A second soldier involved in both events was ‘mentioned in despatches’ at the behest of Kitson for his alleged bravery in the face of the enemy. There, Michael Jackson, who went on to be the professional head of the British army during the Iraq war, described him as “the sun around which the planets revolved”, saying that he “very much set the tone for the operational style in Belfast.

In 1973, a Catholic joiner named Patrick Heenan was driving his workmates to a construction site, when a British-army-issue hand grenade was thrown into their minibus. According to Belfast politician Paddy Devlin, Kitson "probably did more than any other individual to sour relations between the Catholic community and the security forces" in Northern Ireland. If Britain had a functional media or a sensible government, the debate about the prosecution of a soldier for alleged murder on Bloody Sunday would be a chance to talk about our imperial history: how it’s shaped our post-imperial present and how it’s led us to the chaos of today. The commander of land forces in 1971–2, Major-General Robert Ford, was a veteran of Palestine and Aden, and Kitson’s predecessor as commander in the Belfast Area, Major-General Farrar-Hockley, was a veteran of Palestine, Cyprus, Aden, and of covert operations in Indonesia.

He organised ‘night squads,’ recruited from the Zionist Haganah militia (the origin of today’s Israeli Defence Force). The British Widgery and Saville inquiries did not hold Kitson and his elite troops accountable for Bloody Sunday. Mr Doherty said it was a “disgrace” that a CBE awarded to Kitson in February 1972 was allowed to stand, even after the innocence of the Ballymurphy dead was clearly established. Charles Haughey, Minister for Finance, a captain in Irish military intelligence along with two others were put on trial.

Decorated British army officer General Frank Kitson left a “terrible legacy” and was allowed to act with total impunity in Northern Ireland, Derry’s Bloody Sunday Trust has said. This conclusion is also drawn by the British military’s Operation Banner report (2006) into its role in the North, and the claim informs the new JDP 3-40 (2010) counterinsurgency doctrine for the British Army. Photo: Andrew Parsons - No 10 Downing Street / Flickr / cropped from original / shared under license CC BY-NC-ND 2. General Sir Michael Jackson, who was an adjutant in 1 Para in the early 1970s, described Kitson as an ‘incisive thinker and military theorist’, and claimed that ‘he was the sun around which the planets revolved . Petraeus was appointed as Director of the CIA by President Barack Obama and held that post between 2011 and 2012.Kitson and Wilford’s troops shot this woman in the head while she was helping one of the other Ballymurphy victims.