He needn’t have worried. When Kitson arrived in Kenya, he took immediately to what he called ‘the game’. He was a methodical type, so he wrote down his ambition on a little piece of paper: ‘To provide the Security Forces with the information they [need] to destroy the Mau Mau.’ He tucked the paper into the Bible that he kept by his bed.
Kitson was short and stocky, with piercing eyes and a jutting chin. He carried himself ramrod straight, as if on a parade ground, and swung his shoulders as he walked, which gave the impression that he was a larger man than he was. Beneath his peaked and tasselled army cap, he was gradually losing his hair, and as the years went on he was seldom photographed without the cap. He had a slightly nasal voice and was prone to a sportsman’s vernacular, describing people as ‘off net’ and seasoning his conversation with other clubby expressions. He was known to dislike small talk. One story about Kitson that circulated in the army (and was almost certainly apocryphal, but revealing nonetheless) involved a dinner party at which the wife of one of Kitson’s colleagues found herself seated next to him and announced that she had made a bet with a friend that she could get ‘at least half a dozen words’ out of him.
‘You’ve just lost,’ Kitson said, and did not speak another word to her all evening.
In Kenya, he found himself in a completely new environment: the forest. Before leaving on a night mission, he would apply black camouflage to his hands and face and, to complete the disguise, pull an old African bush hat over his head. By ‘blacking up’ in this manner, he supposed he might be mistaken, at a distance and in poor light, for a native. Like a character out of Kipling, Kitson would plunge into the bramble, in search of the mysterious Mau Mau. As he navigated the dense bush, he was struck by how quickly you could adapt to the most alien milieu. In a memoir of his time in Kenya, he wrote, ‘Everything is strange for the first few moments, then after a time normal existence seems strange.’
One day, Kitson came across a group of Kenyans draped from head to toe in white robes. Their faces were completely obscured, with thin slits cut in the fabric for their eyes, noses and mouths. When Kitson enquired about who these strange men were, he learned that they were Mau Mau who had been induced to betray their fellow rebels and work with the British Army. With their identities shielded by the robes, they could observe a group of prisoners, then tell their British handlers who was who.
This was an epiphany for Kitson, a defining episode, as it introduced him to the ‘counter-gang’, a concept that he immediately perceived could be fashioned into a highly effective weapon. In fighting an insurgency, Kitson realised, quality intelligence is essential, and one way to obtain that intelligence is to inveigle some members of the insurgency to switch sides. He began to devote a great deal of thought to how one could best go about persuading a rebel to betray his compatriots. Clearly, trust was a key ingredient, because any potential source, by agreeing to assist his enemy, would effectively be placing his life in the enemy’s hands. But trust is a bond that can be cultivated. When Kitson was courting a new recruit to work as his agent, he would take the man on patrol with him. When they were deep in the bush, Kitson would hand his own pistol to the man, keeping only a machete for himself. This was a risky gesture, but Kitson believed that entrusting his secret agent with a weapon was a way of conveying ‘that he was absolutely one of the team’.
Frank Kitson in Kenya (Still from ‘Kitson’s Class’ in documentary series War School, BBC One London, 9 January 1980)
The British eventually suppressed the rebellion, but at a staggering human cost. Nobody knows precisely how many Kenyans were slaughtered, but the number may reach the hundreds of thousands. Some 1.5 million people were detained, many in internment camps. Mau Mau suspects were subjected, during interrogations, to electric shocks, cigarette burns and appalling forms of sexual torture. This brutal campaign did not forestall the British withdrawal from Kenya, in 1963. Yet, back in London, the operation against the Mau Mau was celebrated as a great success. Kitson had been awarded the Military Cross, for valour, in 1955, for his ‘gallant and distinguished services in Kenya’. ‘I wondered if perhaps some of my good fortune might have been due to the fact that I did think just a little bit more like a terrorist than some of our commanders,’ he mused afterwards. ‘I wondered how much of the African mentality I had absorbed. Was I becoming callous and ruthless and treacherous – to mention some of their less attractive characteristics?’
