The Accidental Spy Read online

  First published by Mirror Books in 2019

  Mirror Books is part of Reach plc

  One Canada Square

  London E14 5AP

  England

  www.mirrorbooks.co.uk

  © Sean O’Driscoll

  The rights of Sean O’Driscoll to be identified as the author

  of this book have been asserted, in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Hardback 978-1-912624-28-7

  Trade paperback 978-1-912624-18-8

  eBook 978-1-912624-36-2

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior

  written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of

  binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Every effort has been made to fulfill requirements with regard to

  reproducing copyright material. The author and publisher will be

  glad to rectify any omissions at the earliest opportunity.

  For Sarah Hale, without whom

  this book simply could not have been written.

  For my parents, PJ and Enda, for Yvette Moya Angeler,

  Michael Gallagher and for the people of Omagh.

  INTRODUCTION

  The first time I saw David Rupert was on the front page of a Sunday newspaper.

  It was a picture of a smiling, heavy-set American man at an Irish republican fundraising event in Chicago. I picked up the newspaper at a Spar shop in the centre of Dublin. Other people were picking up the same newspaper, one after another, reading the headlines and looking at the photo.

  The headline screamed that the FBI and MI5 had planted a spy inside the army council of the Real IRA and that its leader, Mickey McKevitt, and a dozen others, had been arrested.

  This mysterious trucker turned FBI informant immediately became the object of a media obsession and endless rumours in Ireland. Who was he and where did he come from? Was he an FBI agent posing as a trucker, or a trucker who joined the FBI?

  One tabloid newspaper reported that he was from Madrid, Spain. Others quickly corrected it – he was born in Madrid in upstate New York. Every major UK newspaper sent reporters there to discover who he really was. His sister, the local school secretary, received a call from a journalist claiming to be his sister and explaining that the family needed his school photo. When his real sister explained who she was, the woman hung up.

  In the centre of Madrid, reporters were dressing up in waders and redneck T-shirts, trying to blend in with what they thought rural America looked like, as they roamed around town searching for answers.

  They discovered that he had since moved to the American Midwest. A British reporter called the beauty salon in his new home town to find out if his wife was a customer and if they sold butt implants.

  The Sunday Times and the Boston Globe had reporters parked outside his house, waiting for him for days.

  Reporter after reporter tried to interview his family and friends, his former workmates and his three ex-wives. Book deals were offered through his lawyer – there have been four journalists before me who have tried to tell his story, but each time he walked away.

  After the journalists came a wave of Irish republicans and private detectives, driving into town looking for anything to discredit Rupert. His brother drove one Real IRA supporter away with a handgun.

  All that time, Rupert and his wife, Maureen, were touring America in an FBI-hired car, staying out of Irish bars and anywhere the press were likely to gather.

  “I was good at that because I’m never one for talking to strangers,” he said.

  His reticence is what impressed Real IRA leader McKevitt in the first place. A large, stoic, unmoved American was also perfect as a spy for the FBI and MI5.

  It is this reticence that has kept Rupert an enigma for so long. 17 years later, as I was writing this book, the BBC sent two reporters back to Madrid after they heard he was talking to a journalist. After begging Rupert to talk, they, like many before them, went home without a story.

  My contact with Ireland’s most elusive spy came through Facebook. I spent 20 years writing about the Real IRA and other republican groups and I had become good friends with Michael Gallagher, the head of the support group for the Omagh bomb victims. I saw that Rupert was also Mr Gallagher’s Facebook friend. I first wrote to him seeking a quote for the Times after the European Court of Justice praised his evidence against McKevitt as reliable and consistent.

  I was surprised when he replied to my query. He would co-operate with my article on one condition – I should try to get an article published in the local newspaper in Madrid so that his sister and friends could read it.

  It was so heartwarmingly parochial a request that I instantly liked him. He had been vilified by defence lawyers as a liar, a philanderer, an opportunist, a snitch, a terrorist and an arsonist, yet he appeared to be quite a humble man, someone concerned with the slow-moving politics of his home town and someone who disliked the drama of the international media.

  As soon as I wrote the article in the Times, there were immediate requests from other journalists for his contact details, but he refused to say any more. Over time, in many, many hours of conversation, the complexity of his personality emerged, and the reasons for his reticence became apparent – both the obvious concerns about an IRA revenge attack and the culture of small-town America, which distrusted big-town media and the fleeting fame it offered. I hope I have done justice to his complex personality and the most extraordinary story I have come across in 20 years of journalism. I hope it answers many unanswered questions and raises some uncomfortable questions for security forces in the US, Ireland and the UK. Most of all, I hope it helps to explain the combination of injury, rage and ego that fuels international terrorism and the quiet patience it takes to bring it to an end.

  CHAPTER 1

  On a quiet wooded road, in a state the FBI does not want named, sits a two-storey house where leaves gather in the driveway and pine cones roll across the porch. It looks like any other house in this sloped, forested road except for the two English mastiffs that patrol the perimeter and the security cameras discreetly placed in the eaves.

