Bunch of Five

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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. In his works he also envisaged the use of ad hoc special units using ‘special people and specialised techniques’ but did not elaborate further. In 1962, Kitson married Elizabeth Spencer, whose father, Colonel Charles Spencer, was Colonel of the 12th Royal Lancers. Despite penetration and surveillance, the Provisional IRA conducted its most spectacular and damaging bomb attacks in England in the final years of the conflict.

Pseudo Operations and Counterinsurgency: Lessons from other countries, Strategic Studies Institute, page 1" (PDF). In-depth interrogation, torture, psychological operations, pseudo-gangs and the murder of civilians were features of Kitson's counter-insurgency strategy. Kitson’s Irish War lays bare the evidence they discounted: Kitson’s role in the events leading up to and surrounding that massacre; evidence from a deserter from 1 Para who joined the IRA; a deceitful MI5 agent; a courageous whistle blower whom the British state tried to discredit, and much more, all of which points to a motive for the attack on the Bogside. 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. The MRF not only murdered suspects and unarmed Catholic civilians but also colluded with loyalist paramilitaries in a campaign of sectarian murder of innocent Catholics.In Northern Ireland, Kitson sought to duplicate his Kenyan experience, forming the Military Reaction Force. The eldest son of a rear-admiral, he attended one of England’s leading public schools, Stowe, in the mid-1940s, and was head boy of his house.

Their activities are said to have included the ransacking of villages, sadistic sexual abuse and using power drills to maim prisoners.

Furthermore, ‘Low Intensity Operations’ was only published towards the end of my time in Northern Ireland and did not become very well known until some months after I had left the Province. In his evidence to the Saville Enquiry Kitson downplayed his expertise in counterinsurgency, but his books had forewords by leading army generals, and his international reputation in the field was recognised by his inclusion in a small group of foreign military officers brought to the USA for a RAND symposium on counterinsurgency in 1962, anticipating an escalating US involvement in South Vietnam. This book unlocks the some of the key secrets of the Dirty War that the British government is still determined to cover-up. But as recently as 2006 US General David Petraeus (then commander of US Central Command and coalition forces in Iraq) visited Kitson at his home in Devon, apparently for advice. According to Kenya’s biggest newspaper, the Daily Nation, a man named Ian Henderson was known in Kenya as the “ torturer in chief”, and was “the prime mover in the preparation of bogus evidence in the 1953 trial at Kapenguria”, where six leading Mau Mau figures were convicted, including the future first president of independent Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta.

But if rod and net cannot succeed by themselves it may be necessary to do something to the water which will force the fish into a position where it can be caught. On 22 January 1976, he became General Officer Commanding 2nd Division, with the acting rank of major-general, [17] with substantive promotion following on 5 April 1976 (and seniority from 2 June 1974), [18] and leading its re-designation as an Armoured Division in Germany before stepping down on 28 February 1978. Just prior to his arrival in Belfast, Kitson had published his best-known book, Low Intensity Operations. This is because it allows others to file similar legal action previously not seen following conflict situations. General Frank Kitson (97) led British military operations in the north at the beginning of the conflict, and went on to become a hate figure for nationalists and republicans after being linked to several atrocities.His sometimes controversial writings on military subjects - notably Low Intensity Operations (reissued by Faber Finds in 2010, along with Directing Operations and Bunch of Five ) - remain highly relevant and continue to be widely read and to provoke strong opinions. It’s not the only new military base in the region: in 2015, the UK announced a major expansion of its military presence in Oman, where the current Sultan is a former UK army officer who secured his role in a British coup in 1970. Kitson’s counter-insurgency strategy heavily relied on the operation of internment centers or a similar concept, such as isolation. 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.