The Accidental Spy Read online

  They went back inside. Martina wished David and Maureen a safe journey on their hour-long drive back to their apartment in Bundoran.

  Maureen got into the rental car with David and they drove off. As soon as they were on the road out of Derry, Maureen took out her notebook. “Today, Mickey Donnelly talked about…” began Rupert. Maureen wrote quickly.

  Back at the Donnelly house in Derry, Mickey and Martina were cleaning up after the meal and putting the wine away. Donnelly was happy that Rupert seemed interested in moving away from the Continuity IRA and towards McKevitt’s group.

  As Martina was washing the dishes, she turned to her husband.

  Michael Donnelly still remembers her words: “Isn’t it funny,” said Martina, “that a self-made millionaire like David collects receipts for the smallest things he buys. What would a multimillionaire want to keep petty receipts for?”

  “I said, ‘Maybe that’s the sign of a successful businessman,’” Donnelly recalls.

  “She said, ‘Well, maybe he has to give the receipts to somebody.’”

  “I couldn’t have been happier in my marriage and I knew my wife,” says Donnelly. “She was well read and a good judge of character. I immediately listened to her. I tried to dismiss it from my mind but I started to think back. I remembered David reaching into his pocket for something and a big bunch of receipts coming out. It was a small doubt at first, but every time I spoke to my wife I thought about it and it began to fester.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The Wolfe Tones, the IRA’s favourite band, were playing before a heaving, sweaty mass in a community hall in Bundoran. Their most famous song, ‘Celtic Symphony’, was blasting. As usual, the lead singer turned to the crowd and cupped his ear. The crowd chanted back their support in unison, “Ooh, aah. Up the ’RA! Ooh aah. Up the ’RA!”

  The Wolfe Tones attracted a large and rough crowd, a chance for IRA supporters of all factions to put aside differences and drunkenly hug each other to songs that celebrated the war against the Brits.

  IRA sympathisers sold T-shirts and calendars from a table at the back of the room. The calendars had a different balaclava-wearing IRA member and a different weapon for each month of the year. July was the RPG [Rocket Propelled Grenade] shoulder-held missile, a weapon of such effectiveness that a west Belfast street has been renamed in its honour.

  The bouncers on the door, as arranged by Joe O’Neill, were David Rupert, for height and strength, and a New Jersey bomb disposal squad officer, who will be named here only as Mr Gray (not his real name).

  Mr Gray was a long-term Continuity IRA supporter. Every summer, he came back to Ireland to march in Republican Sinn Féin’s hunger strike commemorations.

  He was also an expert in bomb disposal and, by extension, in bomb creation.

  After the last concert-goers were inside, Mr Gray chatted with Rupert. Through the design of the Continuity IRA, both doormen were Americans – Rupert the CIRA funder and Mr Gray the bomb expert.

  Mr Gray talked about his contacts in the movement and how he was about to go to Belfast to meet Continuity IRA people, through Joe O’Neill’s arranging, to share what he knew.

  “So we just keep talking and I’m making a mental note of everything,” says Rupert. “You have to be concerned about this guy because he’s not some Irish American loud mouth. He has knowledge that could do a lot of damage.”

  Rupert has already been getting to know another police officer from New York, who also marches at Republican Sinn Féin events and is trying to encourage other police officers to do the same. He is also photographed in the Republican Sinn Féin newspaper, Saoirse.

  “This second guy was of far more danger to me personally because he was from New York and he was in a position to run a background check on me and find out about the collapse of the trucking company and a lot about me locally. He had a girlfriend in Donegal and a wife in New York, so there was a lot going on with this guy.”

  That night, Rupert wrote a report on both men to the FBI Chicago office. They passed it on to New York and New Jersey FBI, which began an immediate investigation.

  “The FBI were real interested in the bomb disposal guy. They asked me a lot of questions about him but didn’t tell me what they were going to do. They never did,” said Rupert.

  While still in Bundoran, news came through from Michael Donnelly that Mickey McKevitt, the Real IRA leader, wanted to meet Rupert and Phil Kent, the Canadian IRA gun-runner, who had flown to Ireland. A date was fixed for Sunday, 29 July 1999.

