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