The Accidental Spy Read online

  McKevitt had a big announcement – that he was going to appoint a US representative to the Real IRA army council. The representative wouldn’t have voting rights, but they would be there for full transparency, so that they could see how the fundraising money was being spent and report it back to America.

  This, he said, would avoid the “old Provo shenanigans” in which millions in US fundraising money went unaccounted.

  O’Neill immediately looked at Rupert. “This is our man,” he said, as Rupert travelled back to Ireland four or five times a year.

  “This was a huge opportunity,” says Rupert. “But I wasn’t sure how the FBI and MI5 would feel about me on the ruling council. I said, as vaguely as I could, that we would have to report back to the members of the Irish Freedom Committee and see what they say.”

  O’Neill and McKevitt liked the answer. He was not rushing in. They could wait a few months until the bombing campaign began. Both McKevitt and Campbell assured him that the campaign in England would start soon and that a US representative could verify to American supporters that the money was being well spent.

  Over tea, the four of them discussed their most immediate problem: Rupert was in serious trouble with the Continuity IRA for defecting to McKevitt’s side.

  Rupert was expected to go to the Republican Sinn Féin Ard Fheis in a few days. He already received word through Joe O’Neill that Des Long and the Continuity IRA army council were unhappy and wanted to speak to him.

  Bernadette suggested Rupert should go, otherwise the Continuity IRA army council would feel betrayed and might take action against him. She felt he should be diplomatic and explain the decision he had taken, with Frank, to move to the Real IRA.

  McKevitt immediately overruled her, saying that there was no way he should go down to Dublin, as the CIRA would try to get him back and “badmouth” the Real IRA.

  McKevitt looked at Rupert. His underlying anger began to show. “If they threaten you,” he said, “we will have people call at their doors and threaten to shoot them.”

  David Rupert, trucker, was now stuck in a tense stand-off between Ireland’s two most prominent terrorist groups. Both wanted him, and the money and support he offered, and the threat of violence grew.

  They all agreed. Rupert should not go to Dublin.

  McKevitt told Rupert to go to Joe O’Neill before the Ard Fheis and explain to him that he was moving his fundraising to the Real IRA.

  Rupert drove westward across the country the next day and met Joe in his bar. O’Neill’s tone was harder than it had ever been before. He was depressed anyway about losing his seat on Bundoran council; Rupert’s sudden defection to the Real IRA was adding to his sadness.

  “Joe told me that they had taken me in on trust and that I was now taking everything from them,” said Rupert.

  He mentioned that McKevitt was reshaping the Real IRA and wanted Republican Sinn Féin to be its political wing.

  “Over my dead fucking body,” said O’Neill. “We have our own thing going.”

  It was the last conversation Rupert would ever have with his old friend. They had known each other for seven years and it was time to say goodbye. Time for Rupert to move on to bigger things. They shook hands and Joe escorted him to the door.

  Rupert drove away, listening to an audiobook, and booked into the Carrickdale Hotel on the Old Newry Road in Dundalk, where Frank O’Neill was staying.

  That night he couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned, wondering if the Continuity IRA leadership would accuse him of robbing army funds. This was a very serious situation – he was essentially stealing all of their US fundraising and support operation and moving to McKevitt, all because MI5 wanted him to get closer to the Real IRA.

  The next day, he took Frank from Dundalk down to Dublin Airport and told him to take a taxi from there into the city centre for the Ard Fheis. “Alright,” said Frank. “You do what you gotta do.”

  Rupert: “I left there immediately, drove all the way up to Bundoran to get my stuff from the apartment and left immediately for Dundalk. Bundoran was Continuity IRA people and Dundalk, on the other side of the country, was Real IRA people, where I’d be safer. I was driving along thinking, ‘I’m safer with the Real IRA, as long as they don’t know I’m FBI and MI5’ and that all made sense to me.”

  *****

  The car pulled up at a house in Dundalk. Stephen McKevitt told Rupert to walk inside.

