General Sir Frank Edward Kitson died on 2 January 2024, aged 97, after a long and illustrious career as a dedicated servant of British imperialism. In addition to the litany of his war crimes, he will be remembered for authoring the text book Low Intensity Operations – Subversion, Insurgency and Peace-keeping (1971), a manual for dealing with subversive and recalcitrant populations, both at home and abroad. Kitson’s work continues to form a central plank of British strategy for policing dissent.
Born into a military family, Kitson joined the British Army in 1946 as a second lieutenant, rising through the ranks and picking up both military and civil decorations along the way for his part in the suppression of liberation struggles in Kenya, Malaya, Oman, Cyprus and Ireland.
In Kenya he participated in the bloody suppression of the Mau Mau anti-colonial movement, developing a strategy of bribing or terrorising groups within the movement to act for the British state against their former comrades. Kitson wrote about his experience in Kenya in two books, Gangs and Countergangs (1960) and Bunch of Five (1977). The foreword to the first publication described Britain’s presence in Kenya as a ‘benevolent autocracy of good colonial administration’ and the resistance fighters as ‘associated in my mind with all that was foul and terrible in primitive savagery’.
Ireland – reign of terror
Between September 1970 and April 1972, Kitson presided over a sustained reign of terror against the nationalist people of the north of Ireland, vowing in 1971 that he would ‘squeeze the Catholic population until they vomit the gunmen out of their system’. Atrocities of this period included the Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday massacres and the torture of the ‘hooded men’. In July 1982 Kitson was appointed Head of UK Land Forces. Three months later, Kenneth Newman, who had been first Deputy and then Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) from 1973 to 1980 was appointed as Chief of the Metropolitan Police. In the RCG’s book Ireland: the Key to the British Revolution (1984) we wrote about the centrality of Kitson and Newman to the British government strategy during the early 1980s of incorporating colonial methods into domestic policing in order to respond to increasing civil unrest and, in particular, the uprisings against racist oppression which took place from 1980 to 1985:
‘These two men represent the accumulated experience of the British ruling class in oppressing national liberation movements, particularly in Ireland where they both served during crucial periods – Kitson 1970–72, Newman 1973–79. These appointments make it clear how the British ruling class intends to deal with the inevitable resistance to its rule in Britain.’
In 1983, the Association of Chief Police Officers issued a secret handbook to its members, the Public Order Manual, which codified an end to traditional ‘policing by consent’ and its replacement by a policing philosophy based on the colonial experiences of the RUC in occupied Ireland and the paramilitary Royal Hong Kong Police. Police using the new approach were mobilised against groups now described as ‘the enemy within’, including striking miners in 1984-85 and the black community of Broadwater Farm in Tottenham in 1985.
In 2000 we wrote in FRFI about how the large London May Day protest that year was policed using methods straight out of the Kitson playbook, ‘demonstrat[ing] a determination of the corporate capitalist class through its political representatives in the Labour government, its media, police and judiciary to destroy the coalition of forces in this country that see themselves as part of a growing, global anti-capitalist movement’. We described this as ‘part of a continuing police strategy put in place soon after the 1980-81 city uprisings of black and white youth… based on British army colonial experience against national liberation struggles… systematically laid out in General Frank Kitson’s book Low Intensity Operations.’
Repression and psychological operations
The basic aim of the Kitson strategy is to ensure that any effective opposition to the state be treated as a criminal act. He therefore argued that it was necessary to ruthlessly stamp out ‘subversion’ by all means available, up to targeted assassinations if needed: ‘Law should be used as just another weapon in the government’s arsenal, and in this case it becomes little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public.’
Alongside this direct repression, ‘psychological operations’ are used to isolate the militant opposition from the people, while encouraging support for ‘moderate’ elements who largely support the occupier state but also have some oppositional views as cover. These methods include propaganda against the opposition cause, use of the press to put over the government position, ‘dirty tricks’ such as fake leaflets, and the deployment of provocateurs and agents to masquerade as oppositionists and discredit the cause.
An essential feature of the strategy is intelligence gathering, using a methodology reliant on collating a large number of small pieces of information acquired by the police (‘low-grade sources’) to build up a total picture of the opposition. This type of police method can clearly be seen in practice on protests today, with the deployment alongside the overt Forward Intelligence Teams of friendly-seeming Police Liaison Officers in light blue tabards, who are specially trained to engage protesters in polite conversation and document any details that they are given.
A racist, colonial legacy
Kitson’s works are widely ack-nowledged as being influential both in domestic policing and in con–tinued imperialist oppression of other nations. Among others who cite Kitson as a useful resource is General David Petraeus, commander of US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s.
In 2002, Kitson was the first witness at the Bloody Sunday Inquiry into the slaughter of 14 innocent people in Derry in the occupied Six Counties of Ireland in 1972. Unrepentant, he told the Inquiry that the paratroopers who had carried out the killings were dedicated professionals and ‘just jolly good’. He will not be mourned in
Ireland or anywhere people struggle for freedom and against imperialism.
Nicki Jameson
Further reading is available on our website www.frfi.org.uk:
- Ireland the Key to the British Revolution – David Reed, Larkin Publications, 1984
- ‘May Day – a parting of the ways’ – David Yaffe FRFI 155 June/July 2000
- ‘Political policing’ – Joseph Eskovitchl, FRFI 219 February/March 2011
- ‘One of a long line of barbarians’ (obituary for Sir Kenneth Newman) – Carol Brickley, FRFI 256 April/May 2017