  At first, MI5 was incredulous that Rupert would be meeting McKevitt.

  “They were cautious. They didn’t want me to burn my contacts with CIRA if nothing was going to come of meeting McKevitt,” says Rupert.

  Rupert went back to the apartment in Bundoran and discussed it with Maureen.

  “I thought, ‘Oh wow, we are in a very different place now,’” says Maureen. “These people would kill us in a second if they knew the truth.”

  July 29 opened up with summer showers and warm spells between the heavy clouds blowing in from the Atlantic.

  Donnelly arranged to meet Rupert at the bed and breakfast where Kent was staying. It was owned by an older Continuity IRA couple. Like Donnelly, they longed to move to the Real IRA and had told McKevitt that they wanted to make the switch.

  Rupert knew the father very well, through Joe O’Neill, and learned that the man’s teenage daughter, Mairead (not her real name), had a government job in Dublin. She also moved detonators and other bomb parts on the public bus from Dublin to Donegal, where they were assembled into bombs.

  “I saw Dave leave to meet McKevitt,” says Maureen. “I said, ‘Great, you’re going to meet bad people so they can bring you to really bad people.’”

  At the bed and breakfast, Rupert met Kent, who was in a jubilant mood about meeting McKevitt.

  Donnelly was concerned that Joe O’Neill might find out he was poaching Rupert and Kent from the Continuity IRA.

  “I didn’t want Joe O’Neill knowing about Phil Kent and our meeting,” Donnelly said. “His people would have tried to put a stop to it.”

  That Sunday morning, Donnelly and Kent got into Rupert’s rental car. Just as Rupert was about to leave the driveway, Mairead came rushing out of the house, got into the car and hugged Donnelly around the neck. She wanted to let him know, that if Donnelly was breaking away from the Continuity IRA to join McKevitt’s more active group, he had her family’s complete loyalty.

  She got out of the car, almost in tears and Rupert drove out of the driveway and east out of Bundoran.

  They were to meet McKevitt at the Slieve Russell Hotel in Ballyconnell, County Cavan, in the middle of the border region.

  *****

  As they crossed into Cavan, Kent said there were problems with Mr Gray. Rupert froze. Kent said that the FBI had dragged Mr Gray in for questioning about his Continuity IRA links and told him that he would be kicked out of the police and lose his pension if it was true.

  Mr Gray was now back in Bundoran and angry because the FBI had said they saw him with Phil Kent. Mr Gray screamed at Kent, accusing him of turning on him while in immigration custody in New York the previous spring.

  Kent had managed to calm him down. He said they had been seen together at republican commemorations in Bundoran and that the garda must have passed on the information to the FBI.

  Rupert nodded in sympathy. Inside, he was furious. He had only just told the FBI about Mr Gray and they had already busted him. He stayed calm – he would deal with it later.

  They arrived at the Slieve Russell hotel and there was no sign of McKevitt. Donnelly needed to call him but his mobile phone was down. Rupert immediately offered his.

  Donnelly called four numbers to reach McKevitt – one Northern Ireland mobile phone number to reach Maurice, a Real IRA man, and the southern mobile number and landline of Seamus McGrane, the Real IRA’s director of training. Those numbers were now stored in Rupert’s phone, to be passed on later to
MI5.

  In the final call, Donnelly spoke to McGrane, who said that he and McKevitt were watching the All-Ireland Gaelic football semi-final between Meath and Armagh.

  McGrane said to meet them at 6pm at the Four Seasons Hotel in Monaghan. A little after six, McKevitt and McGrane arrived.

  McKevitt had a disarmingly warm smile. A handsome man in his youth, his hair was beginning to recede and he kept a baseball cap pulled down over his face, as much for vanity as disguise. He had big eyes and spoke with the long drawl of the east coast border counties. He had been shot in both knees by republican rivals in the 1970s and occasionally had stiffness of the legs, but not on this day. He was in a very good mood.