Kitson had found his calling. There might be no more world wars to fight, but there were plenty of colonial insurgencies. In 1957, he ventured to Malaya, where he battled communist guerrillas in the jungles of Johore and was awarded a Bar to his Military Cross. From there he was dispatched to the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, to contend with a rebellion in the desert. Next he did two stints in Cyprus, where Greek and Turkish Cypriots had gone to war, and was given command of his own battalion.
In 1969, Kitson spent a quiet year away from the battlefield, on a fellowship at Oxford University. Amid the Gothic architecture and manicured quadrangles, he embarked on a new project: an effort to systematise his thinking about counter-insurgency. He studied Mao and Che Guevara and drew on his own combat experience, to produce a manuscript with the anodyne title Low Intensity Operations. In this book, Kitson advanced an argument that would become a cornerstone of later counter-insurgency thinking: it is important not merely to put down an uprising but to win the hearts and minds of the local population. The book also focused heavily on the gathering of intelligence. It made a point so obvious that it almost went without saying: if you want to defeat an insurgency, it helps to know who the insurgents are. By the time Kitson finished the book, in 1970, he had emerged as perhaps the pre-eminent warrior-intellectual of the British Army. When he finished at Oxford, he was promoted to brigadier and sent to the site of Britain’s latest small war: Northern Ireland.
Army headquarters at Lisburn lay eight miles outside Belfast, behind fortified blast walls lined with sandbags and barbed wire. The number of British troops in Northern Ireland had escalated dramatically in a short period of time: during the summer of 1969, there were 2,700; by the summer of 1972 there were more than 30,000. The soldiers were often just as young and inexperienced as the paramilitaries they were fighting: gangly, pimply, frightened young men who were scarcely out of their teens. They were spread across the country, at bases and barracks and makeshift billets. Two companies of Black Watch soldiers were billeted in a vast aircraft hangar. Another company resided in a bus depot, where soldiers bunked down in empty buses. The soldiers were being deployed to Northern Ireland for four-month tours, before rotating home again.
It could be a hugely dangerous assignment, with a multitude of armed factions blending into close-knit communities. In light of the constant risk of getting picked off by a sniper or torn apart by a homemade bomb, some of the more introspective soldiers were forced to wonder: What would success look like? How would you define victory? They had been sent to Northern Ireland to quell the unrest during the summer of 1969, but since their arrival, the bloodshed had only intensified. What would they have to achieve before they could all go home? The army that deployed in the Troubles was not the army that had fought the Nazis. It was an organisation that had come of age fighting small wars of colonial disentanglement. But what was Northern Ireland? Was it part of the United Kingdom? Or was it one of those restive colonies?
When Frank Kitson arrived, in 1970, he was not the overall commander of British forces. But he was in charge of the army’s 39 Airportable Brigade, which had responsibility for Belfast, and his influence far exceeded his station. As one of Kitson’s subordinates later put it, ‘Within his area of responsibility he was the sun around which the planets revolved, and he very much set the tone.’
The biggest challenge facing the army when Kitson arrived was a shortage of solid intelligence. The men and women who became paramilitaries, whether republican or loyalist, looked like everyone else in the civilian population. So how to identify
them? In previous decades, the membership of the IRA had been relatively static – the same names came up year after year. But the old police files were in desperate need of an update, now that there were new recruits flocking to the cause every week. This difficulty was only exacerbated by the blunderbuss approach favoured by the army. ‘When I was first there, the tactics were rather to stand in a line, pump the place full of gas, and let people chuck bricks at you until they got tired of it,’ Kitson later recalled. ‘Not a very good idea because the gas did so much damage to the local people. It made them hostile.’
