The Accidental Spy Page 13

  “Seems alright,” he said.

  Rupert: “In the trucking business, you got used to weighing cash. You got an envelope, weighed it quickly in your hand and agreed to a shipment. If there was a problem later, you sorted it out, so I was used to dealing that way.”

  Paul wished him well and Rupert left the hotel room and went back to Maureen. Back at their hotel room, Rupert opened the envelope. Inside was a mix of dollars and sterling and it was ten thousand short.

  Rupert flew into a rage. Nothing angered him like someone short-changing him or trying to take advantage of him. It brought back all the nightmare of the Drowes bar, and being stranded with no money, and of his bankruptcies.

  It was happening again. The authorities were always trying to get him for tax, for insurance, for vehicle registration and were now short-changing him on the most dangerous time in his life.

  “I was very, very hot about it. I called MI5 and the FBI, really really angry, saying this better get sorted out that very evening or I was walking away from the whole project. I called the M15 helpline. I was furious. God, I was so mad.”

  Rupert’s rage immediately reached the FBI Chicago office, which was six hours behind in time. They promised to sort it out. “I told them they better sort it out, with dollars only. They can leave the sterling.”

  Lundgren said he would take care of it but it would take some time. David and Maureen flew back to the US and David went to the FBI the next day. From now on, he was on strike, even though his flight for his next trip to Ireland was already booked. Maureen and Lundgren urged him to go to Ireland but that he didn’t have to work until Lundgren sorted out the money.

  Rupert flew back to Ireland but was adamant he would not do any work.

  Lundgren called Maureen and told her to meet him at a service station on a motorway outside Chicago.

  “You have to imagine just how impossible David was with the FBI at that time. He would shout things to them all the time, he was very demanding,” says Maureen.

  Rupert does an about-turn and comes back into his living room when she says that. “Necessarily. I was demanding because I had to be,” he said.

  Maureen: “So I drove out there to the gas station to get the money from Lundgren and he hands over exactly what David wanted, in dollars, and I had to sign for it. I was going to sign my name but Lundgren said, ‘No, just sign it Mrs Wristwatch.’ That’s how we discovered that David’s FBI code name was Mr Wristwatch.”

  Maureen counted the money on the spot and called David to confirm. “I swear to God, it was like a hostage negotiation with Lundgren in the middle. I’m counting money, calling David in Ireland and saying, ‘It’s all here, he can go now.’”

  Mr and Mrs Wristwatch. Rupert finally knew their code names. He already knew his M15 code name: Drumcliffe Echo. The FBI version was less poetic but easier.

  He also got his money. “I was being a dick, I admit that, but if I wasn’t, I could be completely ignored. Very few FBI agents go undercover, so they don’t know what it’s like to be facing castration, finger severing and execution if you’re caught. That’s what they are paying for.”

  Just when they had got that sorted out, there was another problem. The FBI Chicago office thought it would be a good idea if Rupert hired a yacht and asked Bernie and Mickey McKevitt out in it for a day’s sailing. They wanted either the Brits or the Irish to bug the yacht. Whichever agreed, Rupert could steer the boat to that side of the narrow Carlingford Lough, which lies right between the two jurisdictions.

  Rupert was militantly against the idea.

  “I asked Lundgren, ‘You want me to take them out on a yacht. Didn’t I see that in a movie? Maybe McKevitt has seen the same movie. I don’t know how to drive a fucking yacht, I’m not doing it.’ The whole idea seemed like the backdrop to a cheesy Hollywood thriller.

  “It was something out of the ordinary, and you can’t do stuff that doesn’t fit with other things around you. If I had been a big boat guy, maybe, but I wasn’t. And suddenly I had this idea to go get a yacht? It was crazy.”

  *****

  On 20 October 1999, after weeks of heavy surveillance, plain-clothes gardaí spotted known Real IRA men getting into a horsebox on a farm south of Dundalk with several young teens from the Fianna Éireann boy scout group.

  They were followed to Stamullen, County Meath. A larger group gathered at the ruins of a crumbling, disused mansion. A local farmer, Seamus McGreevy, could be seen opening two galvanised sheets that covered the house’s wine cellar. The group of ten, one by one, climbed underground.

