, the JIC operates at the strategic level which is often determined by ministerial objectives. Linking the operational level with the wider context, strategic intelligence considers how trends in violence impact upon broader regional and international factors. This was crucial because unrest not only threatened British interests in one particular territory, but also impacted upon broader and more serious issues relating to the management of imperial decline, the projection of British power overseas and the containment of communism. Conducting strategic intelligence assessments, the JIC therefore aimed not only to ascertain the intentions or capabilities of an adversary (be it a state or a non-state actor) and to consider how a situation may unravel, but also to determine a situation's strategic implications within a broader policy or international framework.

Over time, the JIC also increased its current intelligence output. By 2004, the committee's ‘main function' as outlined by Lord Butler was to provide assessments on issues of both ‘immediate and long-term importance to national interests'.
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The JIC should not therefore be perceived solely as some cumbersome long-term body unable to respond to crises and short-term problems. Like the longer-term assessments, current intelligence output also evolved to cover insurgencies. What the committee added, however, whether looking at short-term or long-term insurgency threats, was an extra layer of strategic intelligence assessment. This was not detailed in terms of tactical updates but considered all available sources, complemented local or departmental-specific intelligence and considered the broader implications of a specific threat. It was ultimately designed to aid policymaking.

Naturally the distribution of intelligence assessments varies depending on the subject of the report. However, recipients generally include relevant military officials and civil servants such as the policy staffs who brief the most senior decision-makers. This serves an important function. As Sir David Omand, himself a former intelligence and security coordinator and JIC member, points out, a ‘strategic appreciation of what is going on, and why, is essential for the formulation of policy advice, and having available up-to-date all source assessment is important as the background against which policy options can be put to ministers, senior officials or service commanders, or be incorporated into briefs written for meetings and negotiations'. Consumers therefore have long included defence planners, the chiefs of staff, the cabinet secretary, ministers' private secretaries,
officials and policy staffs in relevant government departments and certain cabinet committees dealing with the issues at hand. Regarding the ministers themselves, busy senior cabinet members did not eagerly await JIC papers as is perhaps the perception perpetuated by the media. In practice, relevant ministers received ‘a mixed diet by their Private Offices, who [flagged] up any JIC assessments on subjects of interest', together with a range of other material.
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Counterinsurgency is a strategic matter and therefore requires intelligence at the very top level of government. This, however, was no easy task. Irregular warfare, with its inherent fluidity, speed and unpredictability, presents unique challenges to strategic intelligence assessment. Accordingly, the intelligence community has, over a lengthy period, had to adapt to understand and counter these difficult threats. Perhaps surprisingly given Britain's much proclaimed experience in this form of warfare, it is only very recently that the role of strategic intelligence actors in countering insurgent threats has been considered. As a result, academics and the policy community remain unaware of the important dimension of intelligence in centralised responses to insurgency and political violence. Moreover, they have not recognised the complex challenges which insurgencies pose to strategic intelligence assessment; nor have they absorbed the crucial lessons generated from the British experience during the end of empire.

It is widely acknowledged by scholars and practitioners alike that defeating an insurgency requires a successful combination of military and political action, underpinned by effective intelligence. In the decades following the Second World War, this not only applied at the tactical level, but also centrally in Whitehall. Strategic intelligence played, and continues to play, a number of important roles. It informs decision makers in Whitehall when considering local requests for funds, equipment and the authorisation of counter measures. More broadly, strategic intelligence inputs into wider civilian and military planning on important issues with ramifications beyond the specific theatre of conflict, such as global or regional troop deployment. Finally, it is valuable in informing broader foreign and defence policy which needs to take counter-insurgency progress into account. Insurgencies cross departmental jurisdictions and strategic considerations in Whitehall sought to balance local developments against the broader trends which dominated British policy throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Such trends
included firstly managing imperial decline; secondly, the thorny issue of Britain's global status; thirdly, the international communist threat; and fourthly, severe cuts in British defence spending.

MALAYA, 1948–1951

The Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960 is often regarded as an example of successful counterinsurgency strategy from which lessons for later conflicts could be learnt. It remains an important case study regarding the evolution of British counterinsurgency, the response from Whitehall to guerrilla warfare and the nascent role of strategic intelligence. High Commissioner Edward Gent declared emergency regulations in June 1948. In doing so, Gent was responding to unrest and violence led by the Malayan Communist Party's (MCP) armed wing, the Malayan Races Liberation Army.

