Forget Ian Flemming’s James Bond. Forget John Le Care’s Tinkle Tailor Soldier Spy. They are but stories and great imaginations of the author’s creative minds.
Read Calder Walton’s Empire of Secrets - British Intelligence, the cold War and the twilight of Empire. This book was written with the declassification in 2012 of British Intelligence Services’s materials. Empire of Secret covers intelligence work in the vast British colonies across the globe, which of course include Malaya.
Below is an extract from the book’s review.
Empire of Secrets is, as Calder Walton himself writes, "the first book devoted to British intelligence during the twilight of empire that has been based on declassified intelligence reports". "The full story can never perhaps be known," he quotes Sir David Petrie, head of MI5 during the second world war, "but if it could be, it could perhaps claim acceptance as truth mainly on the grounds that it seems stranger than fiction.
The winner of the 2013 Longman-History Today Book Prize is the gripping and largely untold story of the role of the intelligence services in Britain’s retreat from empire.
Against the background of the Cold War, and the looming spectre of Soviet-sponsored subversion in Britain’s dwindling colonial possessions, the imperial intelligence service MI5 played a crucial but top secret role in passing power to newly independent national states across the globe.
Mining recently declassified intelligence records, Calder Walton reveals this ‘missing link’ in Britain’s post-war history. He sheds new light on everything from violent counter-insurgencies fought by British forces in the jungles of Malaya and Kenya, to urban warfare campaigns conducted in Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula.
Drawing on a wealth of previously classified documents, as well as hitherto overlooked personal papers, this is also the first book to draw on records from the Foreign Office’s secret archive at Hanslope Park, which contains some of the darkest and most shameful secrets from the last days of Britain’s empire.
Truth be told as it really was. Awe at the activities of M15 and Malaya Special Branch. Snigger at the misinterpretation, inept coordination and poor analysis from British Intelligence organisations, particularly during the Malayan Emergency 1948 -1960. I strongly recommend this excellent book to anybody who wants to know how British Intelligence setups impacted in their areas of influence and areas of operations.
Happy reading.
Allen Lai
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