The Accidental Spy Read online

  From his cottage in Sligo, Donnelly would get a lift from his sons to come to Joe O’Neill’s bar in Bundoran and a lift around the area from Rupert.

  Wherever they went, Continuity IRA members and republicans who were against the agreement shook Donnelly’s hand and praised him for standing up to McGuinness and the Provisional IRA, who they denounced as sell-outs to the British establishment. As his driver, it gave Rupert extra credibility.

  As he sat there with his leg in a cast, many customers in O’Neill’s offered him a drink.

  “Mickey’s stature went up and up after he was almost beaten to death,” says Rupert. “He went right out there and called Sinn Féin traitors for signing the Good Friday Agreement and they almost killed him for it, so that really made him a martyr to the cause in Joe O’Neill’s place.”

  In Joe O’Neill’s bar too, that summer, was Seamus McKenna, son of Sean McKenna Snr, another of the hooded men.

  Seamus McKenna, who served IRA prison sentences in the north and south, was surviving on the labouring work he got from Colm Murphy, a Continuity IRA leader, in the booming Dublin construction trade. He was an alcoholic and would disappear from work for weeks at a time to go drinking. Bundoran was his favourite place to go. Sometimes he took the bus, using a travel pass borrowed from a retiree in Dundalk.

  He often drank alone, starting at 11am, consuming pint after pint of a Dutch lager that he said gave him less of a hangover than the Irish lager, Harp. I know this because I spent many hours drinking with him, trying to understand his mentality. He spoke longingly of Bundoran and Donegal, and how much he loved Joe’s pub.

  In 1998, McKenna had big sideburns and spoke with a thick border accent. He looked like a relic from 1970s Ireland. He was not a major figure within the Continuity IRA and Rupert might not even have met him at Joe’s place.

  The Continuity IRA used McKenna only for mixing fertiliser explosives and delivering car bombs to their targets. He was, in IRA parlance, “expendable”. He knew that himself, and it was eating him up.

  Picture him there, in the corner of O’Neill’s bar, drinking by himself, trying to chat up the barmaids.

  He is a small, insignificant man. He has no real relevance to this story, except that he is about to turn Ireland upside down.

  CHAPTER 9

  The morning of 15 August, 1998 opened with the promise of a late summer. Temperatures rose to the mid-20s, families drove in their thousands to the beaches of Ireland. Those who had gone abroad for August lamented their choice. The country was in celebratory mood. The republic’s economy was booming, the ceasefire in the north was holding. A country whose economy had been crippled by outdated industry was flourishing in low-tax financial services and technology, and peace in the north was bringing a rush of investment.

  That day, David and Maureen were climbing Benbulben mountain in Sligo, made famous by the poet W.B. Yeats. Down below them was the village of Drumcliffe, where Yeats grew up and where he is buried. In honour of his connection to the area, M15 had recently given Rupert the code name Drumcliffe Echo.

  It was a warm, cloudless Saturday. That morning, I went hiking on the coastal path in Wicklow, between Bray and Greystones. On one side was a family of seals bobbing in the deep blue of the Irish Sea, on the other was the heather of the Wicklow Mountains. A narrow coastal path ran between them.

  Along the way, I saw a piece of graffiti about David Trimble, the leader of the largest unionist party in the north, written with marker at a rest stop: “Trimble will Tremble When the Boys Reassemble. Up the IRA.” It struck me as a little more advanced than most IRA graffiti. Whoever wrote it longed for militarism to replace the agonisingly slow and hostile talks in Belfast.

  That summer morning, a friend of mine, Jerome, was walking into Dublin with his Spanish girlfriend, Anna, who ran her fingers through the air as she walked, to feel the warm summer breeze.

  In England, my friend Ian was working as a hotel manager and had some overbooked guests to deal with.

  As Maureen and David were beginning their climb up the Horseshoe, an outcrop at the back of Benbulben mountain, Seamus McKenna was getting into a stolen maroon Vauxhall Cavalier in a farmhouse in Carrickmacross, just south of the border. Beside him was a 19-year-old recruit, and in the back of the car was a 500-pound bomb.

