Leon Comber knows how Special Branch works, knows what happened during the Emergency, what went right and what went wrong. He knows because he was there from the beginning and because he has studied, collected, collated and assessed his material for a large part of his life.

This is a profile of what has been the most successful intelligence agency in Southeast Asia for almost sixty years. For those used nowadays in Britain and America to the subordination of intelligence to political purposes, it all seems rather old-fashioned; a view of intelligence as it was and as it was intended to be. Piece the evidence together. If you don't know, don't pretend that you do. Let the professionals get on with their job and don't tell them what to do or how to do it.

Conventional wisdom now on the Malayan ‘Emergency’—an equally conventional expression for a largely communist insurrection that lasted for twelve years—is that intelligence was the key that locked counterinsurgency in place. Or, more precisely, intelligence was what eventually turned a largely unknown and alien force into numbers, names, locations and capabilities of a recognisable and credible enemy order-of-battle. Before and without that, the army would struggle and sweat all over the country in the hope of generating their own intelligence, the police would offer themselves in their unarmed vehicles as targets in a shooting gallery, and civilians, mostly Chinese, would suffer by far the heaviest casualties.

To begin with, in 1948, post-war intelligence in the shape of the Malayan Security Service was undoubtedly looking the wrong way and had little idea of an impending Malayan–Chinese insurrection. Hardly surprising, suggests Dr Comber, when they were fifty per cent under strength, and only a dozen or so British police officers were able to carry on a simple conversation in Chinese. For the next year or so it was an open question whether the police or the army were in charge of counterinsurgency. Intelligence, which was not always shared, quite often just disappeared and was seldom of immediate operational use. Not until 1950 did the late, great General Briggs produce his master plan in which army, police and civil affairs were totally integrated and in which intelligence began to be recognised as being of supreme importance.