David McCloskey

And the gap, I guess, kind of makes some sense.

Maybe you just want to have a somewhat normal life for a bit after you've gotten out of prison.

We should say, I mean, he's about 30.

So you'd think maybe he started to think a little bit more about the future or family.

But he goes back.

What's your sense of why he does that?

But if listeners think this is a sort of smoke and mirrors, George Smiley-esque world of counterintelligence or counterespionage, think again.

Because SCAP is practicing a much more brutal and, dare I say, knuckle-dragging version of counterintelligence and counterespionage.

Because he's essentially interviewing everybody who...

The IRA suspects as being an informant or who comes out of prison and needs to be vetted to see if the Brits have turned them.

And he also looks at failed or compromised operations for evidence of security breaches.

And this main role, though, is interviewing individuals who've been detained or arrested because, of course, the IRA is massively penetrated and they're deeply fearful that the Brits are conducting these kind of jailhouse, in many ways, recruitments, right?

Where someone comes in-

Now the Brits have legal leverage over them, can get information on their personality, on their background, on sort of who's up and who's down in their world in the IRA, use all of that to come up with a way to sort of release them back into the wild to work for the British state.

And that is exactly what the ISU and Scappaticci are trying to root out.

the main interrogator, which is interesting because he's the number two to McGee.

And McGee will kind of take this approach of asking questions in a clear voice, take his time, have the person...

kind of tell their story in detail, kind of look to see, okay, are they hesitating?

Are they contradicting themselves?

Importantly, I think just as a note on the way you might interrogate someone to understand if they're telling the truth is ask them question after question, have them tell you their story over and over again.