Forgotten Wars (58 page)

The events that followed, as Chin Peng later recalled them, read as a ‘sort of fiction’. In Hong Kong Chin Peng reported to the CCP representatives on the disappearance and treachery of Lai Teck. They too, it seemed, had harboured suspicions about him, and found him evasive about his past. In his encounters with representatives of the CCP, Lai Teck had not dared to use the cover story he had employed in Malaya, that he was a Comintern agent. In Hong Kong, Chin Peng was asked to lie low whilst the CCP representatives consulted their superiors in Shanghai. He kicked his heels in a cheap hotel in Nathan Road, Kowloon, reading the Chinese and English newspapers, visiting the cinemas and travelling the Star Ferry to Hong Kong Island to kill time. It was on a return trip, scanning the advertisements and notices in the
South China Morning Post
, that he stumbled on a column of the previous day’s arrivals and departures. Arriving by Cathay Pacific from Bangkok was a C. H. Chang. This sounded like ‘Chang Hong’, an alias of Lai Teck, under which Chin Peng had obtained a fake
passport for him. ‘He added a “C” in front of “H” so C.H. is Chang Hong and H. Chang is Hong Chang.’
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Chin Peng warned his CCP contact, a worker in the office of the Chinese business daily
Hwa Sung
. This was corroborated for the Chinese Communist Party by a former Kuala Lumpur Special Branch source then resident in Hong Kong. A few days later, with tremendous audacity, Lai Teck turned up at the same office to meet the CCP representatives. His story was a characteristic double bluff: he told them he had been kidnapped by the British, captured together with his car. He was first imprisoned, then banished to Thailand. He had come to Hong Kong, he said, to report this to the CCP. The CCP representatives demanded to know what his intentions were. To go back, he said, and he asked them for money and travel documents to return to Malaya, via Bangkok.
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This was reported to Chin Peng, but there was little he could do about it. The CCP’s position in Hong Kong was precarious: they would not sanction an assassination in British colonial territory. He gave Lai Teck a couple of days to get away, then followed him on a BOAC flight back to Bangkok. Once again, the Vietnamese underground began a search. After two days they discovered that Lai Teck was in a middle-range hotel. When the Vietnamese went to the address, they discovered that he had checked out. The next morning Chin Peng was told of this by a Vietnamese contact, and they concluded that he had ‘probably found some company’. But, once again, it was Lai Teck who had calmly taken the initiative. He had contacted the Thai communists and had, in fact, left his hotel for a rendezvous with them. A few days later Chin Peng had to return to Penang. Before he left, he paid a courtesy call to Li Chee Shin, the leader of the Communist Party of Thailand. He asked about Lai Teck. Li responded quietly in Mandarin, ‘He’s no more.’ Li would give no further details, and none would emerge until a meeting in Peking in 1950, when MCP members met one of the Thai men who had been sent to meet Lai Teck, and heard the story of his demise. Three Thai heavies, young and inexperienced, had been sent to the rendezvous, where they kidnapped Lai Teck. Their orders were to bring him to interrogation, but Lai Teck, a small, frail man, began to shout, and there was a struggle: ‘They strangled him for a certain amount of time and suffocated him. He died on the spot. According to the Thai[s], they just put him in a
gunny-sack, and then tossed him in the Menam River.’ Chin Peng returned to Malaya to be met with the news that he had been awarded the Order of the British Empire for his wartime services. His uncle took him to a Western restaurant in Ipoh to celebrate.
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The crisis was kept under wraps for most of 1947. The enquiry had taken a long time; only in December was a report finalized. It was filtered through the Party hierarchy so that the new leadership could gauge reactions carefully. It was the end of May 1948 before a statement by the Central Committee was published for the Party and the world at large. The document – ‘A written statement on L[ai] Teck’s case’ – correlates in its main themes, if not the details, with the account given by Chin Peng many years later: they are both, in a sense, authorized versions of the story. The ‘Lai Teck Document’ began with a short account of his rise to power in the Party in a time of ‘unprepared state of thought’ and of the steady loss of other leaders. ‘Following a well-calculated plan he posed as a sacrosanct “hero”’, it explained; ‘he had held up high the “International Signboard”’. But the document reveals little about his relationship with the British, saying only that ‘the possibility of his having conspired with the Imperialists was very great’. It emphasized instead his betrayals in wartime and his corruption. The document took particular pains to explain why his treachery had gone undiscovered for so long: ‘very few comrades’, it reported, ‘had any idea of his mode of living, for he was really a “mysterious person”’.

The ‘running dog’ policy formulated and carried out by him was characteristically ‘rightist’ and traitorous to the cause of the revolution, but that policy had always been implemented as being ‘leftist’ or in some cases smacking of ‘leftist’, so it had not been easy for comrades to discover any serious mistakes or danger in it.

