The Tiger and the Trojan Horse by Dennis Bloodworth

Author:Dennis Bloodworth
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: History
ISBN: 9789814561747
Published: 2010-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

21 THE MAN FROM THE ORGANISATION

IT WAS in March 1958 that the first undercover courier slipped up the steep staircase at 10-B Malacca Street and into the shabby little office of Lee and Lee, Advocates and Solicitors, with its job lot of secondhand chairs and desks picked up cheap in the Thieves’ Market. Lee Kuan Yew had a cubby-hole at the front, and the cutout — a Chinese Chinese from Middle Road in nondescript shirt and slacks — told him in words blurred by its hoarse air-conditioner that someone from his organisation wanted to meet him. It was very important.

Lee consented. At 10.30 on the appointed morning he walked down the road that flanked the Victoria Theatre near the Singapore River, looking for ‘someone tall, about my height, with glasses, and a Chinese newspaper under his left arm…I cannot remember the password for recognition.’ (Comrade Kian on first meeting the Plen: ‘The person would carry black-rimmed glasses in his shirt pocket, and a newspaper; he would say, “Where are you going, Mr. Long?”…’.) A slight, trim Chinese in his early thirties with the right greeting in Mandarin duly accosted him, and Lee led him to the deserted committee room above the nearby Legislative Assembly, where they could talk in private — ‘if the police were to nab us, my defence would be that the man wanted to see me as an Assemblyman.’

As a dangerous subversive and a wanted man, the Chinese seemed reassuringly authentic. It was, said Lee, ‘the way he spoke, and his furtiveness…there was a certain air of stealth and jumpiness as of a man on the run, and the pallor of his face and his hands and his skin’. They belonged to a person ‘who had not seen sunshine for a long time while in hiding; I felt I was dealing with someone genuinely underground.’ But otherwise he knew nothing of this nameless plenipotentiary from the dark side of the CPM who had emerged into the daylight to talk to him in Mandarin for more than an hour, and who appeared to understand English.

The Plen did have a working knowledge of English, for although he had been a student at the Chinese High School, he had spent one year at St. Andrew’s, where it was the medium of instruction. He was a Teochew of petit-bourgeois stock, comfortably off and with a seemingly assured future. He was also a versatile youth, and despite the bookish cast of his features his classmates remember him as a champion swimmer and a long-distance runner, as well as for his excellent scholastic record.

What Jek described as his ‘patriotic activities’ were to attract the attention of more than admiring fellow students, however. ‘Fang Chuang Pi, alias Fong Chong Pek,’ ran a notice in The Straits Times on 29 August 1951; ‘English and Chinese-speaking Teochew, age about 24 years. Height 5 ft 5 ins. Slim build. Information may be given to any police officer or by letter addressed to P.O. Box No….’. He had

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