Chris Bambery on the army’s go-to ‘counter-insurgency expert’ who died this week

Frank Kitson died on 2 January aged 97. He was a man whose service in the British army took him through every one of Britain’s post-1945 colonial wars, who became a world expert in the conduct of such wars, and was involved in a string of callous acts of officially sanctioned violence aimed at terrorising civilian populations from Malaysia to Belfast.

His first experience of such wars was in Kenya in one of the worst chapters in Britain’s imperial history. During the 1950s, the British tried to retain control of lands in Kenya stolen violently stolen from the Kikuyu by white settlers. This led to resistance by the Kikuyu.

Native Kenyans fought back in the Mau Mau uprising. Historians have documented widespread torture by British forces, including crushing testicles with pliers and the internment of up to 320,000 people in concentration camps where they endured slavery, starvation, murder, and rape with blunt objects. Meanwhile, 1.5 million Kenyans were confined to a network of detention camps and heavily patrolled villages,

Kitson was one of those who organised ‘counter-gangs,’ including captured Mau Mau who had been ‘turned.’ Looking back he wrote of one night time operation: ‘Three Africans appeared walking down a track towards us a perfect target. Unfortunately they were policemen.’

Kitson later wrote about the techniques developed in Kenya in a book entitled Gangs and Countergangs which launched his reputation as an expert whose thinking and experience would shape British and United States counter-insurgency strategy.

On New Year’s Day 1955, Frank Kitson was awarded the British Military Cross ‘in recognition of gallant and distinguished services in Kenya.’ Three years later, he gained a bar to that medal for his work in the Malaysian ‘Emergency’. 

This was a war begun by the 1945 Labour government against the wartime Communist-led resistance, which had liberated the country from Japanese occupation. The Attlee government was determined to retain colonial rule there because of the huge sums it earned there from rubber and tin, greater than that earned by Britain’s own exports.

Half a million Malaysians were forced into concentration camps through a process known as ‘villagisation,’ designed, as in the Boer War, to prevent the guerrillas gaining food. As in Kenya, torture was commonly used and pictures emerged of British soldiers celebrating killing civilians.

Kitson went on to serve in Bahrain, Cyprus and Aden and would, naturally, proceed to Northern Ireland, in September 1970, where Michael Jackson, a future Chief of General Staff and the man in charge of British troops during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said that Kitson ‘very much set the tone for the operational style in Belfast.’ Jackson was in command of the Paratroop Regiment at the time of Bloody Sunday in Derry on 31 January 1972, when they shot 14 unarmed civilian demonstrators dead. The news footage shows Jackson cheering his men on. This was an operation sanctioned a Cabinet level in London.

Kitson was on leave at the time of Bloody Sunday, but on his return berated the Paras commander, Derek Wilfordc, for not having killed more! On 15 February 1972, Frank Kitson was knighted by the Queen for ‘gallant and distinguished’ service in Northern Ireland.

Just prior to his arrival in Belfast, Kitson had published his best-known book, Low Intensity Operations. 

Kitson understood intelligence was key to crushing growing Republican guerrilla war and, accordingly, set up a ‘Military Reaction Force,’ whose members dressed to fit in with the civilian population of West Belfast. It ran a door-to-door laundry service in order to obtain forensic and other evidence. That ended when the IRA ambushed the laundry van, killing the soldier driving it. The MRF had been involved in shooting Nationalist youth dead, posing as Loyalist gunmen.

In Low Intensity Operations, Kitson argued in favour of terrorising civilian communities charged with harbouring insurgents. On 11 August 1971, two days after the introduction of internment without trial had seen Nationalist areas of Northern Ireland react with what was virtually insurrection, ten people were murdered by Paratroopers in Ballymurphy, West Belfast.

Joan Connolly, 40 years old, the mother of eight children, was shot at 7:15 p.m. while she searched the area for her children. She stopped to help another victim of the Paras, Noel Phillips, who was lying on the ground. She was shot as she came to his aid. The first bullet put her down on the ground. Witnesses reported after that she got up again only for a second shot to penetrate her head. She had half of her skull missing, while bullets had also penetrated her shoulder, hand and thigh.

Among those involved in these killings was he Support Company of the 1st Parachute Regiment (1 Para), commanded by Brigadier Frank Kitson, who is alleged to have selected his toughest men for this unit.

After the disbandment of the Military Reaction Force, Kitson was then involved in creating a new organisation, 14 Security and Intelligence Company, which was involved in colluding with Loyalist murder gangs in the killing of Nationalist civilians to further terrorise their community.

In 1973, a Catholic joiner named Patrick Heenan was driving his workmates to a construction site, when a British-army-issue hand grenade was thrown into their minibus. Heenan threw himself onto the grenade, to shield his colleagues. The murder was put down to Loyalist paramilitaries – but the man found guilty of it, Albert Baker, was a former soldier who claimed links to British intelligence.

