you understand...spooks

The other night, yes after 33 years on the planet, I was talking to a man who seemed to fully understand my sentence: "My dad used to run spooks."
He told me to tell my father thank-you, because he wouldn't be alive as a high-calibur person if it weren't for some of the work my father did.This stranger who said thanks is a competant engineer/builder/marksman/beyond master-diver, etc.

Everyone else just thinks I'm crazy.