  Colm Murphy, the Continuity IRA’s liaison to the Real IRA, had given one of his foremen’s phones to McKenna the night before for use in the bombing mission.

  Getting into a scout car ahead of them was Seamus Daly, a 28-year-old Real IRA member from Culloville on the Irish border, who communicated with the bomb car using Colm Murphy’s own phone.

  The same South Armagh bomb team had been adjusting their targets all summer. In June, they had left a car bomb in Lisburn outside Belfast but a phone warning from Liam Campbell, the second in command of the Real IRA, was given too far in advance and the police discovered the car bomb and defused it.

  On 1 September, they parked a car bomb in Banbridge, County Down, with a much shorter phone warning. It exploded, devastating the town centre and injuring 33 people, including a police officer, who suffered a fractured skull. This was considered a big success in celebrations at Murphy’s Dundalk pub, the Emerald.

  An equally short bomb warning would be used for this mission. On the morning of the bombing they were told the target was Omagh, the largest town in County Tyrone. Unlike all the other targets that summer, Omagh had a Catholic nationalist majority and was chosen to spread the geographic distribution of the bombings.

  The town was busier than usual. Peace had brought much more funding for community projects. There was to be a carnival in Omagh that day, which was attracting parents with young children. It was also close to the start of the new school year, and parents were coming into Omagh to have children fitted for uniforms.

  As the car took off, eight-year-old Oran Doherty was joining a group of Spanish and Irish children on a trip to Omagh from Buncrana, just over the border in Donegal. They visited the Ulster Folk Museum, another museum that had sprung up with peace funds. At the last minute, the tour organisers changed plans to allow the children to do some shopping in Omagh, and to see the carnival.

  Rocio Abad Ramos, a 23-year-old Spanish woman, was helping to lead the group.

  21-year-old Aiden Gallagher finished up fixing a car at the family mechanic business and said he’d see his father later.

  Avril Monaghan, 30, nine months pregnant with twins, was in town to celebrate the birthday of her mother, Mary Grimes, before Avril gave birth in a few days’ time. As Avril and Mary talked, Avril pushed her 18-month-old, Maura, in a stroller.

  Esther Gibson, a Sunday-school teacher, had walked into town to buy flowers for her church.

  By 2pm, as the town was thronged with carnival lovers and shoppers, Seamus Daly parked the scout car in Dunnes Stores car park and waited. Seamus McKenna, eager to impress the young recruit in the car with him, drove up the main street to the courthouse, the intended target. But he had not considered that the carnival and good weather had brought a big crowd into town and the court car park was full.

  He drove in a circle and parked the car on Market Street, outside S.D. Kells clothing shop, where parents were bringing their children for school uniforms. It was 2.19pm.

  The 19-year-old opened the glove compartment and primed the bomb by switching up two toggle switches. A passer-by remembers him very carefully closing the passenger-side door. McKenna, always with an eye for the women, gave a passing woman a big smile. They walked a short distance around the corner to Seamus Daly’s car and drove away.

  A tourist, with his young daughter on his shoulders, posed for a photograph, right beside the bomb car, unaware of its contents.

  As he drove away, Seamus Daly texted Campbell, in coded language, to say everything was in place.

  Campbell drove to a phone box and, using latex gloves, made a warning call that there was a car bomb at the Omagh courthouse, using the Real IRA code word “Martha
Pope”, who was a member of the American delegation at the peace talks in Belfast. The name was also a play on Catholicism, as if the bombs themselves were blessed by the Pope.

  The bomb call was serious enough for the police to start clearing the large numbers of people from the other end of town and direct them up Market Street towards the car bomb.

  As they were chatting in the scout car, McKenna told Daly that there was no parking in the courthouse and that the bomb car was up the main street. He didn’t know its name.

  Daly called Campbell, who made a second phone warning, saying that the bomb was on “main street” in Omagh.

  None of these men were familiar with Omagh, and didn’t know the street names. Police were directing the public in tighter and tighter packs away from the courthouse and towards the bomb. There were two streets in Omagh that could be defined as the main street, adding to confusion. Shoppers were being pushed further up both streets when the third warning call came, in quick succession from the second, saying the bomb was 350 yards from the courthouse, on the main street.

