Frank Kitson - Death Of An International Terrorist
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the British state was involved in as many as fifty colonial counter-insurgency campaigns in multiple countries across the world. In these countries they confronted and sought to defeat various popular national liberation movements, including those in Palestine, Malaysia, Cyprus, Oman, Aden (now part of modern day Yemen) and Kenya.
It was in Kenya that Frank Kitson first came to prominence, earning his dubious reputation as ‘a counter-insurgency expert’.
During the 1950s, the British attempted to retain control of lands in Kenya that they had violently stolen from the native population in the late 19th century.
Those Kenyans, led by Jomo Kenyatta, fought back during the Mau Mau rebellion, with Britain reacting to this uprising by interning up to 320,000 natives in concentration camps where they endured slavery, starvation and murder. Another 1.5 million Kenyans were confined to a network of detention camps and heavily patrolled villages. In addition to this, historians document widespread torture tactics being used by British forces against the people of Kenya as a whole.
British soldiers detain Kenyans suspected of being Mau Mau members. (Karoibangi, Kenya, 1954)
Kitson later wrote about the techniques that he and others developed in Kenya in a book titled “Gangs and Counter-gangs”. This book launched Kitson’s very questionable reputation as a counter-insurgency expert whose theories (including the use of ‘counter-gangs’) would shape both British and United States military strategy for decades to come.
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 ‘Malayan Emergency’. The citation Kitson received at the time stated “For exceptional skill and leadership as a Company Commander during jungle operations. By his devotion to duty he attained the virtual elimination of two communist party branches in a difficult area.”
The British approach in Malaya (modern day Malaysia) was certainly not within the law, involved high levels of force and led to horrific, widespread human rights abuses. Britain’s brutal war in Malaya, in which Kitson was a key player, was primarily waged so that the British government and British corporations could continue to plunder the country’s natural rubber resources.
More than 500,000 Malayans were forced into concentration camps through a process known as ‘villagisation’.
A British soldier holds the heads of two decapitated communist guerrilla fighters killed fighting during the ‘Malayan Emergency’.
It was in Malaya too that Britain became the first country in history to use herbicides and defoliants as a military weapon. The poisonous concoction was used to destroy food crops, bushes and trees to deprive the guerrillas of both food and cover, playing a role in Britain's food denial campaign during the 1950s. The chemical mixture was virtually identical to the ‘Agent Orange’ concoction which the US used widely later on in Vietnam.
Writing about that campaign, Kitson said that he sought to reverse Mao Zedong’s ‘fish and water’ strategy, as well as refining the lessons he learned previously from his own experiences in Kenya against the Mau Mau.
Kitson described the relationship between the British Army and guerillas as like that between a fisherman and fish, “If a fish has got to be destroyed it can be attacked directly by rod or net... But if rod and net cannot succeed by themselves it may be necessary to do something to the water.”
In theory, he said, this could include “polluting the water” by recruiting informers and agents from among the local population. In practice, he settled for actually poisoning the water, the land, the crops and the people.
Having spent two decades in Britain’s various colonies refining old, and developing new techniques of terror, torture and murder, Kitson eventually arrived in Ireland in 1970. Kitson quickly became the prime architect of the clandestine war being waged jointly by the British government and the unionist regime against nationalists and republicans in the Six Counties.
Kitson and his colleagues were responsible for -
Spreading black propaganda designed to undermine nationalists and republicans.
Deploying psychological warfare techniques, involving the torture of internees, from August 1971 onwards.
Establishing the Military Reaction Force (MRF), a clandestine British Army unit which carried out many ‘unattributable’ assassinations of nationalists and republicans on the streets of Belfast and other areas in the Six Counties.
Infiltrating unionist and loyalist organisations to form and control death squads (counter-gangs) in order to instigate and increase sectarian strife.
Members of the ‘Military Reaction Force’ counter-gang in Ireland in the early 1970s. Notice two members of the British Parachute Regiment standing in the background.
Kitson’s time in the Six Counties also coincided with two very high-profile British Army atrocities, the Ballymurphy Massacre, which occurred over three days in August 1971, and Bloody Sunday, which took place in Derry on the 30th of January 30, 1972.
It was no coincidence that the unit involved in both massacres was the Parachute Regiment, and that ‘Support Company, 1 Para’ in particular was known within the British Army as ‘Kitson’s Private Army’.
It was ‘Kitson’s Private Army’ who fired all 108 shots in Derry on Bloody Sunday.
When Kitson gave evidence at the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, he said that his memory was poor regarding those events but that he was sure there was no insurgency when he arrived in Belfast in 1970.
Michael Jackson, who later went on to be the professional head of the British Army during the war in Iraq, described Kitson as “the sun around which the planets revolved”, saying that he “very much set the tone for the operational style in Belfast.” This is the same Michael Jackson who was adjutant of the Parachute Regiment and was present during both the Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday massacres.
Members of the British Parachute Regiment detain civil rights protestors on Bloody Sunday in Derry, 1972.
After leaving Belfast in mid-1972, Kitson gradually moved up through the ranks and eventually became the Commander-in-Chief of all British land forces in 1982. Kitson’s life story is probably best described as a particularly poisonous strand of British barbed wire that winded, cut and forced its way through the late British Empire, from Kenya to Malaysia, to Ireland and many other places.
Frank Kitson (centre) in Beirut in 1983, two years before his retirement as commander-in-chief of British land forces.
No doubt there are a people in Ireland and in other nations previously a part of the British Empire who will mourn the passing of General Sir Frank Edward Kitson, GBE, KCB, MC & Bar, DL. But, thankfully, they are few and far between. They are the last remnants of those who, like Frank Kitson, once believed the sun would never set on that same empire.