David McCloskey

the value of the information they provide, you kind of want people whose hands are dirty because they're the ones who are going to have the information that you actually want from inside that organization, but their hands are dirty, which is a problem.

This will also be a dynamic or sticking point that we'll drill into in our conversation with Patrick Radden Keefe for club members, because we'll talk a lot about kind of the nature of how you run informants and sources in this kind of intelligence game.

And I guess you could also, going back to Stake Knife, I mean, I guess in some cases,

You could – and frankly, the agency did this while running assets inside terrorist organizations during – in Iraq or Afghanistan where you would try to come up with solutions whereby your agent –

wouldn't directly be involved in violence.

So examples of like, you recruit someone who's in Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and they're regularly firing rockets at a U.S.

or mortar fire at a U.S.

facility in

Afghanistan or Iraq.

Well, make sure you miss, right?

Things like that.

I mean, seriously.

These are actual cases where we need the guys who are in these organizations, but we also need to make sure that they're not actually conducting violence against Americans.

And so you try to come up with these kind of artful ways to get around it.

But I guess the problem for SCAP...

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's not just breaking the law by being a member of the IRA, but he's directly involved in murder.

And this is where the comparison with the agency in the war on terror totally falls away.

He's committing murder against citizens of the United Kingdom.