  There were now twice as many people at the top of Market Street than there would be on a busy Saturday.

  Mary Grimes, her heavily pregnant daughter, Avril, and her granddaughter, Maura, went into Kells clothing store, walking right in front of the bomb car.

  At 3.05pm, a senior policeman advised officers clearing the street to get people “well short of the courthouse” as there were three different locations for the bomb. As he was talking, the timer in the front of the glove compartment connected two wires, sending a full circuit that travelled through a wire to a booster tube at the back of the car, which was connected to a block of Semtex and 500 pounds of fertiliser explosive. A supersonic wave exploded, followed by thousands of pieces of metal and burning fuel erupting in every direction. It collapsed the drapery store, trapping the families inside under a falling roof. Mary Grimes, Avril Monaghan, and Avril’s daughter, Maura Monaghan, 18 months, and Avril’s nine-month-old unborn twins were killed instantly.

  Bodies of children lay behind the bomb crater, their blood mixing with the water pouring from a severed water pipe. One volunteer who ran to the site found a decapitated woman and a dead mother clutching her dead baby.

  Rocio Abad Ramos, who had rushed the children up Market Street during the bomb alert, was killed instantly. Four children died with her: James Barker, 12, Fernando Blasco Baselga, 12, Oran Doherty, eight, and Sean McLaughlin, 12.

  Fernando’s sister, Donna Marie, was hit in the face by burning fuel and metal and was scarred for life.

  Breda Devine, 20 months old, was killed instantly. Her mother, who suffered 60 per cent burns to her body, was unconscious for six weeks before she discovered her baby was gone.

  Some shoppers had been blown through shop windows by the blast.

  Aiden Gallagher was lying on the street, barely breathing. Esther Gibson was dead.

  One man jumped into the smoking bomb crater, pulling up rubble, crying and searching for a child.

  Constable Geoffrey Eakin spotted the body of a man some way from the bomb with part of his face missing.

  “I saw a young lady in shock, totally oblivious that her lower leg was on fire. A lot of people were on fire. I got a fire extinguisher out and basically went around putting the flames out,” he said.

  Police set up an emergency mortuary in an alley and each officer was allocated three bodies to attend.

  The first body placed in PC Eakin’s charge was that of a decapitated woman.

  “There was no head on the corpse at all – just taken clean off. In contrast, the body of a small child appeared to be totally intact,” he later recalled.

  PC Allan Palmer remembered the scene at Tyrone County Hospital.

  “People were running about with parts of bodies. Someone ran in and handed a limb to a constable,” he said.

  An amateur camera captured the immediate scene. It shows a middle-aged woman with blood on her blouse, lifting her shaking hands in the air. A crying Spanish student limps by, with blood pouring from her head.

  Marion Radcliff, with glass still cut into her scalp, walked around the dust and rubble crying for her 16-year-old son, Mark. Volunteers broke sign boards from collapsed shops and used them as makeshift stretchers. Omagh Hospital was overwhelmed.

  Helicopters arrived to lift the injured to Derry and Belfast.

  Michael Gallagher, Aiden’s father, remembers the helicopters lifting off, like something from the war in Vietnam in the 1970s, “but it was women and children they were lifting,” he said.

  The 5pm news reported that an explosion had killed at least eight people in Omagh. Phone logs showed a frantic round of calls between Campbell, Daly and the others as they asked each other what happened and then hurried home to dispose of evidence.

  The death toll rose throughout the day – eight, then 12, then 16, then 18, then 21.

  Elizabeth Gibson, searching for her sister in Omagh Hospital, remembered the blood-soaked hospital documents lying all along the corridor.

  Michael Gallagher went to the hospital to visit his son Aiden, who was clinging to life. Doctors eventually came out and said that they were not detecting brain waves and that Aiden was fading. Michael went home to his family. They hugged, wordless, and cried.

  Claire Gallagher, unrelated to Michael, was a talented young pianist who was planning to study music. She lay in a hospital bed, blinded for life. Over 200 people were injured, some with massive head fractures, others with missing limbs.