In 2015, lawyers representing Heenan’s widow began civil proceedings against the British Ministry of Defence, naming Kitson as a respondent in the case. They said that they were seeking to ‘obtain truth and accountability for our clients as to the role of the British army and Frank Kitson in the counterinsurgency operation in the north of Ireland during the early part of the conflict, and the use of loyalist paramilitary gangs to contain the republican-nationalist threat through terror, manipulation of the rule of law, infiltration and subversion all core to the Kitson military doctrine’. 

It was not the only legal proceedings pertaining to Kitson. A group of men who were specially selected during internment in 1971, ‘Hooded Men,’ who allege they were tortured, commenced legal proceedings against him earlier this year.

Kitson was not inventing the wheel when he wrote his books on counter-insurgency. The British had used the mass ‘resettlement’ of women, children and elderly males during the Boer War to ensure Boer commandos could not access food. In Ireland during the War of Independence they had used paramilitary police units, the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries. These were recruited from ex-British servicemen who specialised in mass reprisals on civilians. Republicans were executed and internment without trial was used on a mass scale.

Many of those paramilitary police then went to Palestine to serve in the British police there and were involved in repressing the Arab Revolt of 1936. Orde Wingate was a British army officer sent there and a fervent Zionist, as well as being clinically insane. He organised ‘night squads,’ recruited from the Zionist Haganah militia (the origin of today’s Israeli Defence Force). Wingate developed the methods of attack on Palestinian villages, used with great effect by the IDF in 1948. The ‘night squads’ would throw grenades into a sleeping village forcing villagers to flee in the opposite direction where machine gun nests had been set up in order to mow them down – sometimes one road would be kept open so villagers could flee leaving the land free for Zionist settlers to move in.

In British-controlled Iraq the future head of the Second World War Bomber Command, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, used air power to crush a revolt there, including using chemical weapons in the form of poison gas.

The point I am making is that Kitson and others could draw on all this, including having different laws on the shelf ready to be used. The victorious Allies could also study counter-insurgency techniques used by the Nazis and Japanese against wartime resistance to occupation.

The Americans studied the lessons of Britain’s supposed success in Malaya and applied them in Vietnam. Britain did not send troops there but did provide intelligence, transport, and trained US forces at the army’s jungle warfare school in Borneo. No doubt Kitson was involved.

When it came to the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq the Americans believed, wrongly, British expertise from Northern Ireland would be invaluable. General David Petraeus who was commander of the United States Central Command and Coalition Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, viewed Kitson as a counter-insurgency guru. Accordingly, when Petraeus in 2006 was planning the US military ‘surge’ in Iraq to crush a mounting Sunni insurgency there, he visited Kitson for guidance and advice. The US repeated this ‘surge’ operation in Afghanistan in 2009, hoping to prop up its puppet government there and to defeat the Taliban.

Both operations failed. Petraeus was appointed as Director of the CIA by President Barack Obama and held that post between 2011 and 2012. He is, as I write, urging Israel to continue its current assault on the Gaza strip until Hamas is annihilated and to occupy it permanently. 

In November 2019, Petraeus publicly defended Kitson by attacking the type of legal action Mrs. Heenan had initiated over the killing of her husband, arguing that this development was ‘as much of a threat to Britain’s fighting capacity as would be a failure to meet NATO budgetary targets, and it risks putting the special relationship under increasing strain … The extent to which those who served decades ago in Northern Ireland, including the highly distinguished soldier-scholar General Sir Frank Kitson, remain exposed to legal risk is striking and appalling.’

While Kitson went to his grave lauded and loaded with honours what did he achieve? In both Kenya and Malaysia the British did not succeed by repression. They made a deal with the local elites to create independent states on economic and strategic terms of great benefit to Britain.

In Ireland the backlash against Bloody Sunday was huge across Ireland – the British embassy in Dublin was burnt down amidst a four day general strike across the Irish Republic, in Britain and globally. The then Tory government grasped matters were spiralling out of control and pulled back from Kitson’s methods, which were seen to act as a recruitment officer for the IRA. Eventually, a negotiated settlement was reached, involving the Republicans.

In Iraq the British occupation of Basra and the south was a debacle from day one. The British had too few troops and lacked equipment leaving Shia militias in control. Eventually they were bailed out by a furious US and beat an ignominious retreat. Afghanistan was no better.

Kitson must have been well aware of all this and of the fact that when he was born in 1926 the sun never set on the British Empire. When he died the empire was long dead.

The Chair of the Bloody Sunday Trust, Tony Doherty, whose father Patrick was one of 14 people murdered by members of the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment said of Kitson’s death:

‘There will be no sadness at the passing of Frank Kitson in Derry, Ballymurphy or in any other community where he plied his evil trade, leaving a trail of devastation behind.’

Kitson was, in truth, a failed boot boy of Empire.