  At 9.30pm, after darkness fell, the garda Emergency Response Unit donned masks and black boiler suits and ran at the wine cellar armed with Uzi machine guns and pump action shotguns. They grabbed John McDonough, a Real IRA member from Dundalk, who was acting as lookout above the entrance and grabbed two others who tried to escape up the ladder from the wine cellar.

  They threw down smoke bombs. One of the first to surrender was a crying, shaking 14-year-old boy who put his hands above his head, then a 16-year-old, both of whom were recruited by Alan and Anthony Ryan, the leaders of the Fianna Éireann.

  The others inside agreed to surrender. Leading them out was Seamus McGrane, the Real IRA director of training, whom Rupert first met less than two months earlier. Five others also came out, including the director of firearms training, Martin “Golfball” Conlon, one of the hardened South Armagh Provisional IRA members who had defected to McKevitt. Conlon was the only openly gay member of the South Armagh Real IRA. “He was gay and he didn’t give two fucks who knew about it,” one former comrade wrote about him online.

  The Ryan brothers, under shouted instructions, also came out, along with Damien Lawless, one of the two nameless men who, McKevitt had told Rupert, were scouting the international market for weapons.

  In the wine cellar, which was lit through a mobile generator, gardaí found a shoulder-held Russian rocket-launcher never seen in Ireland before, part of a large arms haul purchased by Lawless in the former Yugoslavia. They also found 40 detonators, bomb-making equipment, ammunition, an AK-47 assault rifle, a CZ 9mm submachine gun and CX pistol and ammunition. The 14-year-old told gardaí that he had been promised that he would learn some history and learn how to fire a gun.

  In court, a garda described the rocket-launcher as “a very formidable weapon”. It was clear that Lawless had already been successful on the international market and the group were training on the latest rocket-launchers and weapons, while teaching standards like the AK-47 and the submachine gun to the young recruits.

  I was surprised the Ryan brothers were involved. I had known them for three years up to that time. They struck me as intelligent, if politically naive, and I thought that they would soon tire of Fianna Éireann’s uniform fetishism and get jobs in Dublin’s booming tech sector. It struck me how addictive the adrenaline rush of their clandestine world must be and how difficult it was to walk away.

  David Rupert was back in Ireland, and agreed to continue the operation now that the FBI had handed over the money to Maureen.

  The Real IRA had sent word through an intermediary that Rupert should go to the Fairview in Dundalk, a small hotel on the Belfast Road. From there, he would be picked up to meet McKevitt.

  McKevitt’s son, Stephen, pulled up in a new silver Alpha and took Rupert to the pretty seaside village of Blackrock, south of Dundalk, overlooking the Irish Sea.

  Blackrock was where the newly expanding middle-class of Dundalk dreamed of living, close to the town but with long, pristine beaches, preserved sea marshes and open countryside to the south.

  Stephen took him to a two-storey house with a low fence in the front. It was a pleasant setting, where a comfortable bank manager might live.

  McKevitt greeted him with warmth and a big smile. Bernadette Sands McKevitt was down in Dublin, an hour and a half to the south, to lead a 32 County Sovereignty Movement meeting.

  They went into the living room to talk. Rupert gave him $
10,000 in fundraising money from the IFC.

  Rupert thought that McKevitt would be upset about the raid on the wine cellar, and the loss of 10 people, but he was almost dismissive. “If it was a year ago, it would really have hurt us, but now, it’s just a bruise,” he said.

  The loss of arms in the bunker was also not a big deal. He had taken far more from the Provisional IRA’s bunkers and, after the Yugoslavia war and the Gulf war, Europe was flooded with cheap weapons.

  The rocket-launcher found in the bunker, purchased in Yugoslavia, had cost less than £300 and there were many more.

  He did, however, miss Seamus McGrane, his director of training, and Seamus McGreevy, the farmer who ran the bunker. Both were long-term friends. McGreevy, a former Provisional IRA member from Fermanagh, had moved down south to take over a farm. He was extremely loyal to McKevitt. He was a bachelor and devoted himself to farming and to the Real IRA. Any extra money he got went to help prisoners when they were released.