In Low Intensity Operations, Kitson had observed that the aim in counter-insurgency situations should be to ‘destroy the subversive movement utterly’. But it’s difficult to destroy a target that you cannot see. Kitson became obsessed with intelligence. The first challenge is always ‘getting the right information’, he liked to say.
In particular, Kitson was interested in D Company of the Belfast Brigade, the IRA unit operated by Brendan Hughes and the one that was doing the most damage. British soldiers referred to Hughes’s operational area in West Belfast as ‘the reservation’ – Indian country, where soldiers should tread carefully, if at all. Among themselves (and occasionally in the press) the soldiers would decry their adversaries’ lack of humanity, saying, ‘These people are savages.’ Hughes and his men were out there, invisible and silent, embedded in the community. At Palace Barracks, outside the city, where many of the soldiers were stationed, you could hear the bombs going off in Belfast at night. The windowpanes would shudder.
With blasts in central shopping areas, you might suppose that the army would have no trouble finding frightened or disaffected civilians who were willing to help them by furnishing information. But soldiers complained that in West Belfast, a ‘wall of silence’ protected the IRA. Informers were known as ‘touts’, and for centuries they had been reviled in Irish culture as the basest species of traitor. So there was a profound social stigma against cooperating with the British.
Brendan Hughes was not the only one with a habit of quoting that Mao line about the fish and the sea. Kitson liked it, too. But he put his own spin on the sentiment. A fish can be ‘attacked directly by rod or net’, he advised. ‘But if rod and net cannot succeed by themselves it may be necessary to do something to the water.’
Just before dawn one morning in August 1971, three thousand British troops descended on nationalist areas across Northern Ireland. Soldiers broke down doors and dragged men from their beds, hauling them off to internment. Under the Special Powers Act, it was legal to hold someone indefinitely without trial, and internment had been used periodically in Northern Ireland. But not on this scale. Of the nearly 350 suspects arrested that day, not a single one was a loyalist, though there were plenty of loyalist paramilitaries engaged in terrorism at the time. This disparity in treatment only compounded the impression, in the minds of many Catholics, that the army was simply another instrument of sectarian oppression. In planning the sweep, the army had relied on intelligence from the RUC, and, as one British commander later acknowledged, the largely Protestant police force consisted of people who were ‘partial to one extent or another, in many cases, to a considerable extent’.
But the lists of suspects that the RUC produced were not merely skewed to target Catholics – they were also out of date, and included many people who had no involvement whatsoever in the armed struggle. Because of the Irish tradition of naming sons after their fathers, elderly men were dragged off under the mistaken assumption that they were their sons, and sons were arrested because the authorities thought they were their fathers. (Sometimes, finding both father and son at home and uncertain about which one they were after, the army simply took both.) Nearly a third of the suspects seized that morning were released after two days. The army had arrested a bunch of people it wasn’t looking for while failing to arrest most of the people it was looking for, all while further embittering a Catholic population that was highly embittered to begin with. An official study by the British Ministry of Defence later conceded that internment had been ‘a major mistake’. In the words of one British officer who took part in the sweep, ‘It was lunacy.’
As the presiding counter-insurgency intellectual in Northern Ireland, Frank Kitson would forever be associated with internment. But he would later insist that he had not approved of the decision – that, on the contrary, he had warned his superiors that such a measure would prove counterproductive. His quarrel was not so much with the use of the practice in general as with the specifics of its application in this instance. Kitson had endorsed the use of internment in Kenya and elsewhere. While allowing that it was ‘not an attractive measure to people brought up in a free country’, he argued that internment could nevertheless shorten a conflict, ‘by removing from the scene people who would otherwise have become involved in the fighting’. He reportedly quipped, of locking people up without trial, ‘It’s better than killing them.’ This view may seem callous in retrospect, but the sentiment was echoed at the time in the British press. The Telegraph suggested that some of the Catholics who were locked up without charge ‘admit to preferring internment to the chances of being shot outside’.