  He was being led into his first bomb team meeting. They were at the very top of the engineering department preparing bombs for Northern Ireland and London. McKevitt was already there. He wanted to show Rupert, and the American support base, how it all worked and to obtain their support in getting bomb parts.

  It was just two days after his meeting with Bernadette and Liam Campbell in Blackrock.

  “It was a lot more serious than I wanted my mind to believe. If you thought about how serious it was, it would eventually show up somewhere in your reaction,” said Rupert.

  He was focused on remembering as much detail as possible.

  As he walked in the short driveway, he noted the number on the door, the second last house on the row.

  “We were in a council row house on the outside of Dundalk. It was projects, you call them in the US.”

  Inside were McKevitt and two of the Real IRA’s main bomb-makers. As always in the IRA, they tried to match an electronics expert with the man who makes the fertiliser or Semtex bomb. Both are needed to build a sophisticated car bomb or mortar.

  The electronics engineer, called “Dent” by the others, was well dressed, handsome and had a goatee beard. The bomb maker, Frank, (not his real name) was scruffy and badly dressed. He looked like a farmer and was from South Armagh.

  McKevitt began the meeting and invited Dent to lead the discussion.

  Dent explained that the wine cellar had been raided after the gardaí had blocked the signal of the walkie-talkies used by the Real IRA lookouts, who couldn’t notify the team in the wine cellar that the gardaí were there. After decades of walkie-talkies, the team would now switch to digital radio and would need Rupert to source them in the US.

  They were probing Rupert’s knowledge of components and electronics and McKevitt gave him a list of bomb-making equipment to get in America.

  As the number of items grew, Rupert asked McKevitt if he could take notes. McKevitt said yes.

  Rupert wrote it down on a notebook as the team called it out:

  Two clean laptops to be used with public phone hook-ups for remote detonation. The laptops should also have voice distortion for coded warnings, as the police had recorded the panicked bomb warning before a car bomb detonated in Banbridge, injuring 33 people.

  They also wanted digital radios with US frequencies, so that the Irish police could not interfere; parking meter timers for bomb detonation; black powder for “barrack-buster” mortars; marine magnets strong enough to hold eight pounds, to attack ships in a harbour; voice synthesisers; encryption software; giant-sized flash bulbs for bomb detonation; catalogues from spy supply stores, and model rockets and remote-control helicopter catalogues.

  They wanted to be able to drop bombs on police and army barracks using $5,000 model helicopters.

  They also wanted GPS devices and four personal organisers.

  Frank had a copy of a specialist news brief called Interception Capabilities 2000, a trade publication for the bugging and interception business. Rupert asked to have a look and kept it in his hand as he talked.

  Afterwards, they discussed a machine shop in Cork where the group was trying to make Barrett .50 calibre sniper rifles, which were extremely long and difficult to import. It was easier to make the barrels themselves and smuggle in the rest of the gun from America.

  Rupert: “I could buy a Barrett over the counter in my local town in the US but they were too hard to bring over to Ireland.”

  The meeting broke up after an hour and a half.

  The two bombers left first. Nobody ever drove their
own car to the meetings, they all left with supporters who pulled up at the house, picked them up, and left quickly.

  After they left, Rupert sat with McKevitt for half an hour.

  Mickey explained that Dent and Frank were known as Lilywhites – they had clean criminal records and weren’t known to the police, similar to the bomb team in London.

  He wished Rupert well in the States and told him to report back. Stephen picked up Rupert and drove him back to the Carrickdale. Rupert still had the bugging magazine in his hand. He flicked through it.

  It was coming up to Christmas. Time to go home and celebrate with Maureen and the family. It was clear from the meeting that there would soon be bombs in England. MI5 prepared for a bombing in the new year, based on Rupert’s assessment. The assessment was passed on to the home secretary and the cabinet.

  In the US, the FBI’s response was far more subdued and it was clear that they would let the Brits run the operation. Mark Lundgren sent back a short email to Rupert.