  McKevitt was worried that the state might confiscate McGreevy’s farm under post-Omagh anti-terrorist legislation because he was using it for Real IRA training.

  It would not be good for publicity if the Real IRA released a statement saying that anyone who bought the McGreevy lands from the state would be shot, so he did it “the Irish way” and spread news locally that nobody was to have any part in the confiscation of the land, or its sale.

  His biggest concern about the raid was that he believed the Provisional IRA, hoping to disrupt the Real IRA, must have tipped off the gardaí. (When he was released from prison, Martin Conlon, the gay South Armagh arms expert found in the bunker, was kidnapped, shot twice in the back of the head and his body dumped at the side of the road. Asked in an interview if it was responsible, a Real IRA representative said the organisation had no comment.)

  McKevitt was confident and upbeat. The release of Provisional IRA prisoners had brought new recruits and he believed he now had the best of the bomb making “engineering division” on his side. His organisation was crippled and almost collapsed after Omagh but now it was back as strong as ever. It was on tactical ceasefire, he said, as a move to recover from mass arrests after Omagh, but was ready to strike hard against the British.

  The big attacks would be in England and they would start soon in London, he said. The men were already in place and waiting.

  McKevitt did nearly all the talking for three hours. Rupert nodded his head and laughed at the right moments.

  “He was as relaxed as anyone in his position possibly could be. I liked him on a lot of levels, he was smart but there was this brutality behind it. It wasn’t ’til you got away from him that you really thought about exactly what he was saying – bombs in England,” said Rupert.

  McKevitt mentioned two sleeper agents in Boston. The first was not a success because he drank too heavily and talked too much and was being thrown out of his apartment. The second was very different. He was a decorated member of the French Foreign Legion who had worked on a South African arms deal for McKevitt before being sent to Boston. In the IRA training camps, he had shown himself to be by far the best shot, and was an excellent assassin. He was too valuable to be brought to Ireland, where he might be caught, but would be recalled to assassinate “Tony Blair or somebody of that calibre” when the time was right.

  What McKevitt really wanted, he said, was a spectacular attack against the British establishment, so notorious that it would generate headlines around the world and overshadow the damage caused by the Omagh bomb.

  Frank O’Neill was flying in from Chicago that morning. McKevitt wanted him and Rupert to meet Bernadette the next day.

  McKevitt shook his hand warmly. It was their first meeting alone. It could not have gone better, Rupert felt.

  Another son dropped him back to the Fairview Hotel, where he booked for the night.

  Up in his hotel room, he wrote a long email, warning Paul in MI5 that the Real IRA would start up their campaign again soon, that it would be aimed at military targets in the north and, more importantly, England, and specifically London, and that they were waiting for the right time to strike. It would give the UK authorities time to plan, and to find suspects in London. He also warned of a sleeper assassin in Massachusetts who would be brought back to kill a major British political figure.

  His emails were developing their own dynamic. He was deeply immersed in dissident republicanism but didn’t fully understand the politics. He repeatedly spelt Gerry Adams as the American “Jerry Adams” and used the abbreviation “JA”. That suggested he was not reading much about the wider political context. He referred to leaks to the media as “press releases”, leading to confusion in MI5, and he repeatedly called Michael Donnelly’s ill-fated political movement the “Anti-Patrician League” instead of the “Anti-Partition League”. In essence, if anyone intercepted any part of his emails, or fished them out of a bin, they would know an American wrote it.

  Paul, in particular, showed great concern about security and about whether Maureen fully understood what her husband was getting into.

  That night, life permanently changed for David Rupert. His email from the Fairview Hotel reached the top of the state security apparatus, as well as Tony Blair and the British cabinet. A cabinet briefing document was headlined “Real IRA ready to resume campaign, London likely target”. Rupert was too wound up to sleep and continued answering M15’s follow-up emails until after 4am.

  The next morning, he woke up groggy.

