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150 FIGHTING THE ELECTRONIC WAR
the sets to give out a stronger signal. This gave the opportunity
for sigint to achieve a direction-finding fix on the main guerrilla
bases. Bombers from the RAF and the Royal Australian Air
Force were standing by, and lightning raids were carried out on
the deemed location of the signals. Avro Lincoln bombers
dropped thousands of tons of bombs into the dense jungle at
likely guerrilla locations. Their pilots were always impressed by
the resilience of the jungle: their largest bombs vanished into
the triple-canopied green foliage below them, and from the
aircraft little impact was visible. It is not known how successful
these operations were, but Ching Peng, the most important
prize, certainly eluded them.4
In January 1952, Sir Gerald Templer arrived as the new High
Commissioner in Malaya. Templer possessed the authority and
charisma necessary to create a unified government machine and
to implement an effective counter-insurgency strategy. Although
famed for his emphasis on 'hearts and minds', he also sorted out
intelligence, creating a coherent structure in which the army, the
police and the civil authorities were forced to share intelligence.
All this was done with his customary fiery language - he was
quite incapable of uttering a sentence without a cussword in it.5
Despite Templer's forceful direction, intelligence did not
improve overnight. An important intelligence issue that was
never quite resolved was the question of who was actually
behind the insurgency. The Colonial Office and the Special
Branch officers of the Malayan Police preferred to interpret the
Emergency as a wicked plot initiated by Stalin or else Mao,
while the British diplomats tended to see it more as a local anticolonial
uprising. During the mid-1950s GCHQ began to intercept
what it believed to be wireless traffic between the MCP
guerrilla leadership and the Chinese Communist Party in Peking.
The Special Branch presented this intelligence to senior British
officials in Kuala Lumpur with some delight as evidence of its
theory of external direction, but only in a summarised form.
Diplomats in Kuala Lumpur were sceptical, and asked to see
the full transcripts of the transmissions. A major altercation