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Summer 2002

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Issue 43

Kitson revisited

John Newsinger

The publication of Frank Kitson's Low Intensity Operations in 1971 created a storm on the left.(1) An influential British army officer with considerable experience of colonial warfare was advocating that the army prepare for counterinsurgency operations at home. As far as Kitson was concerned there was a serious danger of revolutionary disturbance in Britain in the foreseeable future. To meet this challenge the army needed to develop a new preemptive strategy. The traditional role of providing support for the civil authorities, ie. putting troops on the streets when the police had lost control, was no longer adequate. What was needed was a more specifically counter-revolutionary approach.This controversial advocacy did not damage Kitson's career, despite the outcry from the left, but how far were his ideas actually carried out? To what extent did his theories inform the practice of the British state?

Learning the Ropes

Kitson's first combat experience was in Kenya during the Mau Mau Emergency in the early 1950s. This was Britain's most brutal and bloody postwar counter-insurgency campaign; he subsequently acknowledged that it was the 'most violent of the counter-insurgency campaigns in which I have taken part', with a far higher death toll than Northern Ireland for example.(2) The poorly armed Mau Mau were defeated by the most ferocious repression with over a thousand rebels hanged (some for the administration of illegal oaths!), 77,000 interned without trial and over a million people forcibly resettled into heavily policed 'new villages'. (3) Kitson's contribution was as one of the developers of the pseudo- or counter-gang technique for hunting down the Mau Mau. This involved the establishment of bands of renegade Mau Mau, led by heavily disguised white officers, going into the forests, pretending to be rebels and luring the real thing out into the open where they could be killed or captured. While this technique was certainly not responsible for the Mau Mau defeat, it did play an important part in mopping-up operations once the rebels were on the defensive. Kitson published his own account of his Kenyan adventures, Gangs and Counter-Gangs in 1960. (4)

After Kenya, Kitson next saw active service in Malaya. He arrived in the country in January 1957, by which time the Communist insurgency had already been effectively defeated. Only a small number of isolated guerrilla bands were still at large. He regarded the army's methods as 'thorough rather than inspired' and instead developed his own approach. This involved using his own troops as collectors of background intelligence which he made operational use of, rather than just relying on Special Branch or acting blind. (5)

His growing reputation as a counter-insurgency specialist saw him go to Military Operations at the War Office after Malaya, with a brief that covered Aden, Kuwait and the Oman. He was involved in establishing an internal security headquarters in Aden, where the political situation was already deteriorating. This failed to prevent Britain's most humiliating postwar defeat. He was also involved in setting up an SAS operation against insurgents in Oman in 1958-59, an operation that arguably saved the SAS from disbandment. Certainly this is what Kitson believed. (6)

In 1962 he took part in peace-keeping operations in Cyprus, which involved close contact with former EOKA fighters. In his account of this episode, he discusses EOKA campaigns against the British, where George Grivas with 'about 150 full-time insurgents' managed at one time to tie down some 25,000 troops, hoping to bring about 'enosis' (union with Greece) 'through a process of attrition by harassing, confusing and finally exasperating the British'. In fact, Grivas was only finally outmanoeuvred by mobilising the Turkish Cypriot minority against EOKA in a classic divide and rule strategy. Kitson makes clear his admiration for Grivas's 'courage and determination'. In a remarkable passage in his memoir, he acknowledges that 'deliberate assassinations, which confirmed the basis of EOKA terrorism, were difficult to stomach' but nevertheless insists that the inescapable fact remains, that if EOKA was to fight us at all, then the methods which they adopted were the ones which offered the best chance of success. Also, although EOKA murders were essentially repulsive in their cold bloodedness, they were considerably more selective than many other forms of warfare, such as the massed bombing used by both sides in the Second World War, to say nothing of the use of atomic weapons in Japan. Furthermore, the assassin was obliged to take risks in carrying out his task and many were shot or subsequently hanged. Inevitably EOKA attracted some thoroughly unpleasant people, but it also attracted others, who were high-minded, courageous and patriotic according to their lights. The only logical course was to condemn the war, but to take the people who fought it on their merits. (7)

A good case can be made that Kitson's refusal to demonise his opponents was an important factor in his successes in Kenya and Malaya. The sentiments expressed are a stark contrast to those in most discussions of 'Terrorism', academic and otherwise, which amount to little more than exercises in the propaganda war.

With an established reputation as a counter-insurgency specialist, with the likes of Richard Clutterbuck singing his praises, (8) Kitson was given a one year defence fellowship at University College, Oxford to develop his ideas. The result was Low Intensity Operations.

