The Accidental Spy Read online

  It is difficult to articulate the disgust and anger and helplessness people felt that week. It was a surge of energy that coursed through the country.

  The sight of little white coffins being carried by sobbing grandparents convulsed the country.

  The Irish newspapers, long frustrated with having to refer to the leader of the Real IRA as “a former quartermaster of the Provisional IRA” who had “close links” to a group run by Bernadette Sands McKevitt, broke all their libel rules in the aftermath of the bombing. McKevitt was named as “the alleged leader of the Real IRA” by the British newspapers, and the Irish papers quickly followed.

  In Blackrock, the village just south of Dundalk where the McKevitts lived, local residents announced that they would lead a protest march to the couple’s home.

  Bernadette called a local priest, sobbing uncontrollably, saying she feared the protesters would harm her children. Mickey McKevitt took the phone and told the priest he had “no hand, act or part in the Omagh bomb”. It was a lie, of course. He had carefully put together the Real and Continuity IRA teams to build and deliver the bombs. The priest told reporters what he had been told and that the family did not want their children harmed.

  The next day, a more composed Bernadette was on national radio, saying in passive verbs that the bombing in Omagh “was condemned”, without saying that she personally condemned it. When asked if she supported the Real IRA, she asked what the interviewer’s agenda was in asking that question. The hardened IRA woman had rediscovered her composure and was back, as unapologetic as ever.

  The Real IRA’s spokesman called the Ireland International news agency anonymously, claiming responsibility for the Omagh bomb, saying that it was aimed at economic targets as part of “the war against the Brits”.

  The reporter read the statement back to him. “Do you want to say anything to the victims?”

  “Yeah, and an apology to the victims,” he responded.

  That week, writers and artists struggled to find expression for the enormity of what had happened. Her whole adult life, Bernadette had carried huge respect among republicans because she was the sister of hunger striker Bobby Sands, the IRA’s most revered martyr. Now, his death cult had pointed back at her.

  Irish writer Dermot Bolger wrote a poem to mark the children’s funerals, blaming the Sands cult for their deaths.

  “Hovering like Christ above the mourners/The ghost of Bobby Sands smiled his boyish Bay City Roller smile/And held out withered hands/As they lowered each the coffin of someone’s daughter or son/He called like the piper of Hamelin, Come, little children, come.”

  Paul Durcan, the republic’s favourite poet, wrote a long, angry poem, in which he replaced the Catholic list of venerable names for the Virgin Mary with the birthplace of all the Omagh victims, followed by a second litany of their names, and a third litany of their ages. It had a powerful, repetitive, mournful effect.

  He ended with a cry to the collective guilt of the Republic, long steeped in ambivalence towards republican violence. “Omagh have mercy on me,” he wrote.

  The Real IRA held an army council meeting in Dundalk to decide on whether to declare a temporary ceasefire, to give it enough time to reorganise. Bernadette Sands McKevitt and Mickey McKevitt voted in favour of the ceasefire. Liam Campbell, the man primarily responsible for the atrocity, voted against. He wanted to continue the bombing, regardless of public opinion, but lost the vote.

  The group did call a ceasefire but refused to make it permanent. The rage of the public grew. People gathered in thousands in Dundalk, demanding the group disband.

  Hillary Clinton wrote that the shock of the bomb reminded her of all the times she had met women from all over Ireland to talk about ending the Troubles. It was the middle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and in Omagh, she found common mourning.

  “Now that’s what I had to try to do in the midst of my own heartrending troubles,” she wrote.

  She, Bill and Tony and Cherie Blair walked the streets of Omagh in early September. Hillary was struck by how much Gerry Adams and other hardliners had softened their position since the bombing.

  An Irish government representative met Mickey McKevitt, Bernadette Sands McKevitt and the leadership at Clonard Monastery in Belfast, warning them that if they didn’t permanently shut down, they could expect the worst from the state. McKevitt immediately refused, saying that disarming would leave the Real IRA helpless to revenge attacks from the Provisional IRA. It was an excuse; he was already planning to restructure the Real IRA and begin a new bombing campaign.

