Bunch of Five

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In April last year, 47 years after the UK left its original HMS Juffair base in Bahrain, Britain opened a new naval base in the country.

On 22 January 1976, he became General Officer Commanding 2nd Division, with the acting rank of major-general, [17] with substantive promotion following on 5 April 1976 (and seniority from 2 June 1974), [18] and leading its re-designation as an Armoured Division in Germany before stepping down on 28 February 1978. Shortly after this visit to Northern Ireland, Bahrain’s Ministry for the Interior managed to locate him. On New Year’s Day 1955, Frank Kitson was awarded the British Military Cross ‘in recognition of gallant and distinguished services in Kenya. Chairman of the Bloody Sunday Trust Tony Doherty said Kitson left a trail of devastation in Derry, Ballymurphy and other communities in the north.

Wingate developed the methods of attack on Palestinian villages, used with great effect by the IDF in 1948. The first Treaty of Friendship was signed in 1820, nearly 200 years ago, and it remained until replaced by a new one in 1971 on Britain’s withdrawal from the Gulf – a unilateral decision of which my father said – ‘Why? What this meant, was that the prisoner would be offered two choices, one that was terrifying or one comparatively more appealing (Melshen 15). He subsequently authored two books on counter-insurgency, believed to be the blueprint for British policy in the Troubles. Mr Doherty, whose father was killed on Bloody Sunday, said: "Kitson, in his blind pursuit of defending the crown’s interests, made no distinction between civilian and combatant as he honed his skills in applying torture, internment and death from Kenya, to Aden and then to Ireland.

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

General David Petraeus who was commander of the United States Central Command and Coalition Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, viewed Kitson as a counter-insurgency guru.

A group of men who say they were tortured – known as the Hooded Men – announced legal proceedings against him earlier this year. As a result of both of these investigations, an archive of colonial documents from Malaya, Kenya, Aden, Cyprus and other places of controversy, hitherto kept secret in breach of Britain’s Freedom of Information Act and amounting to 200 metres of shelving, was discovered. Ian Henderson was awarded the George Medal – Britain’s highest civilian award – on 28 September 1954 for his work in Kenya. During the 1950s, the British tried to retain control of lands in Kenya that they had violently stolen from the Kikuyu and other groups. The lasting legacy of Kitson’s tactics in Belfast was a framework of intelligence tactics of penetration of paramilitaries, abuse of prisoners and the psyops of disinformation, with ‘going in hard’ against the Provisional IRA and coercive control of the Catholic community.Recent developments have focused attention on the nature of British counterinsurgency as ‘dirty war’, not only in Northern Ireland but also in several other anti-colonial struggles after World War II. Some, like Northern Ireland secretary Karen Bradley and defence secretary Gavin Williamson, think there’s nothing to see here, saying that British soldiers in Northern Ireland were “fulfilling their duties in a dignified and appropriate way”, and should be above the law. Kitson adapted other experiences, notably the infiltration tactics of Edward Lansdale and Magsaysay against the Huk rebellion in the Philippines, and the covert assassination ‘Q’ squads organised by Roy Farran in Palestine.

I very much doubt whether the GOC [general officer commanding] or the CLF [Commander Land Forces] had read it by January 1972; indeed they may never have read it.

His dirty fingerprints are all over the McGurk's Bar Massacre cover-up too as he agreed a line of disinformation with the sectarian RUC hours after the explosion. Derry’s Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972—described in 2010 by British Prime Minister David Cameron as ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’.