  A camera swivels every so often if one of the dogs barks loudly at a squirrel or a passing stranger.

  The owner, in T-shirt and shorts, walks slowly to the gate.

  His movement is deliberate, pushing his towering frame forward with his chin up and his arms swinging in front of his belly. He is 300 pounds with a boyish smile that makes him look like an overfed toddler dressed in adult clothes.

  He extends a shovel-like hand in an upward movement of greeting. “How ya doin’?”

  His left leg has a chunk missing, earned while trying to stop a dog fight when he owned six mastiffs.

  His jovial greeting is tempered by a flinty addition, “You didn’t bring any other visitors from Ireland with you, did ya?”

  On the front door hangs a small pumpkin, and just inside the door, his wife, younger and slimmer, offers squash and pepper soup. Her arm carries a visible scar from the 142 stitches she needed when one of the dogs bit her. They used to have a lot more ill-tempered dogs when security was tighter.

  Standing arm in arm in the hallway, the couple look like an oddity from National Geographic: he, the leader of a lost tribe of giants and she, the smiling anthropologist who found him.

  Leaning over the sofa, he offers tea. It is autumn and they have just returned from the farmers’ market.
The silence in the living room is filled with the sound of two mastiffs rapidly sniffing the air. They know the farmers’ market bags mean there is meat, they just don’t know where it’s stored.

  Behind him, as he speaks, there is a miniature carved harp, a gift from Irish republican prisoners. It sits like an artefact from another dimension, incongruous and disjointed in this scene of blissful Americana. I don’t like it, amid the soup and the autumnal leaves and the rolling woodland, yet it’s the reason I am here. It is the reason the dogs and security cameras are here and why this couple are living in the woods, and not in the big city.

  Its presence is a pulsating and shrill alarm, pulling us out of mid-afternoon tea and soup and transporting us to bomb-making factories on the Irish border and the screams of a market town on a carnival Saturday.

  “So,” he says, wrapping his hand around a tea cup that seems to shrink to dollhouse scale, “where do ya wanna begin?”

  *****

  My rental car barely crests the top of the Adirondack mountains. I can feel the back wheel slip and the car jolt and hang just over a flood culvert. I move to first gear and slide across the road and over the top.

  It is ink dark and the only lights are the stars, my headlamps and the fluorescent glow of a convenience store and gas station. I stop there for a glazed doughnut and an instant coffee that sticks to the top of my mouth. “If I was you, I’d turn back ‘til spring,” says the store clerk.

  It is November and there is a radio warning not to travel unless necessary. I have to get to Madrid, more than eight hours’ drive north of New York City. The temperature is already dropping and, the Weather Channel says, the roads will be covered in a thick blanket of snow in two days – four feet is expected in places.

  It will continue snowing all winter, and St Lawrence County is hurrying for winter preparation, when life slows and residents wait for the gradual emergence of colour in March and April.

  When I get to Madrid, I book into a motel and walk around the next morning. It is a neat, pretty little town of 1,600 people just south of the Canadian border. There is a Native American reservation nearby and, until recent integration, there was a strong French-speaking population who owed allegiance to Quebec, just over the St Lawrence River.

  The town’s Spanish settlers have, like the French, long since integrated, and I’m told at the motel that the town is pronounced MAD-rid, with a distinctly American emphasis on the first syllable.

  The local library had, until recently, a permanent display honouring its most famous son. There were photographs of David Rupert, his mobile phone and computer, and newspaper articles from all over the world chronicling his story.

  Now few young people in the town have heard of him. I have heavy frost on my breath as I ask around town. The young librarian doesn’t know who he is, nor does the clerk at the local convenience store. Everyone over the age of 50 simply says, “Oh, you mean Joebe?”

  David Rupert was born in July 1951, the youngest of seven children, and was raised on a farm in the remote woodlands three miles outside Madrid.

  His father’s family, and many others, had fled New York City to escape Washington’s advancing army in the War of Independence. They were British loyalists who had fought their fellow Americans through the Hudson Valley until the cause was lost, and America was won.

  Linguists link the northern St Lawrence dialect to that of the Appalachian Mountains, and Rupert was 12 years of age before he learned in school that Russia was against, and not “agin” America, and that writing “prinnear”, meaning “pretty near”, brought a drop in grade.

  Six children came before him: Bud, Dale and three sisters, Wanda, Bonnie and Betty. The sixth, Gary, died in his cot, leaving a seven-year gap between David and the next youngest brother, Dale.

  His paternal grandfather was tall, over 6ft, and hefty, and so were his maternal uncles. Those genes combined to create, in the final baby, one that set new family and hospital records.

  His father, a manager at the local aluminium plant, nicknamed his rotund, two-year-old son after the hefty Montreal union agitator Joe Beef.

  Joe Beef was condensed to Joebe and when I interview Betty and Wanda they both try to say “David” but tell me that it sounds odd, and say it’s easier to refer to their brother by his nickname.

