John Ware
speaker
113 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 11 Jul
John Ware’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yes.
I mean, essentially, if you're a state, a democratic state, combating...
an insurgency, an armed insurgency in which not just combatants but innocent civilians are dying in considerable numbers.
As a state, most states, every state would seek to advance this position by actionable intelligence, reliable intelligence.
And certainly in the 70s and 80s,
with electronic means of intelligence gathering being not as sophisticated, anything like as sophisticated as they are now.
Human intelligence was the premium, so many agents were recruited, and this presented this state with a dilemma because they were run largely outside of a legal framework.
Well, that was certainly the dilemma that confronted the state in a number of cases.
We don't know how many cases, in other words, putting it bluntly, we don't know, we can't, I mean, I don't know in how many cases the lives of others were sacrificed in order to keep the agent in place.
But what we do know is
with a high degree of confidence is that, um, keeping agents in place source protection as it's known was the priority really.
Um, and, um, in a competition between that and saving lives, it wasn't always quite clearly saving lives often did take what was the, what,
was the outcome.
But usually, only when the state was satisfied, it didn't compromise the cover of the agent.
That's really the point.
But I just want to make another point.
This compromise, these legal and moral compromises, which are at the heart of my book, as you say,
didn't just relate to whether lives were, were sacrificed.
It, it, it also, you know, impinged very significantly on the criminal justice system.
And you'll, you'll probably recall that the, the defining mantra of ministers, British ministers was that this was the, the, the, the counterinsurgency was aimed at establishing the rule of law.
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