Empire of Secrets by Calder Walton

Author:Calder Walton [Calder Walton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

Thus, it seems that records in Malaya were destroyed without even being referred to senior officers.

One of the reasons MI5 carefully ‘managed’ – manipulated – intelligence as the new state of Malaya was born was because, as in India, many of its leading politicians were themselves previous targets of MI5 and Malayan Special Branch investigations. Both agencies are known to have maintained files on the Tunku himself, though at the time of writing his MI5 file has not been declassified. Nevertheless, an indication of the kind of information MI5 probably held on the Tunku is revealed by its multi-volume file on Anthony Brooke, the nephew of the last of the ‘White Rajahs’ to rule Sarawak (British Borneo), Vyner Brooke, who in 1946 ceded the territory to Britain. The public explanation for the cession, which brought an end to ‘Brooke rule’ in Sarawak, which had essentially been run as a private dynasty, steeped in eccentric tradition, was the growing communist threat in the principality, but conveniently for Vyner, it was made in exchange for a sizeable pension. Vyner was by any measure an eccentric, who described himself in Who’s Who as having ‘led several expeditions into the far interior of the country to punish head-hunters’, and as understanding ‘the management of natives’, while his wife, Sylvia, Lady Brooke, described herself as the ‘Queen of the headhunters’ – a reference to the tradition practised by the Ibans of Sarawak of decapitating their victims. After Vyner’s surprising cession, Anthony Brooke, as Heir Apparent, set himself up as a leading ‘anti-cessionist’ politician in the territory. Though he was extremely anglicised, having been educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, when it came to what he felt was ‘his’ dynasty in Sarawak, he was a diehard nationalist.59

Matters grew more complicated when, in December 1949, the British Governor of Sarawak, Duncan Stewart, was assassinated. It did not take long for suspicion to fall on Anthony Brooke. This sparked MI5’s interest in him, and its wish to ‘get wind of any other plots he and his associates might be hatching’. It opened a file on Brooke in January 1950, and began to scrutinise his activities in London, the base of his government-in-exile. MI5’s interception of Brooke’s mail, carried out by means of a HOW, was so effective that in October 1950 it was even able to tell the Colonial Office when and where he lost his wallet. Despite MI5’s suspicions, Brooke was not in fact involved in Stewart’s assassination, which was carried out by a lone ‘anti-cessionist’. Stewart was stabbed during a trip to Sibu, while he was inspecting the guard of honour of the Sarawak Constabulary, by a young Malay opposed to the cession of Sarawak to Britain, and died soon thereafter. Even after the nature of his death was clear, however, MI5 maintained that while Brooke may not have been directly responsible for the murder, he was still ‘indirectly responsible’ for it as the head of the anti-cessionist struggle. Although MI5 started off by seeing Brooke as

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