David McCloskey

with advanced knowledge with like warning that someone was about to be killed too which is another piece of this it's not just like looking back because there's a whole separate conversation around kind of these like dirty assets or agents where they've been involved in illegal activity in the past and then you're trying to evaluate future cooperation based off of you know misdeeds from you know their misspent youth or what have you but in this case

What makes it so hard is that he is in some cases, Scappaticci in some cases is saying, this person is going to be killed.

And conceivably, we could look back on some of these and say, well, the Fru could have intervened.

The British state could have intervened in theory to prevent these murders from happening and chose not to in order to keep steak knife in place.

I mean, what do we make of that case?

There's so many layers to this, which is, do you let your agent get involved in murder to protect his position?

If you do that, are you murdering people?

who the IRA suspects are informers, but are not.

And in some cases, I guess you could also run up against a situation where do you let your Golden Goose agent murder other agents or provide you with information that they will be murdered and let it happen?

So in some cases, you could have one agent actually killing another.

So there's a whole level of operational complexity to this thing.

And also,

so much moral complexity because I'd imagine that every Frew case officer who handled Steakknife would have said,

He's providing us with really, really important intelligence that is saving lives.

And these lives that are lost are worth it.

You know, that's kind of the grim math that I think they're doing, is that what he's providing at the moment or a steak knife's potential future value outweighs the value of

I mean, that is the stark kind of moral calculation that I think that, frankly, not just the handlers, the British state is making as they run this guy.

But of course, members to the Declassified Club can listen to this entire series right now, get early access to all of it.

You will also get access to our bonus interviews, doing an interview, as we mentioned, with Patrick Radden Keefe, the author of Say Nothing, looking at this kind of intelligence conflict inside the troubles.

And you can sign up for all of that at therestisclassified.com.