  In London, Rupert met Harold, his second MI5 handler. There was frantic activity in MI5 and the FBI.

  Rupert was to gather as much information as possible about the Continuity IRA’s involvement in the bombing.

  The Irish garda was woefully ill-equipped to take down the leadership of a terrorist organisation. It had never convicted anyone of terrorist offences or used wiretap equipment. It had never used an informer in court to accuse anyone of being a member of an IRA army council. It had spent years watching McKevitt’s home without ever securing a conviction against him.

  The Irish parliament, reacting to a public outcry, rushed through some of Europe’s strictest anti-terrorism laws, which removed the right to silence in terrorism cases and allowed someone to be convicted of IRA membership on the word of a senior garda. It also introduced a new offence: directing terrorism, which carried a maximum life sentence, and allowed for the confiscation of farmland and houses if they were used for aiding terrorism.

  The investigation into Omagh began on both sides of the border. It was to be the largest murder investigation in Irish history, involving interviews with thousands of witnesses, and tens of thousands of individual police actions.

  A clerk who worked at a police station in Monaghan remembers the piles of paperwork. “It took up an entire wall, from floor to ceiling, just on Omagh.”

  Their single biggest problem was the decades of experience that McKevitt and the Real IRA had built up in defeating police investigations, and there was nothing directly linking Mickey McKevitt to the Omagh bomb.

  What the southern police urgently needed was someone close to Mickey McKevitt, who could prove that he really was directing terrorism and bring Ireland’s 30-year-long nightmare to an end. All of those close to him were completely loyal. They needed someone from the outside to come in and get close to him. MI5 believed they just might have the right person.

  CHAPTER 10

  Rupert drove to the ancestral home of US president Woodrow Wilson, just inside Northern Ireland, two miles south of Strabane in County Tyrone.

  With peace funds, the house had been restored to its original condition. It was a pretty, red-doored, two-storey country house with whitewashed walls.

  Inside were mementos from the Wilson family and a board showing the family tree and details of their journey from Northern Ireland to the White House.

  Tourist figures had been hit badly by the Omagh bomb. There were few people around. A car pulled up. It was Andrew, an MI5 agent who was working on Rupert’s case.

  He walked to Rupert’s car. Andrew lit up a cigarette. MI5 very much wanted to get the Real IRA leaders. He was intrigued by Mickey Donnelly, who was disillusioned with the Continuity IRA and defecting to the Real IRA. He listened and puffed as Rupert filled him in on Donnelly and his thinking. Rupert had told Donnelly that he was trying to buy a cottage in rural Derry or Donegal and wanted Donnelly’s help in finding a place. He had the Drowes bar before, so he had credibility. It would give him a chance to talk to Donnelly and win his confidence.

  Andrew nodded. He liked where this was going.

  They drifted to talking about Linda Vaughan, Maureen and Rupert’s glide through Irish women.

  “Why do you like Irish women so much?” asked Andrew.

  “Because they’re easy to sleep with,” said Rupert, laughing.

  Andrew grimaced. “I should let you know that I’m Irish myself,” he
said.

  “Oh, I meant no offence,” said Rupert.

  “I was scrambling, I remember that,” said Rupert. “Turns out he was from just below the Inishowen Peninsula in rural Donegal. He didn’t sound like it.”

  They both agreed it would be inadvisable for them to visit Wilson’s home together, so Andrew switched to his own car and drove off.

  The next day, Maureen, David and the still-injured Donnelly drove around the countryside, crossing over the border between Derry and Donegal, looking at cottages.

  “How about this one?” said Donnelly as he pulled himself slowly out of Rupert’s rental car and held up his crutch. David and Maureen also got out.

  It was a quaint, isolated cottage in the foothills of the Donegal mountains.

  Donnelly: “David had this little rental car that was way too small for him. He looked really funny in it. At the time, when we were driving around looking at houses, I thought it was ridiculous. It wasn’t ‘til later I started wondering, ‘Why this particular car for such a big man? Is there something special about this car?’”