  By kindergarten, Joebe was double the height and width of the two local girls in his class.

  Betty recalls that he was “this big, smiling kid that we babied and made such a fuss of”.

  By the age of eight, he was too big for hand-me-down clothes from Bud and Dale and had to be driven into Madrid to the teenage section of the drapery store.

  When he was 11, he was 6ft 1, weighed 270 pounds, and loomed awkwardly over the other children. That same year, Wanda came back from business school in nearby Watertown and locked her brother out of the house as a joke. He got worked up and kicked the lower half of the door in.

  “He’s 11 years old and he’s kicking the door down. I got in trouble for that one. He really was a very big boy,” Wanda recalls.

  At 12, the boys his age shared jokes about how America could fight off Soviet nukes by putting Joebe’s fat belly in their way.

  His standard response to the name-calling was simply, “I’m twice as tall as you and twice as smart as you, so shut up.”

  His mother would hold him when he told her about the bullying and say, “Every mother’s lamb is the whitest.”

  She had left St Lawrence County only twice in her life and urged her son to travel. “Go out into the world and make some noise,” she said.

  Progression through adolescence would not be easy. He had astigmatism in his left eye, leaving school texts blurry and confusing.

  He compensated by slowly memorising large passages of books at home and then reading them out in class. He developed a very strong, close to photographic, memory that became his single greatest accomplishment in school.

  He was a rebel, Wanda recalls, but it was largely directed and quasi-political. He organised several sits-ins at the school canteen when the food rations were sparse, a pragmatic act of defiance for a teenager who weighed twice as much as those around him.

  Being so big had advantages. He looked 25 or 30 and could get served alcohol in any bar. At age 15, he lost his virginity to a much older married woman who believed his claim that he was 25. She met him in a bar while her husband was out of the country and she was looking for fun.

  Being sexualised in mid-1960s America, long before his classmates, had a profound effect. Women came easy and it began a safari hunt for new female company that was to last 30 years.

  His height and size also allowed him to bluff his way into work. At age 16, 6ft 7 and 300 pounds, he left school and got a job in construction, his employers believing his was at least 25.

  War came in Vietnam and, aged 18, he was drafted. A military bus brought him and the teenage boys of Madrid to the induction centre in Syracuse. A doctor deemed him medically obese and he was immediately discharged, while all his friends went on to boot camp. A military bus was offered to army rejects later that day. He couldn’t wait that long to leave and took a Greyhound bus back to Madrid and the crying hugs of his mother.

  From there, he was expected to follow his father and sister, Wanda, into the Alcoa aluminium plant in Massena, a larger town east of Madrid.

  Joebe and the other teenagers would place a flattened Zippo lighter in their hands and walk beside the magnetic cylinders where the aluminium was reduced. The Zippo, pulled by the magnetism, would stand up in their hands.

  The magnetism pulled the galvanised zinc from mailboxes on the other side of the road, leaving them rusty on the plant side and shining and new on the other.

  Residents complained about cancer scares but in 1960s America, it never made it past the St Lawrence County planning office.

  His father died from smoking unfiltered cigarettes and, Joebe believed, the 30 years of magnetism pulling the iron in his blood.

&nbs
p; He decided at the funeral, while shaking hands with the factory managers, that he would never work in the aluminium plant.

  By St Lawrence standards, Massena was a cosmopolitan hub. Immigrants moved in their thousands from New York City to work in the ever-expanding aluminium plant. There were Cuban girls, and Mexican, and French. The family, like many in the area, were “very vaguely anti-Catholic and anti-French,” he recalls. Two years before he died, his father told him to wear orange on St Patrick’s Day to annoy Massena’s growing community of Irish Catholics. When his sister later married a Catholic, his mother said, “Your grandfather would turn in his grave if he saw this.”

  Hormones have their own prejudices and Joebe found the freckles and milky skin of the Irish girls the most beautiful.

  Aged 21, he started dating Tamara Buckley, an Irish American woman in Massena. She was five years his elder and he was impressed by her maturity. They married the following year.

  He got a job working for his new father-in-law selling pensions and insurance with the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company.

  It was the first of a series of jobs that would result in other people losing money.

  Joebe had developed a rebellious, outsider mentality, and it fed into how he viewed his role in society.

  He discovered that he could earn insurance commissions before the insurance or pension sale was complete. If the deal fell through, brokers would have to give the money back to the company. By the time he left Northwestern two years later, he owed thousands and, in addition, a $2,000 loan from his father-in-law’s boss.

  That same year, he declared bankruptcy to escape repaying the money, the first of several trips to the bankruptcy courts.

  He was gaining a reputation in Massena.

  One former acquaintance, out walking his dog before the snow enveloped the town, recalled, “He was kinda all over the place. Not a bad guy but kinda shady, like he could smile one past you.”

  His two years with Northwestern were his one and only venture into white-collar office work.

  He didn’t feel he belonged in “their” world.