"I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or Japan ever were... our terrible enemy, America". Powell's suspicion of the anti-British Empire demeanour of the U.S. Government's foreign policy continued for the remainder of the war and into his subsequent post-war political career. He cut out and retained an article from the New Statesman magazine published on 13 November 1943 in which the American writer and diplomat Clare Boothe Luce said in a speech that Indian independence from the British Empire would mean that the "USA will really have won the greatest war in the world for democracy". After the Axis defeat at the Second Battle of El Alamein, Powell's attention increasingly moved to the Far East theatre, and he wanted to go there to take part in the campaign against the Japanese Imperial Army because: "the war in Europe was won now", and he wanted to see the Union Flag back in Singapore before, Powell feared, the Americans beat the British Empire to it and secured an imperial domination of their own over the region. He had at this time an ambition to be assigned to the Chindits units operating in Burma, and secured an interview with their Commander Orde Wingate to this end while the latter was on a temporary stop-over in Cairo, but Powell's duties and rank precluded the assignment. Having declined two posts carrying the rank of full colonel (in Algiers and Cairo, which would have left him in the now moribund North African theatre "indefinitely"), and despite expecting to have to accept a reduction in rank to major in order to get the transfer, he secured a posting to the British Imperial Indian Army in Delhi as a lieutenant-colonel in military intelligence in August 1943. Within a few days of arriving in India, Powell bought as many books as he could about India and read them avidly. On one occasion, he wrote to his parents in a letter "I soaked up India like a sponge soaks up water." Powell was appointed Secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee for India and Louis Mountbatten's South East Asia Command, involved in planning an amphibious offensive against Akyab, an island off the coast of Burma. Orde Wingate, also involved in planning that operation, had taken such a dislike to Powell that he asked a colleague to restrain him if he were tempted to "beat his brains