  By then, Maureen and David had given up their house in Tullaghan and moved into an apartment a mile away in Bundoran. It was among a group of holiday apartments near the sea. They both liked it and it was a good base from which to focus on Michael Donnelly, who was drifting further and further towards the Real IRA. Donnelly was impatient with the Continuity IRA and wanted revenge for what the Brits did to him, and to Ireland.

  The day after he had driven around with Donnelly, Rupert looked in the passenger door of the rental car and found Andrew’s cigarettes. He was furious.

  “I couldn’t fucking believe it. They were an English brand of cigarettes. I don’t smoke, neither did Maureen. How would we explain that if Donnelly or Joe O’Neill or anyone had seen them in the car? It’s one of those things that plants doubts. I called and wrote to MI5. I was pissed off.”

  It was to be a lasting change in the operation.

  “I told them that from now I would not meet them anywhere in Ireland. I’d meet them in London or somewhere else or communicate by email but I didn’t want to see their faces in Ireland, ever. I was really annoyed.”

  By now, David and Maureen had worked out an effective system for their spying business, reliant on nobody else.

  Maureen would either join David at meetings or join him afterwards. In each case, he would say aloud his recollections of everything that had just occurred in the meeting and Maureen would write it down in the notebook as they drove back to the apartment in Bundoran.

  Once inside, she would give him the notes and he would email encrypted details of the meetings to MI5 and the FBI.

  When he was finished, they would take Maureen’s notes and burn them in the sink.

  “I was happy to play a back-up role,” says Maureen. “It was a very sexist world they lived in anyway. It was nearly all men in Continuity and the Real IRA. Women stayed at home at looked after children.”

  Her husband gave her the nickname “99”, the female assistant and love interest in the comedy spy show Get Smart.

  More and more, Rupert was holding himself out as a self-made trucking millionaire, who could afford to take his wife to Ireland for weeks at a time. The money he was bringing from Chicago fascinated Michael Donnelly, who increasingly saw himself, in the post-Omagh turmoil, as the person who would lead violent republicanism on a new broad front of resistance to the British.

  In February 1999, Donnelly, still recovering from his beating, invited David and Maureen for dinner at his house in Derry.

  Donnelly was in a strange position: he hated McKevitt because of the Omagh bombing, yet he needed a ruthless, well-equipped leader like McKevitt to restart the campaign.

  “Republicanism never recovered from Omagh,” Donnelly told me. “Nobody was hostile to my face, but it knocked the heart out of it for me,” he said.

  “Were people like Mickey McKevitt reckless?” I ask.

  “Yes, I have no doubt they were. You came across it all the time. They were isolated down south. Some of them had never crossed the border in 30 or 40 years. They thought that anything went, in terms of killing civilians, but living here [in Northern Ireland], we look at things in a very different way.”

  So McKevitt didn’t see the human side of it? “That’s putting it mildly, he didn’t care,” Donnelly says emphatically.

  With the Chicago IFC’s approval, Rupert would give Donnelly a few hundred pounds of fundraising money every time he visited, for Donnelly’s family, and to fix his stalled Citroen car.

  David and Maureen met Martina, Donnelly’s wife, who had been one of the most committed female IRA members in Derry.

  “She was such a kind, lovely woman,” says Maureen. “I just couldn’t imagine her getting involved in violence. They had a nice, clean house and adorable children. At dinner time, they blessed themselves and we said grace together. They were such good people and yet there was all this violence in the background.”

  Maureen was getting better and better at acting the American ingénue in Ireland. She behaved like she knew little of the IRA and was simply on holiday with her husband.

  To this day, Michael Donnelly still does not know the extent of her role in writing out hundreds of pages of notes of her husband’s recollection of meetings, including with Donnelly himself.

  “Maureen was a lovely woman,” says Donnelly. “A nice Irish-American woman who hadn’t a clue about what her husband was doing in Ireland. She had a big personality and she was fun.”