  They met at 11am in McKevitt’s house in Blackrock. Bernadette Sands McKevitt was there, for her first meeting with Rupert. Tough-jawed, with a defining Sands flat nose she inherited from her mother, Bernadette had short dark hair and her clothes were either turtlenecks with a pendant or just plain and inoffensive. Bernadette bore a close resemblance to her brother Bobby. And, as Bobby Sands’ sister, Bernadette was republican royalty. She herself had been mentioned in Bobby’s smuggled prison communications. She had joined the IRA after her brother was jailed for possession of weapons in the 1970s and visited him frequently when he was first in prison.

  In the 1970s, the Provisional IRA gave Bernadette an incendiary bomb to smuggle into Belfast city centre, past the city’s new security gates. When she got to the centre, one of them went off, setting her coat on fire. She threw it off and fled, with IRA protection, south of the border to Dundalk, which had become the IRA’s southern headquarters. When Bobby went on hunger strike to gain political status in 1981, she campaigned for him in the south. When he was elected an MP, the world’s media gathered to watch the unfolding drama. He died, aged 27, on 5 May 1981, after 65 days on hunger strike. Around 100,000 people turned out at his funeral and Northern Ireland was convulsed by riots and shootings. Bernadette, wanted in the north, had to watch it all on television from Dundalk. The night after his death, the Grateful Dead dedicated the song “He’s Gone” to Sands at a concert in Long Island. In India, the opposition party stood in silence for him, and the Longshoreman Union in New York implemented a 24-hour boycott of British goods. Some 5,000 students marched for Sands in Milan, while protesters occupied the British consulate in Ghent, Belgium. Over time, five French cities named streets after him. The British embassy in Tehran, to this day, sits on Bobby Sands Street, a deliberate insult. In Havana, there is a memorial to him. The mural of him on the side of the Sinn Féin building in Belfast is one of the most photographed images in Northern Ireland. He is as iconic an image for the IRA as Che Guevara is for the Cuban regime.

  When Bernadette denounced the Good Friday Agreement, many joined her, simply because she was a Sands. “My brother didn’t die for cross-border bodies,” she said. “He died for a united Ireland.”

  Rupert found her very friendly and polite, not a hothead or visibly angry. Many people, including Republican newspapers, noted the close resemblance between Bernadette and her brother, which made her all the more iconic.

  “She kept a clean house, she had well-behaved children,” Rupert recalled. “S
he looked like this neatly-dressed suburban mom except that she would turn on you in a heartbeat if she thought you’d crossed her.”

  They were joined at the meeting by McKevitt’s second-in-command, Liam Campbell, who had been the officer commanding the Provisional IRA in South Armagh, one of the most respected positions because South Armagh was as close as the IRA had to an independent republic within Northern Ireland. Hundreds of soldiers, police officers and civilians had been killed there and the IRA operated largely with impunity.

  Campbell was known as a fearless and ruthless fighter, who had kept the British pinned down in South Armagh for decades. He also ran its cigarette and alcohol smuggling business, which brought in millions in profit, for him and for the cause.

  He grew into the IRA in South Armagh. His older brother, Sean, blew himself up while planting a landmine in the 1970s. The family had heard the explosion and just assumed it was another IRA bomb until a priest and neighbours came to the house. Liam Campbell was banned from Northern Ireland from his early 20s because of his heavy campaign of bombings. Northern Ireland was right behind his house. He was not shy of publicity – he was photographed in the Irish Press newspaper, jumping over his back wall, one inch inside the Republic of Ireland as the photograph was taken.

  He had a visceral energy and would arrive at McKevitt’s house at 8am and say, “Let’s go to Cork to meet the volunteers”, then drive 200 miles to Cork, hold a meeting, drop McKevitt home and drive to Derry, 150 miles away, for another meeting.

  Like Bernadette, the death of his brother gave him the stamp of official republican martyrdom. His family held an annual commemoration for Sean Campbell. Liam made it clear that Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA were no longer welcome.

  With McKevitt’s approval, he directed all Real IRA operations and made the botched and imprecise warning calls before the Omagh bombing. Shaking hands with Rupert was, essentially, the person primarily responsible for the worst atrocity in modern Irish history.

  Frank O’Neill had flown in from Chicago and was the last to join the meeting.