General Sir Frank Kitson, who has died aged 97, saw the people of Kenya, Malaya and Northern Ireland as little more than laboratory rats to test his brutal military theories.

“In Northern Ireland, Kitson sought to duplicate his Kenyan experience, forming the Military Reaction Force”A member of the Order of the Bath for the past 43 years (his many other ‘honours’ are too many to list) Kitson rose to become Commander-in-Chief UK Land Forces from July 1982 and Aide-de-Camp to Queen Elizabeth II from 1983-1985.

“In Northern Ireland, Kitson sought to duplicate his Kenyan experience, forming the Military Reaction Force”

This consisted of covert units liaising with local “proxies” to carry out deniable murders and foment internal dissent within republican paramilitary groups – along with mass screenings of the “suspect community”.

Former SAS man Tony Geraghty claims that, in Northern Ireland by the spring of 1971, the British authorities, desperate to penetrate the IRA, did so by adopting Kitson’s counter-gang tactics.

Kitson himself wrote in December 1971 that successes against the IRA would be hard to achieve without radical change and “we are taking steps to do so in terms of building up and developing the MRF”.

Deadly lesson
The outcome, however, was not the defeat of the IRA (its campaign continued for a further 30 years) but the killing of uninvolved civilians, including women and teenagers, and the further alienation of the Catholic community from Britain’s security apparatus.

https://www.declassifieduk.org/the-general-who-terrorised-the-colonies/