Above all, the ‘Lai Teck Document’ was written to exonerate the new Party leadership from his political errors. Lai Teck was the ‘greatest culprit in the history of our Party’; but his was a case of ‘individual conspiracy with the enemy’. He had recruited no accomplices and nurtured no successors. The entire Party had to accept responsibility for the deception. There was to be no general witchhunt. There was no opportunity for one. By the time the report was published, the
MCP was four weeks away from its climactic confrontation with the British.
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The news was met by confusion and anger, a feeling, voiced in the report, that ‘our past work was done in vain, that we have to start everything all over again’.
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A middle-ranking Perak leader described the mood on the ground: ‘Some MCP veterans may be disgusted and discouraged. They will be unwilling to suffer hardships… weall feel that we are getting a raw deal as compared with the higher officials… The supreme leaders had always in the past used the slogan “Let’s Struggle Together”, but this was only in words and not in deeds.’
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Lai Teck was a convenient scapegoat for the failure of the MCP after the war to convert its open-front strategy and broad public appeal into revolutionary success. Yet the unmasking of the traitor did not mean the immediate abandonment of Lai Teck’s line. The advice of the Chinese Communist Party to Chin Peng in 1947 was that the decision to move to armed revolution could only be taken in the light of local circumstances. For the Party, the last months of 1947 were a time of reconstruction, of making closer contact with the masses, and reimposing its leadership on them. Supporters of Lai Teck, suspected ‘rightist deviationists’, were placed on probation.
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But the decisive break with the past had yet to occur, and the united-front policy had yet to run its full course.

Questions continued to be asked within the Party. The Singapore MCP open representative at the time, Chang Meng Ching, later claimed that Lai Teck had left because the British were blackmailing him to force him to expose the hidden arms caches. Defectors from the Party in the 1950s, such as vice-president of the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions, Lam Swee, challenged the Party’s account of Lai Teck’s treachery, and even suggested that Chin Peng himself was behind the Batu Caves massacre of 1942, or had at least manufactured the charge that Lai Teck was responsible, in a plot to seize control of the Party. Over the long years of insurrection this was to become a staple of British and Malaysian black propaganda against Chin Peng.
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Lai Teck’s career must be set in context of the many deceptions, covert alliances and secret understandings made and later repudiated, that proved so pivotal to the course of the war and end of empire in Asia. The revolutionary underground was a fluid world
which left few of those who moved in it uncompromised. Many MCP members had gone into business for the party or on their account with the spoils of war: the Party had invested $70,000 in a tin mine in Kampar; it also had stakes in the Lido Hotel in Singapore, the Lucky World Amusement Park in Kuala Lumpur and another $100,000 invested in other small business.
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Few were immune to the glamour of insurrection; this was why, despite all the misgivings about him, Lai Teck commanded a loyal following and was, by all accounts, such a compelling presence. In 1971 Gerald de Cruz, by then a communist apostate himself, wrote of him: ‘I am sure he had been involved with both the Japanese and the British authorities – what revolutionary worth his salt does not find himself in such situation from time to time with his “establishment” – and that these were raked up and exaggerated to justify the denunciation and later his assassination… I also recall when Rudolf Slansky was executed in Prague, he was accused of being both an American agent and an Israeli spy. Today they place flowers on his grave and say, “Sorry, comrade, it was a mistake”. Perhaps they’ll do the same with L[ai] Teck one day.’
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.

Dato Onn bin Jaafar and other Malay conservatives played skilfully on these fears in order to push the British towards a swift and definitive settlement with the Malays. As Onn wrote privately to Gent on 17 February: ‘the British must choose
now
between Malay support and cooperation or sacrificing them to political expediency’.
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Onn remained hostile to Indonesia. As he told a UMNO meeting in early April 1946, he came from an area where the Malays were mostly of Indonesian origin. He had observed at first hand the stirring in the villages, but ‘there are also’, he warned, ‘people who will sell the name of Indonesia to enrich themselves’.
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But Onn faced a rising tide of criticism. Prior to the Second General Assembly of UMNO at Alor Star in Kedah in January 1947, leaflets in Arabic script circulated in the town: ‘Dato Onn has sold the Sultans and the
rakyat
[people] like slaves… Dato Onn has become a British satellite.’ Characteristically, Onn faced down the criticism in his opening speech. Malaya, he reiterated, was not yet ready for independence. There was no Malay fitted to be a minister, or an ambassador: ‘Who was running the country immediately after the Japanese surrender? – The Chinese. We have been greatly endangered by the
Bintang Tiga
and by the Malay Nationalist Party. We do not care for those people. We must rise united to defend our birthright; the 2,500,000 Malays in Malaya must be united and once unity is achieved we will have no fear of foreigners.’ But the weeks before and after the UMNO General Assembly saw a surge in support for the Malay Nationalist Party.
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