The Accidental Spy Read online

  Vincent Murray met Linda for the first time when Sligo hosted the Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, an annual traditional music festival that attracts over 100,000 people.

  “I still remember her in her black Guinness top. She was really beautiful for her age, she stood out straight away and she knew so much about politics,” he recalls. Linda was dating Murray’s best friend within days of meeting, but that soon ended.

  She took Rupert to Vincent Murray’s bar to discuss the twinning of Tallahassee and Sligo, but also to talk to Murray about the Irish republican scene in Florida.

  Until now, the violence in Northern Ireland was almost theoretical for Linda: it was all about ethnic solidarity and a salty addition to the bourgeois politics of Florida.

  In the real world of Irish politics, the agony of sectarian conflict dragged on. When Linda and David arrived, rumours were rippling through Murray’s bar about the discovery of a woman’s body in Sligo five weeks previously.

  She was strangled and beaten to death by three IRA members, allegedly to stop her revealing that they were working for MI5, the internal UK section of the British secret service.

  As soon as her body was found, the IRA kidnapped the three men, tortured them and shot them in the back of the head. Their naked, hooded bodies were found along border roads a week later. The IRA released a detailed statement, saying the men disgraced themselves by spying for MI5 and the police.

  The violence in Northern Ireland had rolled on all year, in an increasingly futile wave of attack and counter-attack by paramilitary groups who identified as either Irish or British. In January of 1992, the IRA blew up eight Protestant construction workers who had been doing repair work on a British army base.

  The following month, a policeman shot three people inside the main Belfast offices of Sinn Féin. He then committed suicide. The next day, in revenge for the killing of the construction workers, the British loyalist group, the Ulster Freedom Fighters, shot dead five Irish civilians, including a 15-year-old boy, in a bookie’s shop in a nationalist area of Belfast. A week later, four IRA members were shot dead in County Tyrone in an ambush at a church car park after firing heavy machine guns at a police and British military base.

  In April, the IRA unveiled a new tactic: bombing the financial centre of London to weaken the British government’s resolve to stay in Northern Ireland. On 10 April, a bomb in the Baltic Exchange in the centre of London killed three people, including a 15-year-old girl. Insurance claims from the devastated financial district exceeded £800m.

  There were also smaller confrontations that received almost no external coverage. In May, British parachute regiment soldiers smashed up two nationalist pubs in Coalisland, County Tyrone in revenge for a roadside bomb that blew a soldier’s legs off.

  Two of Vincent Murray’s brothers had been jailed for bombings and he himself had been an election volunteer for Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker, when he won his seat in the British parliament in 1981.

  His volunteering included meeting the other nationalist candidate and persuading him that it was “not a good idea” for him to run against Sands.

  Vincent’s brother, Marcus, was one of 38 IRA prisoners who led a mass escape from the Maze Prison in Belfast in 1983. Vincent, who was playing a football match that day, asked the referee for the time because he was waiting for his brother’s escape. Marcus and another IRA man were stopped at a British army checkpoint in Northern Ireland. They claimed to be good friends but didn’t know each other’s surnames. They were arrested and thrown back in prison.

  In jail, Marcus, like Vincent, was beginning to recognise the futility of the violence, especially when weighed against the ardent socialist beliefs of their mother.

  “We were looking for a socialist all-Ireland republic and what was happening? In some cases, the IRA were killing fellow socialists,” says Vincent Murray. “It was framed as you being either British or Irish, but it was working-class people who were being hurt.”

  Murray, a fit-looking man with tight dark hair, takes a sip of beer and corrects himself. “Actually, I’m not sure I like the phrase ‘working class’. I prefer ‘people with a working spirit’.”

  Linda and Rupert, who were staying at the Silver Swan Hotel downtown, visited Vincent’s pub several times over the next few days, listening to the rebel songs. Linda loved it. It wasn’t the hokey, neutered ballads of the Harp and Thistle. This was the real thing, IRA members shouting republican slogans in a pub in Ireland. “She was an extremist in every way – in politics, in partying. It was only natural that she was drawn to extreme people,” says Barbara DeVane.