Low Intensity Operations

Low Intensity Operations appeared at a time when an increasing level of industrial unrest, serious disturbances in Northern Ireland, student revolt, the women's liberation movement, the reemergence of the revolutionary left and a strong Labour left, all seemed to add up to a challenge on a scale not seen since before the First World War. And this was in an international context where revolutionary war in South-East Asia and South America seemed in the ascendant. Kitson drew on his experiences combating revolutionary war in the withdrawal from Empire to develop a response to the crisis that was developing at home. Essentially, he proposed responding to Britain's domestic troubles as if they were the first stage in the development of revolutionary war at home. As far as he was concerned, while the army might be withdrawing from East of Suez, it still had the obligation for maintaining law and order in the United Kingdom. Recent events in Northern Ireland served as a timely reminder that this could be taken for granted. There were other potential trouble spots within the United Kingdom which might involve the army in operations of a sort against political extremists who were prepared to resort to a considerable degree of violence to achieve their ends. If a genuine and serious grievance arose, such as might result from a significant drop in the standard of living, all those who now dissipate their protest over a wide variety of causes might concentrate their efforts and produce a situation which was beyond the power of the police to handle. Should this happen the army would be required to restore the position rapidly. (9)

It is important to recognise that Kitson was not writing in a vacuum but was systematising the thinking of important elements within the military at this time. Senior figures in the SAS in particular were thinking along similar lines.

What was significant about Low Intensity Operations was Kitson's identification of three stages of development of revolutionary war: the preparatory stage, the non-violent stage and the insurgency state. This had tremendous implications. It involved treating a whole number of activities, protests, demonstrations, strikes, meetings, etc., as if they were the preparatory stage in a revolutionary war. Moreover, Kitson advocated military involvement in responding to this preparatory stage, not in the form of troops on the streets, but in an intelligence gathering and harassing role. What he seems to have been thinking of was giving the army a role in Britain similar to that of the FBI's aggressive COINTELPRO operations against the US left. (10) He argued that the United States was 'well ahead of Britain in its thinking on the overall direction of counter-insurgency and counter-subversive operations'. (11) Clearly, this would have involved a dramatic change in the state's attitude towards protest and dissent, a change from hostility to system-atic repression. What is interesting, however, is that Kitson's prescriptions in Low Intensity Operations were never acted upon. Why?

The War in Northern Ireland

There seem to be two related answers to this question. First, there were many, especially in the police, who did not share Kitson's interpretation of the situation in Britain. They still viewed developments from a public order rather than a revolutionary war perspective. Moreover, the police had compelling institutional reasons for resisting any military encroachment onto their territory. Sir Robert Mark exemplifies the police stance. In his memoirs he recalled being included:

'.....in a working party set up by the Ministry of Defence to review the army's policies in respect to aid to the civil power. The travelling part of the working party consisted of Major General Anthony Deane-Drummond, CB, DSO, MC and Lt. Colonel Desmond Bastick MBE and my part in the operation being particularly easy in that it consisted of saying "No" at frequent intervals'.

This was in 1970.(12) Mark was certainly no liberal. His rejection of Deane-Drummond's prescriptions derived from the belief that they would exacerbate conflict situations whereas the role of the police involved 'the containment or absorption of social unrest'. Mark cites the handling of the Vietnam War protests in London as an example of the police successfully containing a 'potentially dangerous situation'.(13) One suspects that if the police had failed to contain the October 1968 demonstration the likes of Deane-Drummond and Frank Kitson would have received more of a hearing. (14)

The other answer lies in Northern Ireland. Here Kitson was given command of 39 Brigade in Belfast with the opportunity to put some of his ideas into practice. The results were disastrous, and, although this was certainly not all down to Kitson, there is much to be said for Paddy Devlin's judgement that he 'probably did more than any other individual to sour relations between the Catholic community and the security forces'. (15) By the time of the Falls Road curfew of 3-5 July 1970, the army was already well on the way to alienating the Catholic working class in Belfast and Derry. The conduct of the troops was effectively recruiting young Catholics into the Provisional IRA, something since acknowledged by military sources. A good case can be made that, by treating the events of 1970-71 as the first stage of a revolutionary war, the army helped bring about the very situation they were supposed to be preventing. The alienation of the Catholic working class was completed by the introduction of internment (which Kitson opposed) on 9 August 1971 and by the 'Bloody Sunday' massacre on 30 January 1972. The turn to 'police primacy' in the mid-1970s can be seen, at least in part, as a repudiation of the Kitson strategy.(16)

