It transpired that he had been a British agent

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 160. The postwar conditions in Malaysia.

The Malay Chinese were hardworking and entrepreneurial, including the 600,000 so-called squatters among their number. That was largely why the Malays resented their community, whose businessmen towkays dominated Kuala Lumpur and other towns. Yet the Chinese community was very complex and fractured, not least into supporters of the Communists and the Kuomintang and by membership of rival societies, while there were those who still yearned for China and others who saw their future in Malaya. The Chinese squatters had fled the murderous racial violence of the Japanese to eke out a living cultivating small plots of land etched from densely forested hillsides with no formal legal title. Officials claimed they were damaging valuable stocks of timber, while planters resented the relative independence such plots gave to people they wanted as a low-paid workforce on rubber plantations. Both labour and planters organized for confrontation, with Communist-infiltrated labour unions calling for strikes and the Incorporated Society of Planters demanding dismissals, evictions, floggings and the like. In 1947, some 700,000 working days were lost in 300 major strikes, which sent ripples far beyond the peninsula. In 1948 the US imported 371,000 tons of rubber and 155,000 tons of tin, worth some $170 million at a time when the sterling area owed $1,800 million. The bonanza gave the labour unions greatly increased leverage and there was a superabundance of combustible materials before the Malayan Communist Party decided to strike a match, without any known direction or interference from Moscow.

Chin Peng had become Communist secretary-general in 1947 after the Party’s much respected leader, an Annamite migrant called Lai Teck, had fallen under a cloud of suspicion. Lai Teck’s dogged advocacy of moderation began to be read by his comrades in the sinister retrospective light of how he had survived arrest by the Japanese unscathed in 1941, or why he alone had not attended a September 1942 conference of Party members that was wiped out in a Japanese ambush. Sensing that the noose was tightening, Lai Teck fled to Singapore, taking with him the bulk of Party funds. It transpired that he had been a British agent, inherited by Singapore Special Branch after his cover had been blown while spying for the French in Indochina. His former comrades subsequently assassinated him in Bangkok. Apart from Peng, other Force 136 veterans included Ah ‘Shorty’ Kuk and Lau Yew, an experienced jungle fighter who had led the Malay contingent to London’s VJ parade. The only Muslim Malay veteran of Force 136 was Che Dat bin Abdullah, always known as Abdullah CD, who would command Communist operations in Pehang, Malaya’s largest state. The British owed most of these men wartime pensions.