  Of the coming bombing campaign, he wrote:

  “You have struck the lightening once again. I’ll say a prayer for all of Ireland and Britain tonight… sounds like the shit is about to hit the oscillator once again.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The church manager’s windows smashed into the kitchen and the blast blew the doors off their hinges. It was 3am and the bomb could be heard over a wide area of rural Derry. The manager’s children came crying down the stairs. Patients in a hospital 50 yards away woke up and got out of bed to see the wreckage outside.

  The Real IRA announced its return with a bomb at Shackleton army camp, which was breached by entering the Church of Ireland grounds next door and cutting a hole in the barracks’ fence.

  The bomb, made up of three gas cylinders packed with explosives and a sophisticated Mark-19 timing unit, was placed against the wall of the accommodation block of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. The accommodation block was damaged but nobody was killed. It was a near miss for the British army.

  The attack was symbolic – in 1982 the INLA had planted a bomb in a pub outside Shackleton barracks, killing 11 British soldiers and six civilians.

  It was February 2000. The same month, the Continuity IRA phoned in a bomb warning before blowing up the back of a hotel in Fermanagh. The bomb, placed under an oil tank, blew out the gable wall of the hotel and collapsed the ceiling in the kitchen and the toilets. Hot oil rained down on guests’ cars, setting them on fire. It was the Continuity IRA’s third time bombing a hotel in Fermanagh.

  Two days later, Rupert flew in to Ireland to be initiated into the Real IRA army council. He had the approval of Frank O’Neill in Chicago but it was causing a serious split with representatives in New York, who wanted to fund Continuity IRA prisoners and to keep the organisation legitimate.

  McKevitt’s son, Stephen, picked him up at the Fairways Hotel in Dundalk. Stephen was late and Rupert was getting worried. As he waited, he could see what looked like a white Daihatsu Rocky with number plates from nearby Kildare. Two middle-aged men were inside and they were peering at the hotel.

  Stephen pulled up at the entrance quickly and jumped into the foyer, telling Rupert they had to move. They got into his car and sped off. Stephen said he was so late because the Irish anti-terrorist Special Branch were following him and he had to drive into Dundalk centre to lose them and then drive out to the hotel. Rupert told him the bad news – that there was a car outside the hotel. “That’s them,” said Stephen. He pulled up at a junction just outside the hotel and watched until a line of cars came down the road to them, then spun out in front. The Special Branch were hemmed in by the five or six cars following in close procession behind Stephen and he sped off quickly to the McKevitt house in Blackrock.

  His father greeted Rupert warmly and greeted news of the chase with a shrug.

  Rupert dropped $10,000 in an envelope on the table, along with the video conferencing equipment and the digital personal organisers requested by the Real IRA’s engineering department.

  “Why isn’t your wife with you?” asked McKevitt. Maureen was afraid to come. Rupert had to think fast. “Oh, she’s on her spring healthy eating and exercise kick so she’s at home working on that.”

  McKevitt thought the Continuity IRA bombing of a Fermanagh hotel, yet again, showed their incompetence. He was laughing about it to Rupert, who laughed back. “Couldn’t they even find an army barracks to plant it in?” McKevitt said.

  As they sat down to tea, McKevitt said he was thinking of shooting Michael Donnelly because of his leaks to the media.

  McKevitt had asked commanders from each area to collect information on the home addresses and movements of senior Provisional IRA figures, as there was likely to be a bloody feud between the Real IRA and the Provisional IRA and they needed to prepare for assassinations. Donnelly had collected information on Gerry Adams’ country house in Donegal but had then leaked the information to the Sunday World newspaper, which did a big spread on Adams’ champagne socialist lifestyle. McKevitt wanted to know how Rupert would feel if the Real IRA killed Donnelly. Rupert said he didn’t have a problem with it, as long as it was justified.

  Approving assassinations. Who was Rupert by now? He was more confident than he had ever been in his life, finally finding the excitement he had always craved. Like Walter White in Breaking Bad, he had escaped suburban drudgery for a new, dangerous life that had affirmed his masculinity and reaffirmed his marriage. But was he, as Maureen feared, getting too familiar with the world he was inhabiting?

