Subverting United Front Work Department operations in Australia: ASIO's institutional memory includes 70 years working with and learning from Malaysia's Special Branch to counter Communist Party China and United Front activities; that experience must be put to work now

by Ganesh Sahathevan




The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has had a long history of  learning about and working against the Communist Party Of China and its United Front Work Department.

The following excerpts from Leon Comber's Malaya's Secret Police 1945-46 : the role of the special branch in the Malayan Emergency provide some insight into that history, and expertise:
The first Australian Army intelligence officer to attend a course at the Malayan Special Branch Training School was Captain KH Roney, Directorate, Military Intelligence, Army Headquarters, Melbourne

ASIO was founded in 1949 with responsibility for Australia's internal security. It maintained from its earliest days a fraternal relationship with the Malayan Special Branch.

 ASIO officers attending courses at the Malayan Special Branch School were accommodated at the Malayan Police Officers Mess, Venning Road, Kuala Lumpur. On completion of the course, they were attached for a week's or ten days' practical training at Federal Special Branch headquarters and subsequently spent another two or three days at a Contingent (state) or Settlement Special Branch headquarters.

It is worth noting, too, that after Malayan independence in 1957 and not long after the formation of Malaysia in 1963, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Australia's external intelligence service, opened a station in Kuala Lumpur on 14 February 1964, which soon established close links with the Malaysian Special Branch.2  It was later to credit the Malaysian Special Branch as being 'the most efficient internal security service in Asia'.

China, the Communist Party Of China (CPC)  and its local operatives which include the United Front Works Department and its predecessors, both in form and in substance, has been the primary preoccupation of the SB from its inception. Working with the SB (and other lesser known but equally lethal organisations in Malaysia) ASIO and ASIS would have over the years gained much insight into the methods of the CPC.

As Comber explains in his book, Sir Gerard Templer who led the fight against the  CPC's Malaysian affiliates , had an overarching role in organising the intelligence capabilities of a number of Commonwealth countries in this region. The common heritage would have (and has in fact) ensured a deep knowledge among Australian intelligence officers of CPC operations in Malaysia, which are now becoming more obvious in Australia.

ASIO and ASIS  should therefore have an institutional memory of CPC methods which ought to have been  drawn on to subvert CPC and United Front operations in Australia.  Despite that expertise successive Australian Governments and their security advisers seem lost in their dealings with the CPC and its operatives.

Why that expertise has not been relied on needs explanation and  PM Scott Morrison and his Minister For Home Affairs Peter Dutton ought to request an urgent briefing from the head of ASIO, Mike Burgess.

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