  McGrane had thick black hair and a moustache. He had swarthy features with dark eyes. His hair was short and straight but bristly and naturally stood up from his head. Rupert was struck by his intelligence and economy of speech. These men were different from the Continuity IRA. They were efficient business managers of the Provisional IRA for decades and had now broken off on their own.

  Donnelly introduced Rupert and Kent as two very good republicans with a track record in the US.

  It was clear to Rupert that McKevitt had already been briefed on both him and Kent. He kept his attention solely focused on Rupert, who introduced himself as the number two man for the Irish Freedom Committee in Chicago.

  Like Rupert, McKevitt saw Kent as an ageing has-been, someone who had once set up arms deals all over the world for the Provisional IRA but who was now living on nostalgic stories and past reputation.

  “Phil would start going on about the past and McKevitt would pull it right back to the present, and address it to me,” said Rupert.

  Donnelly had huge respect for Kent and was trying to edge him into the conversation. “I really liked Phil, I thought he was very wise. He just wasn’t wise that day in bringing Rupert with him to the meeting,” said Donnelly.

  McKevitt and McGrane came straight to the point. They needed a US political and fundraising wing and wanted the Irish Freedom Committee to switch from the Continuity IRA.

  McKevitt turned to the Omagh bomb. He told Rupert that it was a Continuity IRA operation and that he and his men had simply supplied the bomb parts. He was angry that Republican Sinn Féin had publicly denounced the bombing and distanced themselves from it. “They were supposed to share the blame but they turned tail and ran,” he said.

  Rupert saw that McKevitt was disciplined. He explained that the Real IRA was going well and was getting ready to strike but that it was weak in Belfast, where the Provisional IRA was at its strongest and was moving to peace.

  McKevitt impressed Rupert. He seemed to be truthful and willing to admit where his organisation was weak. He wasn’t like the loudmouths he had seen in the Drowes or in Joe’s bar.

  An hour into the meeting, McKevitt raised the issue of two members of a sleeper cell he was creating in Boston, who were there solely for weapon procurement and that more details would follow.

  The final item on the agenda was procuring weapons on the global market. Kent, eager to get back into the conversation, mentioned that he had spent time in Cyprus and had obtained weapons in the 1970s, through the local leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The man, said Kent, worked in architecture in the 1970s and his wife worked in an office.

  Rupert cringed.

  “And how do you know these people are even still alive?” demanded McKevitt.

  “I don’t know it for sure but they probably are,” Kent said.

  For Rupert, it was excruciating.

  “Phil just came across as desperate to impress but he had nothing to bring to the table and they knew it. It was like he wanted McKevitt to say, ‘You did big things for us in the 1970s, you’re a hero,’ but McKevitt didn’t care.”

  There was a pause in the conversation.

  Kent said he knew a Limerick businessman who owned him some favours and might be able to help.

  There was silence at the table.

  “Right,” said McKevitt, staring back at Rupert.

  McKevitt then mentioned that he had two men on the international market who were looking for some sophisticated new weapons.

  Kent interjected that if the weapons were that sophisticated, maybe McKevitt and his men might not know how to use them.

  “At this point, McKevitt and McGrane almost fell off their seats,” said Rupert. “Don’t worry, we’ll know how to use them,” said McKevitt. McGrane laughed with him.

  McKevitt again directed his attention to Rupert, appealing for help in winning over the Irish Freedom Committee and its fundraising and support networks in the US. He said that the Real IRA was now referred to as Óglaigh na hÉireann (Volunteers of Ireland) or simply “the army” and that they were waiting for the anger surrounding the Omagh bomb to subside so they could begin a new bombing campaign.

  Rupert said that he would do all he could to win over Continuity IRA supporters in the US and that he had already won over Chicago. “Good, good, good,” said McKevitt. “We’re going well.”

  It was coming up to 7.30pm. Rupert was keen to get out of there before Kent said any more.

  McKevitt and McGrane left first. The hotel bar had no window in that section, so Rupert had to get up and walk a few feet to see if he could identify their car.

