David McCloskey

And to drill down a little bit into this, we talked in the last episode about how the British Army and essentially the security services that were operating in Northern Ireland did have a wide variety of technical penetrations of the IRA as well.

And how in some cases, there were efforts made to...

prevent these kind of killings if they could get the intelligence from you know some form that wasn't steak knife wasn't a human yeah and it does make me wonder if in some of these cases and i'm not sure if it's true in this specific case if part of the thought process because i'm just trying to put myself with the mindset of you know steak knives handlers who are getting this information seeing this in real time and trying to figure out what to do with it

If there's a pretty grim calculation that gets made that says the only source we have for this is Freddy's Gap of Teaching.

Yeah.

And if you're sole sourced on this thing and then you go in and you prevent this from happening or later on you arrest the people who are involved, maybe not in one case, but if the cumulative effect of that over not even a very long period of time,

would be that you'll lose the agents.

And I'd have to think that there's no incentive on the part of the Fru handlers.

You don't want to be the handler that loses steak knife.

That's a career killer all the way up the chain.

If the guy you have who's providing you with all this great intel on the IRA decides, or you end up getting him killed,

Because you're trying to save- One person.

Right, but you're trying to save someone who's a member of the IRA.

You know, you're the fruit handlers.

You're like, no way, no way.

Do we have any sense from...

anything that has come out as part of the canova investigation or otherwise that there was any kind of process inside the fru for thinking through these kind of questions or is that just black box

There's a story from Richard O'Rourke's book, Stake Knives, Dirty War, that

I think illustrates at kind of the granular human level, the kind of game that Scappaticci is playing.

And O'Rourke writes, in 1982, markets resident Marion McCullen was working in the kitchens of the five-star Culloden Hotel in Holywood, County Down.