  The four exchanged talk of family and the weather and the difference between Americans and Irish. Martina and Maureen stayed talking at the table, while David and Michael went out the back door to talk about “republicanism”, as Michael Donnelly puts it.

  “That’s how it was from then on,” says Maureen. “War was a man’s business and I wasn’t supposed to ask too many questions, that’s how they saw it in Ireland.”

  The same week that David and Maureen visited the Donnelly home, Channel 4 broadcast a Continuity IRA propaganda video, in which it vowed that the fight against the British would continue. Channel 4 said that the video had come from a Continuity IRA contact in Derry. It became the main source of footage of the Continuity IRA for the media and, today, a still from it features on the Continuity IRA Wikipedia page. It shows three men in balaclavas in front of an array of weapons, including a hand-held grenade launcher, an AK-47 assault rifle and a Magnum revolver.

  When Rupert saw the video, he laughed. One of the men in balaclavas was wearing tear-away tracksuit bottoms with a white strip down the side and had snap buttons all the way down both legs.

  “After the Provos broke his leg, Mickey always wore a pair of dark tracksuit bottoms with a white strip. They had buttons down the side so it could be opened and closed easily by the doctors and the dressing could be changed without having to take them off. So when I saw the video on the news, I immediately said, ‘Hello, Mickey.’”

  Donnelly smiles broadly when I ask him about the video. “I’m not in that video. My wife did buy me a pair of tracksuit bottoms when I was in hospital but it wasn’t me.”

  Does he know who is in the video? He smiles again. “Well, you’d be surprised who is in it. It’s a small world,” he says.

  Donnelly phoned Rupert shortly afterwards. He was setting something up. David was to come to a meeting in Derry. Maureen could come too. Some big people would be there.

  They drove north to Derry in silence. It was raining heavily. They were led by car to a Victorian terraced house. It was dark and foreboding. The house was badly lit and the grey skies outside offered little light.

  At the table sat Donnelly and Eddie McGarrigle, an Irish National Liberation Army leader who had been in a wheelchair since he was shot in 1984. McGarrigle, who would never walk again, was one of the most feared INLA men in the city. Beside him there was a female INLA member and another dissident.

  Maureen and David sat down.

&nbs
p; Donnelly introduced the Ruperts as the American fundraisers who could help with weapons. It was clear that he was trying to impress the group with his connections.

  He and McGarrigle both spoke about the need to revitalise the armed struggle and how they would have to refocus and engage the community in a new wave of war.

  Rupert could see that this was an important meeting. “I was told the guy in the wheelchair was high up in the INLA. I guessed he wasn’t put in a wheelchair out of his own choosing. He looked pretty tough. I remember the room being really dark and the atmosphere was really dark.”

  Maureen: “We walked out of there and I thought, ‘Oh my fricking God, is this the level we are at?’ This was a turning point for me. This wasn’t IRA songs with the good old boys in Joe O’Neill’s bar. This was dark and sinister and absolutely terrifying. The woman terrified me as much as the guy in the wheelchair. I couldn’t wait to get out of there and let David write his emails. I felt that there was a bridge being crossed here.”

  That year, Donnelly and Martina invited the Ruperts to their home several times. The house was under close surveillance by the British army, which kept a camera at the end of the street. “If I went to the shops, the camera would suddenly swing in my direction, so I knew they were watching,” Donnelly said. Rupert felt the heavy surveillance on Donnelly might help him, if things went wrong.

  Martina Donnelly was starting to observe David more closely. She had spent her adult life in the IRA and had some nebulous intuition about him, that he might not be who he claimed to be. Primarily, according to Michael Donnelly, she had noticed that Rupert collected receipts for everything he purchased, a claim Rupert denies. Donnelly said he began to notice that David would lead off conversations talking about importing weapons and would ask Donnelly what he needed from America.

  One evening, after a meal and wine, Michael and David went out the back of the house to talk. Donnelly said that he was making good progress with Mickey McKevitt about starting a new campaign and wanted Rupert to meet McKevitt and his men.