  David Rupert was sleeping on the sofa of the apartment after the long walk up Benbulben. He switched on the 6pm news. An RTE newswoman reported that a bomb had devastated Omagh and that rescue workers feared that more than 20 were dead and the death toll was rising.

  He called over Maureen. They sat and watched the footage in silence.

  Eventually, Maureen uttered, “Oh my god, oh my god.”

  After the news, Rupert got up and drove over to Joe O’Neill’s house, behind the pub. Joe, who had dreamt of a bomb to grab the world’s attention, was looking scared. “He looked more worried than someone hearing about a bomb. It was a guilty look. He looked sick,” said Rupert.

  Joe told Rupert that the Provisional IRA, which had already nearly killed Michael Donnelly, would not stand for this disaster, and would start killing Continuity IRA members, and there would be mass round-ups by the police.

  “I wanted Joe to tell me to go, and he did,” said Rupert. “Go back to America, go quick and we’ll talk,” said Joe, and he closed the door. Where now was Joe O’Neill’s romantic attachment to the Continuity IRA?

  Rupert rushed back to the apartment and told Maureen. They packed up immediately. “We have never, ever got out of town that fast. It was a whirlwind. It was a sad and dangerous time,” said Maureen.

  David called the MI5 helpline. They said they would get him a flight as quickly as possible, anywhere out of Ireland. They called back. They were to drive to Belfast. They had a flight to Edinburgh, and then a flight to London.

  I was coming back into Dublin after my hike. I was due to see a band in the city centre with my friend Jerome and his girlfriend Anna. Anna, who normally greeted me with a big smile, was waiting for me at the venue, her face stern. The show had been cancelled. “Why?” I said. “There has been a bombing in the north,” she said. “Many English, Irish and Spanish people dead.”

  We walked into the bar. People were gathered around a TV screen watching in silence. More than 94 per cent of the Republic’s voters had approved of the Good Friday Agreement in a referendum in May. The very people they were trying to stop had given their blood-soaked response.

  I left the bar and walked home, passing my newspaper offices. A sub-editor came out for a cigarette, put his hands to his eyes and quietly sobbed.

  In Omagh, the death toll climbed to 29, plus Avril Monaghan’s two unborn babies. As she was due to deliver in a few days, most people now put the death toll at 31. The majority of them were
children or teenagers. It was the worst atrocity in the 30-year history of the Northern Ireland Troubles, and it came after the people, north and south, had voted overwhelmingly for peace.

  In England, my childhood friend Ian was in the staff apartments of the hotel, crying in front of the TV as the death toll rose.

  That night, the bomb team gathered in Colm Murphy’s bar, the Emerald, in Dundalk.

  Kevin “Kiddo” Murray, a fat, squat Real IRA man who had helped relay the bomb messages to Liam Campbell, was pacing up and down the bar, looking concerned.

  Seamus Daly and Seamus McKenna were drinking with Colm Murphy, with a practised lack of concern.

  Terence Morgan, the building foreman whose phone Colm Murphy had borrowed the night before, noticed Seamus Daly laughing. He began to wonder if his phone had something to do with the outrage in Omagh. Daly came up to him and said, “It was you who brought the yoke to Omagh.” Morgan said he looked at Daly in silence then walked away in disgust. He was appalled, but it was a vital clue.

  In the days after Omagh, there was universal and unqualified revulsion. It rose above those of previous IRA atrocities to become something more – a tear in the national psyche. The country had never been so affluent, so self-assured, so willing to bury the certainties of nationalism and sectarianism. It was as if the bombers wanted to destroy not just a town centre, but the new national confidence.

  In Dundalk, the McKevitts, who watched the scene unfold on television, fled their home immediately.

  At the gift and T-shirt shop they owned in a Dundalk shopping mall, people began to line up to leave small toys and cards for the lost children of Omagh.

  When Bernadette Sands McKevitt came back several days later, the management had changed the locks and ordered them out. Crowds cheered as she was escorted from the shopping centre.

  In the White House, President Clinton, embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, vowed that he would visit Omagh during his upcoming trip to Ireland. Gerry Adams, the Sinn Féin leader, who for years had refused to condemn republican violence, said that he condemned the bombing unequivocally.