  Rupert remembers her clapping along to the songs and hugging Vincent Murray, who was to become a lifelong friend.

  After three days, the couple drove north to Bundoran, County Donegal, a seaside town just inside the Irish Republic that was steeped in the Irish rebel cause. It was raining and windy as they drove into town. Linda wanted to meet another pub owner who was also a local councillor.

  Joe O’Neill greeted her with a vigorous handshake. “Linda, Lord God!” he said.

  O’Neill was a member of Bundoran town council for the hardline republican breakaway group, Republican Sinn Féin. His group, and its paramilitary wing, the Continuity IRA, were as conservative, Catholic and enthusiastic about violence against the British as Murray’s left-wing republicanism was socialist, internationalist and wringing with self-doubt.

  In 1986, O’Neill and his comrades walked out of Sinn Féin’s Ard Fheis (Annual Convention) when it agreed to take seats in the southern parliament. As far they were concerned, there could be no parliament in Ireland, even a nationalist one, until it was an all-Ireland parliament. They hated the mainstream IRA, which they felt was moving towards peace and constitutional politics.

  O’Neill, like Murray, was an avid player of Gaelic football. Now in his 60s, he had several county championship medals and once broke the Irish record for the longest free kick. He had a strong voice and, in his bar and at republican commemorations, he was an accomplished singer of unsophisticated rebel ballads. ‘Four Green Fields’ and ‘Come Out Ye Black And Tans’ were his standards.

  The Continuity IRA was run by old men like O’Neill and it lacked the funding, resources and sophistication of the larger mainstream IRA (commonly referred to as the Provisional IRA, or Provos).

  What Republican Sinn Féin and the Continuity IRA lacked in effectiveness, they gained in romance, conservative Catholicism, republican history and their claim to embody the spirit of the first all-Ireland parliament, before the country was divided in the 1920s between the independent, majority Catholic south and the British, majority Protestant north.

  O’Neill had a straggly beard and a crooked, beaten nose. He drove an old Mercedes on which he mounted a loudspeaker for announcing Republican Sinn Féin’s endless list of IRA commemorations and marches.

  He had a wild, untamed look, what Americans might expect the IRA to be – a devoutly Catholic, Gaelic-football-playing, hard-drinking, charming, violent, cunning, rebel-ballad-singing pub owner.

  He also ran a real estate business from nearby Ballyshannon, where he took Rupert on his first visit.

  “Joe and I really hit it off,” remembers Rupert. “He had a real passion for history and I was his pupil. He told me about the history of Ireland, where this battle took place and that battle took place. He was very clear – the British had no right to be in Northern Ireland, the country should be reunited. That was about as far as the argument went.”

  Rupert and Linda returned to Florida, after Linda had assured both the Provisional and Continuity IRA they had the full backing of Irish America.

  After they returned, Linda’s daily phone calls to Rupert began to slacken off to one call every three days. When she called, she was distracted and rushed, like she was readying herself to go out for the night. Rupert would have to wait in a long line of suitors. He discovered that she was seeing a married man.

  “Linda was this magnet,”
says Barbara DeVane. “If David Rupert says he was her boyfriend, well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. She dated a lot and lived a lot and I think he was just someone she was seeing for a while.”

  “Linda and I didn’t last a whole long time,” says Rupert. “I learned pretty quickly she had other boyfriends, so I wasn’t exactly going to stop myself with other women in Florida. But I really liked Ireland, and Joe said he could find me a place if I wanted to come back. I was also really intrigued about the politics and the history and I wanted to know more.”

  In Christmas 1992, he returned to Ireland by himself. There was something about the country that filled some hidden void.

  “It was like going back 40 years when I was in the west coast. The mountains, the history, I loved it all.”

  It was to be the most disastrous trip of his life.

