Gordon Carrera

Now, it's hard to know that's true, but the argument would be that's a kind of tactical intelligence that the British state had built up, which then, because the IRA know it, puts pressure on them because they feel

so badly penetrated you know and that some of these agents might also be kind of maneuvering politics to push the IRA towards talks now this has I think created a slightly self-serving narrative which you sometimes hear from people which is that intelligence somehow won the war and it kind of

takes away from all the other factors which led the British state and the IRA to realize that neither of them were going to achieve their fundamental aims, and so they had to talk.

I think the idea that intelligence was the main reason for that, the intelligence penetration, is over-egging it.

It's a claim that's out there, I suppose.

Yeah, and I think Canova looks into this in quite a lot of detail and it does say that Steakknife became kind of mythologized with exaggerated stories, both about the benefits he brought as well as the dark things.

and that they say, you know, any serious security and intelligence professional hearing an agent being likened to the goose that laid the golden eggs, as steak knife was, should be on alert because the comparison is rooted in fables and fairy tales.

And I kind of, I like that point because I think the idea, I think the idea is used by some people who were in British intelligence, that this was the most amazing agent who saved, some of the claims are hundreds of lives.

But actually, when you drill into the metrics for understanding the hundreds of lives, it doesn't quite stack up because they based the hundreds of lives being saved on perhaps a bomb or a gun was found which had been hidden and which they get through a tip-off, maybe from steak knife.

But that would have been used to kill X number of people.

You know, it's a counterfactual, which is quite, you know, shaky because you don't know if they'd have found it some other way or how many people it would have really killed or what would have happened with it.

Well, so again, Canova says that the Fru kept success books, which I guess is what you're talking about, for some agents, but the one for State Knife has never been recovered.

Another mysterious disappearance, you know, which fits something here.

So, I mean, and they say, look, they look at the number of lives they can identify who were saved through relocation warning or intervention, and they say...

It's between high single figures and low double figures and nowhere near the hundreds that are sometimes claimed.

They also try and do an accounting of the lives cost by steak knife.

I think this is significant.

He's going to be linked to at least 14 murders and 15 abductions.

When we say linked there- No, directly linked, I think, in that sense.

So Canova's conclusion is, I think it is probable that his actions resulted in more lives being lost than saved.