  That morning, Rupert drove back to the McKevitt family home in Blackrock. There, as arranged with McKevitt, he spent the entire day setting up a new 32 County Sovereignty Movement webpage and online video conferencing system for Bernadette, who was alone in the house.

  She used an external hard drive for sensitive material she didn’t want the police to see, and wanted Rupert to protect her computer, while giving the 32 County Sovereignty Movement’s webpage a new look.

  While working on the computer, Rupert looked over the table and tried to memorise the books he saw in the McKevitts’ home office. He noticed a pocket guide for hotels in Yugoslavia and a detailed roadmap for Belle-Isle-en-Terre on Brittany’s Côte-d’Armor. Like many republicans, McKevitt found an affinity with the Celtic nations, and visited Brittany by smuggling himself out of the country in the well of a trucker’s lorry.

  Rupert: “I was trying to take in all I could while working on the computer. His office was 8ft wide and 14ft long maybe. I made a note of books that might be of interest to M15.

  “Bernie left and I was all alone. I knew that Mickey had a lot of security video cameras in the house, some of them maybe hidden, so I only dared to go as far as the toilet and back to the computer. I felt he would review it later.”

  Bernadette came back later and talked about her children and made tea as he worked. At 6.10pm, Stephen said he was ready to bring Rupert. Bernadette wished him good luck.

  He got into Stephen’s car and they drove north to Gyles Quay, a long, curved beach on the Cooley peninsula, just south of the border. Stephen said little on the way. Rupert grew tense.

  “I honestly thought maybe this is the time I get killed,” he said. “It was absolutely ink-dark out at the beach, no lights. You couldn’t even see your hand.”

  “There he is,” said Stephen. A white pickup in the car park flashed its lights. “He’ll take you from here.”

  Rupert walked across the car park and got into the pickup. “A white pickup truck. There weren’t many of those in Ireland at the time. They were kind of a desert jihadi thing.”

  The man took him up through a country road and into the remote mountainous townlet of Lordship on the foothills of the Cooley Mountains.

  He was talking to Rupert about the area. Rupert was nodding his head, trying to memorise the route. They turned right up a steep driveway to a whitewashed farmer’s cottage. Inside was a woman and a young child of 10 – Rupert couldn’t make out if it was a
boy or a girl.

  The woman made tea and tidied up in time for the army council meeting. She smiled and said little. It was her husband’s business.

  It was the home of a Real IRA member from Louth who farmed cattle and who was trusted enough to host army council meetings and store, under fields where the cattle roamed, some of the Real IRA’s most sophisticated weaponry.

  Within a few minutes, Liam Campbell came in the door with a big smile for the woman of the house. Behind him came Kieran McLaughlin from Derry, the Real IRA’s finance chief and a gunman trained in some of its best weaponry. With them came Maurice, a Real IRA man from the north. Rupert focused, trying to remember their appearance. McLaughlin was in his 40s, about 5ft 6, 190 pounds, receding hair. Maurice looked like he was in his 30s, “very modern, looked like a college boy,” according to Rupert.

  There were just three of them. They wanted to assess Rupert before he met the full army council.

  Campbell led the meeting. They were especially grateful to Rupert, he said, who had done more for them in just three months, through winning over US supporters and providing technical support, than Michael Donnelly had in nine months. They all expressed their disappointment that Donnelly, a republican hero, talked so loosely to the media. It was clear that Donnelly was in big danger.

  Campbell raised his arm over his head. “Mickey was up here,” he said. “Now Mickey is down here.” He lowered his arm down to his hip.

  They sat at the kitchen table and poured themselves tea. “What would improve support in the US? A bigger campaign?” asked Campbell.

  “Of course,” said Rupert. He told them that as the Real IRA was back attacking the Brits again, they should strike in their own time, and not when Sinn Féin’s peace talks in Belfast presented an opportunity.

  The three of them seemed happy with that answer. Campbell said they were waiting for Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA’s final disgrace by agreeing to destroy their weapons and then win over more of their members.