In 1947, the MCP had just under 12,000 members, the overwhelming majority of whom were ethnically Chinese. Indeed, around thirty-eight per cent of the population as a whole was of Chinese ethnicity, with the majority having been born in China itself. Fifty per cent of Malaya's population was ethnically Malay and predominantly Muslim, whilst the remainder were Indian. Given the make-up of the MCP, it is hardly surprising that, as Calder Walton has noted, British officials saw the words ‘Chinese' and ‘communism' as synonymous.
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This was a dangerous conceptualisation, however, as it underplayed local grievances, internal agency and a more nuanced sociological profile of the rural Chinese labourers. Some joined the MCP for ideological reasons, but
others had economic motives or saw it as an organisation through which they could realise their frustrated ambitions for a better life. A further particularly important motivation underlying recruitment was that local people saw themselves as ‘refugees' from the heavy-handed government. Meanwhile, cultural bonds of loyalty between the Chinese should not have been underestimated by the security forces, for they could not be easily severed by the government's labelling of people as communist or criminal.
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Relatively autonomous units began an unauthorised campaign of robbery and extortion in 1948 which culminated in the murder of three European planters on 16 June. The public were outraged and forced Gent to swiftly impose a ‘State of Emergency'. The insurgency quickly escalated and the number of guerrillas rose from roughly 2,000 in 1948 to nearly 8,000 by the end of 1951. This surge was matched by an increase in British forces, which nearly doubled from ten infantry battalions to nineteen by October 1950. Numbers of police also proliferated in an attempt to quell the violence. In the early years of the insurgency, however, the security situation deteriorated dramatically. In 1951 alone, over 1,000 insurgents, 500 members of the security forces and 500 civilians were killed.
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It was not until the appointment of the talented Harold Briggs as the director of anti-bandit operations in the spring of 1950 that the government launched an effective coordinated counterinsurgency strategy. The Briggs Plan included measures to improve intelligence and aimed to increase cooperation between the military and civil administration. It began slowly but started to see results by late 1951. In the autumn of that year, Henry Gurney, who had replaced Gent as high commissioner, was assassinated. The event was recorded incredibly bluntly by Guy Liddell, deputy director-general of MI5: ‘Gurney has been assassinated in Malaya which will complicate matters very considerably there, although I believe that he has not been regarded as a particularly successful Governor'.
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The appointment of the now-legendary ‘Tiger of Malaya', Gerald Templer, as combined high commissioner and director of operations, revitalised the situation in Malaya from 1952. He built on the foundations laid by Briggs, improved intelligence, enhanced civil-military cooperation and is often associated with the kind of approach now referred to as ‘hearts and minds'—although he was by no means afraid
to use the stick as well as the carrot. By 1953, the insurgents were on the defensive and Chin Peng, the MCP leader, was forced to retreat into Thailand. From then on fewer civilians and members of the security forces were killed, whilst the government's strategy proved increasingly effective. The numbers of guerrillas hiding in the dense jungle began to drop significantly in the mid-1950s, with more and more surrendering or being eliminated. Malaya achieved independence in 1957. This milestone naturally further increased the surrender rate and the emergency was formally ended in 1960.
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Despite the war lasting a long twelve years, this case study focuses exclusively on the opening four years of the Malayan conflict, in which ministerial responses, policies and strategies were shaped. According to a former National Security Adviser, Sir Peter Ricketts, the early stages of a conflict require more policy decisions by ministers than after violence settles down into a medium- or long-term pattern. Therefore, strategic intelligence becomes particularly useful—although clearly some tension between operational and strategic demands will surface.
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Furthermore, the end of 1951 saw the darkest period in the entire emergency and by the start of 1952 the conflict was slowly beginning to turn in Britain's favour.

Following the demands and horrors of the Second World War, Clement Attlee's Labour government inherited a country on the verge of bankruptcy. It was militarily overstretched, declining as a global power with worldwide commitments and faced voluminous crises at home and abroad. The twin contexts of imperial decline and the Cold War loomed large. In terms of a broader colonial context, 1948 was a significant year. It witnessed a crisis of imperial rule, with uprisings, strikes and riots across the British Empire, from Burma to Accra. This created a more active and centralised response to colonial security as a whole. In March 1948, for example, the governor of the Gold Coast frantically wired MI5 and SIS in London. He desperately wanted an intelligence officer to come out to the colony to investigate his ‘troubles with the negroes' whom he thought were involved in a communist plot. MI5 disabused the governor's mind,
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but the episode reveals a new trend in imperial management.

Regarding strategic policy, it was Attlee's overall intention to transform the empire to a Commonwealth and to aid the route to self-governance. This, however, was subject to practical considerations dictated by short term and Cold War developments, thus decreasing overall cohesion.
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Aiding self-governance broadly applied to Malaya, yet strategy was certainly prey to the exigencies of the Cold War.