  Kent, thinking Rupert was getting up to leave, told him to sit down and let McKevitt and McGrane leave first. Rupert had to think fast, so he said he had to go to the bathroom. From the toilets, he could see a red Volkswagen leave the hotel.

  He walked back into the lounge and he, Kent and Donnelly walked back to Rupert’s rental car. Kent was silent and sad.

  Donnelly was excited. He had made that vital connection between the US fundraising wing and McKevitt.

  Rupert was delighted because he was being brought in, quickly, to the Real IRA.

  Rupert drove Donnelly back to Derry and then Kent back to the guesthouse in Donegal before making it back to his own apartment in Bundoran.

  “I remember being really happy with the meeting but also pissed off that I had to drop Donnelly all the way to Derry city, which was way off the road home. I didn’t have Maureen with me in the car to take notes, so I’m trying to keep all this information accurate in my head until I get home to her. I wanted Donnelly and Kent off my back and to start writing.”

  Back in the apartment before 10pm, Maureen made tea while he clicked on the computer and began to write thousands and thousands of words, more than he had ever written since agreeing to email MI5 and the FBI two years earlier.

  “Big Day!” he began. “If I was worried about it being slow when I got here, it all changed today.”

  The message was addressed to both Paul, his new handler at MI5, and his friend Mark Lundgren in the Chicago FBI office. He detailed the entire day and every word he could remember but added a sharp admonishment to the FBI.

  The arrest of Mr Gray, the bomb disposal officer, was “upsetting to me and I don’t know what can be done about it”. Mr Gray is “of course quite upset about seeing his pension disappearing,” he wrote.

  What scared him most about the arrest was that McKevitt and McGrane were lifelong terrorists, who were intelligent and very shrewd and had survived the worst of the Irish Troubles. They had improved their skills over decades and he pleaded with the FBI not to make any near-term arrests of anyone he mentioned in emails.

  “There are new people that are going to come to the surface and you will want to pick up… if that is done, this new group of people are much smarter and it will wind up on my doorstep fairly quickly,” he wrote.

  The FBI assured him that they would be much more cautious in future.

  Everything changed for David Rupert that day. He was now in what intelligence services saw as the most professional, well-armed and ruthless terrorist group in Europe. He was never as badly needed.

  The geography of his life was also about to change. His entire experience in Ireland, from his fi
rst encounter with Joe O’Neill and Linda Vaughan, had been on the western Atlantic coast of Ireland, where the Continuity IRA was strongest.

  The Real IRA was largely an east-coast phenomenon, mostly located north of Dublin in the border town of Dundalk and in the IRA heartland of South Armagh, just over the border.

  He warned MI5 that night, “I see an entire new playing field now, probably much more dangerous, or at least I would have an entire new respect for my subjects,” he wrote. “I think we need to rethink my cover, especially in the States.”

  The FBI gave a limited response but Paul at MI5 was ecstatic.

  In a response email the next day, he peppered Rupert with questions.

  Paul knew that within the internecine world of Irish republican politics, Donnelly, a republican hero, was unfiltered and ambitious and would soon find himself in conflict with McKevitt’s overarching ego. The key challenge, Paul said, was to find a balance between the two men without alienating either.

  Paul seemed to accurately know the psychology of Donnelly, the ambitious extravert, and McKevitt, more guarded but just as ambitious.

  Overall, Rupert was delighted. There was now a real chance to infiltrate the Real IRA and get close to its leadership. “At this point,” wrote Rupert to MI5, “I feel that the fire already has more than enough fuel so we will let it produce some heat.”

  CHAPTER 12

  The InterContinental Grand Hotel rests in the centre of Paris, overlooking the Palais Garnier opera house. Paul, the MI5 agent, was waiting.

  David and Maureen were staying at a hotel near Charles de Gaulle Airport. Maureen stayed in the room while Rupert took a cab to the InterContinental and met Paul in his hotel room.

  He briefed Paul on the meeting with McKevitt and Paul handed him an envelope. Rupert was expecting $20,000 for his recent work in Ireland.

  He lifted the envelope and weighed it in his hand.