It can be argued that Kitson's ideas were only put into practice in Northern Ireland too late and even then only in part. The situation in Northern Ireland deteriorated so rapidly, with the Unionists effectively vetoing any 'hearts and minds' strategy, that the army was to a considerable extent responding to, rather than being in control of events. Whatever they did only seemed to make the situation worse. Moreover, Kitson was never actually in command in Northern Ireland. Roger Faligot's famous Britain's Military Strategy in Ireland: The Kitson Experiment in this respect seems way off the mark, presenting as a controlled experiment what were in fact desperate measures in a situation that was out of control.(17)

What if Kitson's strategy had been implemented as laid out in Low Intensity Operations? Applying his methodology, the civil rights movement would have been treated as the first stage in a revolutionary war. This was, of course, what many hard line Unionists and the likes of Ian Paisley argued at the time. On the other hand, Kitson makes clear that the remedying of justified grievances is an essential part of defeating revolutionary war. The problem was that the Unionists steadfastly opposed any remedying of justified grievances. Looking back on the Mau Mau Emergency, Kitson blamed the European settlers for the revolt and one suspects that his rumoured unpublished Northern Ireland memoir will be uncomplimentary to say the least about the Ulster Unionists and, in particular, Ian Paisley.

What of Kitson's own thoughts on countering subversion since his time in Northern Ireland? In 1987 he published a neglected volume, Warfare As A Whole, in which he effectively acknowledged the efficacy of police primacy. The police, he wrote 'have greatly increased their ability to act in support of the government in both peace and war'. This is 'advantageous to the politicians because they enable them to get the police to deal with politically inspired unrest as if it were criminal activity'. He wrote on:

'There can be no doubt that the increased capability of the police is the prime reason why the government has been able to maintain its authority in the last few years in the face of industrial disputes, CND activity and the threat from international terrorists. Had the police not had the extra capability, it is difficult to see how the army could have avoided being more directly involved than it has been.'

And he still insisted that the army had to be 'prepared to carry out counter-insurgency operations within the United King-dom'. (18)

In his Plots and Paranoia, Bernard Porter argued that if the authorities had possessed a copy of Low Intensity Operations in the 1830s then there might well have been no need for the Great Reform Act of 1832. It is much more likely that the possession of such knowledge, far from saving the British ruling class from the necessity for reform, would have instead ensured that Britain would have had its revolution in 1848 as did the rest of Europe.(19)

Notes

1 London: Faber and Faber, 1971. In 1971 'the left' included a substantial Labour Party left. Today, New Labour objections to the book would be more likely to centre on his failure to involve the private sector.

2 Frank Kitson, Bunch of Five, London 1977, p. 59.

3 For the suppression of the Mau Mau revolt see my British Counter-insurgency: From Palestine to Northern Ireland, London 2002.

4 Frank Kitson, Gangs and Counter-Gangs, London 1960. One feature of this book worth noticing is that it does not demonise the Mau Mau but treats them with a degree of respect that is unique in the memoir literature deriving from the campaign.

5 Kitson, Bunch of Five, op cit, p. 94.

6 Ibid. p. 201.

7 Ibid. p.p 236-237, 263.

8 Richard Clutterbuck, Riot and Revolution in Singapore and Malaya, London 1973, pp. 112-121.

9 Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, London 1971, pp. 24-25.

10 For COINTELPRO see Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, Boston MA, 1990.

11 Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, op cit, p. 52.

12 See Scott Newton's 'Historical Notes' in this issue for a discussion of related thinking on this issue by the British military - ed.

13 Sir Robert Mark, In The Office of Constable, London 1978, pp. 102, 111, 244. This volume more than establishes Mark's reactionary credentials.

14 Deane-Drummond was a former commander of the SAS, first in Malaya and later in Oman. For his account of the working party see his Arrows of Fortune, London 1992, p. 230-231. He subsequently wrote a short volume, Riot Control, that was published by the Royal United Services Institution in 1970 and included, among other things, a survey of the revolutionary left.

15 Paddy Devlin, The Fall of the Northern Ireland Executive, Belfast 1975, p. 119.

16 For a further discussion see my British Counter-insurgency, op cit.

17 Roger Faligot, British Military Strategy in Ireland: The Kitson Experiment, London 1983.

18 Frank Kitson, Warfare As A Whole, London 1987, pp. 55-57.

19 Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: A History of political espionage in Britain in 1790-1988, London 1989, p. 205.

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