But if an agent is a murderer, and his handlers know that he is murdering people, does that not make the handlers – and, as such, the state itself – complicit? British Army sources would subsequently claim that the efforts of double agents saved many lives. But they allowed that such numbers could only be ‘guesstimates’, and this sort of thinking can degenerate pretty quickly into a conjectural mathematics of means and ends. If a spy takes fifty lives but saves some larger number, can that countenance his actions? This kind of logic is seductive, but perilous. You start out running numbers in
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