Dead or Alive

Among the battle-seasoned veterans who marched down Piccadilly in London's 1945 Victory Day Parade was a flap-eared Chinese lad who wore the Order of the British Empire. No one who noticed slim, sickly Chin Peng that day could have guessed that in a few years he would be responsible for 7,000 Commonwealth casualties, including 4,000 dead and missing.

A Communist long before World War II, Chin Peng earned his O.B.E. honestly. British Intelligence Officer Lieut. Colonel F. Spencer Chapman, who spent 3 1/2 years dodging the Japanese in Malayan jungles, called him "Britain's most trusted guerrilla representative." Malayan-born Chin, who speaks fluent English, Malay and several Chinese dialects, was on the receiving end of secret British submarine landings and air drops in occupied Malaya. He fought the Japanese bravely and shrewdly, but always with Communist ends.

After London's Victory Parade, Chin went visiting among Chinese and South Asian Communists, soon picked up the new "imperialist" line on his old World War II allies. When the secretary general of the Malayan Communist Party ran out with the party's funds in 1947, Chin stepped into the party leadership. The next year he began a reign of terror to drive the British out of Malaya and set up a Communist state. Soldiers and civilians, men, women & children fell to the bullets of his tight, 5,000-man gang. Chin's tactics were modeled on his guerrilla experience. His arms were mostly British weapons air-dropped during the war and cached in jungle hiding places.

The Communist war in Malaya has been deeply embarrassing to the British. So has Chin Peng. They quietly withdrew his O.B.E. in 1948, but for years did not name him as the leader of the Communists. The advantage was Chin's: his terror gained from being secret and anonymous.

Last week Britain's dynamic General Sir Gerald Templer, new High Commissioner for Malaya, upped the price on the heads of 26 of Malaya's Communist guerrilla leaders. But for 31-year-old Chin Peng, believed hiding in the Pahang jungles, Templer offered the highest reward. He would pay, he said, $42,000 for Chin's dead body, or $83,500 for Chin alive. A Singapore wag pointed out that $83,500 was no more than the first prize in the Malayan Chinese Association Lottery. It is also exactly what Chin's operations cost the British in Malaya each day.

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