David McCloskey

I mean, in a lot of these cases, I know that the way that the handlers have tried to talk about these recruitments are saying, oh, we're sort of playing off of...

agents need for money or their desire for status or grudges that they have with others in the community, all good fodder, of course, for recruiting a human asset.

But at the same time, you can essentially use the leak.

I mean, the fact that they're part of is, you know, a recruit might be part of the IRA, affiliated with the IRA, might have committed some other legal infraction.

That's tremendous leverage for the army as they're thinking about their agent pool in Northern Ireland.

Well, by the mid-1970s, this intelligence focus is really starting to pay off.

I mean, obviously, given the context we've just described,

the army would have a massive pool of potential agents to recruit from.

And that's paying off.

But the IRA, I mean, this is sort of a push and pull to this, isn't there?

Because the IRA is starting to adapt to this.

And what it discovers it needs is it needs a different cell structure to improve security.

So it's a classic kind of... We see this kind of classic arc

You go from open conflict insurgency to a kind of more clandestine cell structure where you try to fragment or atomize things so that if the British state, if the army penetrates one cell, they don't roll everybody up, right?

So you've got to be careful about the links between these kind of groups.

And crucially, they're looking for ways of dealing with informers, with the penetrations that the British state has recruited.

So they need a counterintelligence function.

And this is where our friend Scappaticci comes back in.

Why do you think he went back?

To the IRA.