Parachute Regiment commander Frank Kitson has died

The 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, members of which murdered 14 anti-internment demonstrators in Derry, on January 30, 1972, had been nicknamed ‘Kitson’s Private Army’.

At the time of the massacre in Derry Kitson was Brigadier of the 39th Infantry Brigade in Belfast and was in overall command of 1 PARA.

Evidence provided to the Saville Inquiry noted how Kitson had commented to Major General Robert Ford, the Commander of Land Forces at the time of Bloody Sunday, that ‘no-one seems to sort out Londonderry’.

Ford was also said to have felt that the British army ‘were taking too soft a line' notwithstanding an acknowledgment within military circles that ‘the security situation in Londonderry differed from that in Belfast in that the great majority of the population on the west bank of the Foyle was hostile to the security forces’.

The Saville report noted: “Even though these differences were recognised, dissatisfaction about the situation in Londonderry had been expressed in political and military circles in Stormont and at Headquarters Northern Ireland (HQNI).”

In these circumstances 1 PARA was dispatched to Derry from Palace Barracks, Holywood, under the direct command of Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford, whose men shot 13 people dead on Bloody Sunday. A 14th victim later died of his injuries.

Wilford, who died aged 90 in Belgium last November, had served in Malaya and Aden, where he had been involved in the repression of anti-colonial uprisings against British rule.

Kitson had also been involved in putting down national liberation movements in Kenya, Malaya and the Yemen and elsewhere, prior to his career in Ireland.

It was in those theatres he had honed a theory of counter-insurgency based on infiltration, the use of agents provocateurs, pseudo-gangs, informers and black operations which he outlined in his books Gangs and Counter-gangs, Low Intensity Operations and Bunch of Five.

He is believed to have applied these methods in Ireland and to have established the British Army’s plain clothed Military Reaction Force which was accused of targeting innocent civilians and nationalists as well as republican paramilitaries.

Kitson was born in Kensington on December 15, 1926.

Bloody Sunday 50: ‘How many brothers do you have?’ ‘I have two.’ ‘You have only one now’