Kitson’s chief criticism of internment in Northern Ireland was that it did not come as a surprise. Brendan Hughes, who knew a thing or two about intelligence himself, was not picked up in the raid – because he knew in advance that it was coming. In late July, the army did a kind of dry run, conducting searches and arrests, and the operation looked to Hughes like an effort to gather information. He was right. The army had devised this preparatory phase in order to make sure the addresses on its list were up to date. Another hint about the army’s intentions was rising from the ground twelve miles outside Belfast: on the premises of a former air force base, a capacious new prison camp was being constructed, a facility capable of housing large numbers of detainees. If you were paying attention, it was not a question of whether mass internment would be introduced, but when. Brendan Hughes, having realised this well in advance of the raid, simply went underground, along with his men. After the sweep, the IRA held a press conference to announce, with smug satisfaction, that the massive operation had succeeded in netting hardly any Provos at all.
Dolours Price was not one of those picked up. When the raids happened, she was out of town, on a visit to London. The army had come for her father, but he wasn’t there either. He knew they were coming and was already on the run. But Dolours’s childhood friend Francie McGuigan was arrested. It was not just Francie and his father, John, who were involved in the armed struggle; his entire family was. Francie was the oldest of seven children, all of whom would end up doing time. When the raid happened that summer, his mother, a sturdy woman named Mary, was already locked up, serving a sentence of almost a year in Armagh jail for taking part in a peaceful protest. It was around four in the morning and Francie was asleep in bed when the door burst open and soldiers flooded the room. They dragged him out of the house in his underpants while another soldier pulled his father onto the street. John McGuigan collapsed on the pavement, but Francie could not come to his aid. He was thrown into the back of a lorry. As it drove off, Francie looked out of the back window and caught a glimpse of his father, still on the ground.
John McGuigan ended up being held by the police for several days. When he got out, he could not find his son. Francie had not come home, so John assumed that he must still be in custody. But when he telephoned Crumlin Road jail, where many of the internees had been taken, they said there was no Francis McGuigan there. Next John telephoned the army, but they told him that everybody arrested in the raid had subsequently been turned over to the police. People were being killed in the streets, and John began to fear that Francie might be dead. He saw a local man he knew, who confirmed his worst suspicions. ‘There’s a boy down in the morgue,’ the man said. ‘I think it’s your Francie.’ Distraught, John made his way to the morgue and asked to see the body.
It was another boy.
It wasn’t Francie. John was overcome with relief. But if Francie wasn’t dead, and he wasn’t being held by the army or the police – then where was he?
What John McGuigan did not know was that his son had been selected, along with eleven others, for a special fate. A thick hood was placed over his head, muffling his senses. It had the stale smell of dirty laundry. Francie was loaded, with several other prisoners, onto a Wessex helicopter. They flew for a period of time; it was hard to say how long. Nobody would tell Francie where they were going. Then, under the roar of the helicopter’s rotor, he heard a sucking sound and a louder roar and realised that, though they were still flying, someone had just slid open the helicopter’s door. Now Francie felt hands on him, jostling him, moving him. His handcuffs were removed and he managed to wrap his arms around his knees and draw them tight to his body, folding himself into a compact ball. He still couldn’t see anything because of the hood, and he was panicking, and now he felt the hands pushing him out of the open door of the helicopter and he was falling.
But another set of hands was on him now, and he felt the ground beneath him. What had seemed, in his blindness, to be a free fall to certain death ended up being just a few feet: the helicopter had been hovering close to the ground. Now the people who had caught him were hustling him into a mysterious facility. It was a remote barracks on an old Second World War airfield in County Derry. But Francie McGuigan did not know that at the time, since he was still hooded, and, technically, it was an undisclosed location, selected by the army because it was remote, anonymous, and far from any mechanism of accountability. McGuigan and his fellow detainees were stripped naked and examined by a doctor, then subjected to a series of procedures that were classified, in the army’s euphemistic bureaucratese, as ‘interrogation in depth’.
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