  “Things were going bad for the trucking company in New York and that culminated with what happened on 7 December, 1992, while I was staying at the hotel in Sligo. I got the news that a driver of mine killed three kids near Evansville, Indiana, across the river in Kentucky.

  “There were three or four kids in the front of a pickup truck and they had just left church. My driver had missed his turn and was turning around to go the other way. This pickup came over the hill and smashed underneath the trailer, killing three of the kids.”

  Elizabeth Elliott, who was driving the pickup, was the daughter of the county prosecutor. The driver went to jail for several weeks and they tied up the truck and the trailer for months before it was returned to Rupert.

  “It wasn’t either side’s fault but we were sued for $50m,” says Rupert. “We really took a hit and we just couldn’t recover. I was horribly bothered by the deaths, it was a nightmare.”

  In 1993 he wound up the trucking business in upstate New York, while still based in Florida.

  A major freight company came down to St Petersburg to see him. They really wanted him as an agent, as he had a talent for trucking.

  He agreed to move to Chicago to work as an agent in the city’s largest truck depot, while consoling himself with visits to Ireland to see his friend Joe and staying for a few days in Sligo to see the Murrays.

  In Vincent Murray’s bar, he heard some men joking with one of their members, named Sean, about the murder of Lord Mountbatten, who was blown up while fishing in Sligo in 1979, and died along with his 14-year-old grandson, a 15-year-old local boy and the Dowager Lady Brabourne. “They were all joking with the guy like: ‘Oh you wouldn’t know anything about that would you, Sean?’ – like they knew he was in on it. That kind of surprised me.”

  Vincent Murray: “I’m a republican, there were republicans coming in and out and things might be exaggerated while the pints are flying. I certainly didn’t know anything about Mountbatten’s death, but maybe somebody did.”

  Rupert visited Ireland three times in 1993, each time learning more and more about the IRA’s struggle against the British.

  On his last trip, O’Neill dropped him back to the hotel in his old Mercedes.

  Across the road, in an unmarked car, a plain-clothes Irish policeman, or garda, was clicking a camera furiously as Joe said goodbye. Rupert and Joe smiling. Click. They shake hands. Click. Rupert enters the hotel. Click.

  The photographer put down his camera, turned the car around and headed back to Sligo police station. Later, he drove back to Dublin to his bosses at Special Branch, the anti-terrorism police.

  A group of Special Branch officers gathered around a table. They recognised Joe O’Neill, the conservative Catholic die-hard, immediately. But they all had one question: Who was the 6ft 7, 300-pound yank, and what was he doing here?

  One of the team, now a senior Special Branch officer, remembers it well. “You would know the other people around – the Murrays and the O’Neills, but there’s this huge American in the middle and there was concern because if he was funding things in Ireland, or if he was opening gun-running links from Chicago, this was going to be a problem.”

  He opened a file and wrote in marker: “Sligo/Donegal: Unknown American.”

  David Rupert, who knew almost nothing of Ireland just a year before, was now a terror suspect.

  CHAPTER 3

  Agent Ed Buckley pulls up at the Calumet Truck Plaza, 20 miles south of Chicago.

  It is a hot summer day in late July 1994 and the warm air is heavy with the acrid smell of diesel. Calumet is the city’s largest truck depot, a self-contained town with 22 fuel pumps, a diner, shops, tattoo parlour, motel and masseuse. It rests uneasily inside the old Dutch township of South Holland, which strictly prohibits Sunday trading and the sale of alcohol, and in which the truck plaza is a jarring and modern intrusion.

  Buckley is holding an envelope in his hand, containing photographs from Ireland of David Rupert and Joe O’Neill.

  The Irish police have contacted Interpol about the mysterious American, and Interpol have contacted the FBI. Buckley walks up the stairs to Rupert’s office. Lawsuits from the fatal crash have destroyed Rupert’s New York operations and he has moved to Chicago, one of America’s great trucking centres.

