David McCloskey

I think the difference is that in that case, those handlers were effectively corrupted by Whitey Bulger.

And eventually the end, spoiler alert, there won't be a lot of accountability happening.

on the part of the British state for what happens with steak knife.

Whereas in the Whitey Bulger case, he goes to prison and his handlers do as well.

So there are some key differences.

But it was interesting because I put the question to a couple –

FBI special agents of, you know, would there be an incident where... Because you can get waivers for your confidential informants committing crimes.

Like, that's a thing you can get.

You can get that at the CIA if you're running an asset inside a terrorist organization and they're providing material support to that organization.

Like, there are ways to get things wavered in extenuating circumstances.

But it was interesting, like, you know, this direct question of would the FBI allow a confidential informant to commit murder?

I couldn't, I honestly couldn't get a clear answer.

Now, small sample size, I think it'd be an absolutely extreme case.

And there is a process, which is different from the snake knife one, but that's kind of the, that'd be the American frame for this today.

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,