  His office shares a corridor with a tattoo artist, a masseuse and a preacher, all of whom offer redemption of some kind to the travel-weary trucker.

  Inside the office, Buckley shows his FBI badge and puts the photos on the table.

  “Buckley was like no other FBI agent. He was a real maverick type, hand on hip, pointing at me. His language was pretty coarse,” says Rupert. “He was really trying to impress upon me the seriousness of the situation, that I was seen with Joe O’Neill and Vincent Murray, another Irish republican, and that I was in trouble. To be honest with you, with everything that was going on in Chicago trucking, I was relieved this was about Ireland.”

  Buckley, thick-set and frumpy, had spent a decade hunting out IRA gun-runners in Chicago’s large Irish community.

  “He was acting the real blowhard, trying to shake me down with some scare story about how the FBI knew I was mixed up in Irish terrorism. I said, ‘Look, all trucker stories start with three things: a bar, a beer and a woman. In my case, that’s the Harp and Thistle, Guinness and Linda Vaughan.’”

  Rupert’s attitude was deliberately guyish and light-hearted, but Buckley was not smiling. He told Rupert that if he wanted to stay out of trouble he should inform the FBI about what the IRA was doing in Chicago and in Ireland.

  “I said, ‘I got nothing to tell ya. I’ve got no problem with the people over there and I don’t even know anything.’”

  Buckley was known as the bulldog of the Chicago field office, the only one who would wander into a trucking depot unannounced and demand answers.

  He left after 10 minutes of questions and promised that he would be back.

  “I didn’t think a whole lot of it at the time,” says Rupert. “I had so much going on, this guy was just another problem.” Rupert was, yet again, recently divorced. This time the marriage had lasted six months. It was to a woman he met online named Jacqueline Decker – a tumultuous relationship that was to scar him for life. Even now, he finds it difficult to talk about, but it gave him a definite goal: to marry for love, and end the destructive cycle.

  He had been flirting with the operations manager of the plaza, Maureen Brennan, who had rented the office to him for $300 a month.

  Maureen, quick-witted, slim and petite with brown hair and a bright smile, was from an Irish American family in the adjoining Dolton area of Chicago’s exurbs.

  Her mother, second generation Irish, never fulfilled her lifelong dream of visiting her ancestral home.

  For many Irish people scattered around the world, the death of thousands in Northern Ireland was not a backdrop to rebel ballads, but a deep and painful wound.

  One day, Maureen saw her mother crying in the kitchen after the evening news. “I asked her what was wrong and she said, ‘Why are the Irish killing each other?’”

  Maureen was pregnant at 19 and gave birth at 20 to her
daughter, Doreen or ‘Dorie’. She married Doreen’s father, against the wishes of her family, but it ended quickly. Her second marriage also rapidly ended in divorce and, at 22, Maureen turned up at Calumet Auto Trucking, looking for a job.

  “I knew I was in a man’s world and so I had to work harder than anyone to prove myself. We used bleepers in those days and my bleeper was never off. There was a hundred staff and I had to solve everyone’s problems. After a few years, I was running the place.”

  Being a pretty young woman who hosted 1,000 truckers every day was not easy. “They were always flirting, with me and every woman. They were on the road a long time and they were lonely. They would always tell you that they had a big place back home and that they were well off. I just laughed.”

  Maureen and the plaza owner, Eugene Suppelsa, liked to hire young men from the evangelical churches of South Holland for the garage and shops because they could be trusted, but their Dutch Calvinist faith clashed frequently with the immoral ways of trucking.

  One day, she got a call from the garage manager saying one of the local boys was refusing to fix a tyre on a truck because the truck was carrying alcohol. Another refused to pump diesel for a beer truck. “One time, I got a call from the store because one of the truckers bought a Playboy and the guy wouldn’t serve him. I literally had to run from downstairs, ring it up for this embarrassed trucker and get back to work.”

  The plaza handled 1,000 trucks a day and pumped over one million gallons of diesel a month, and behind it all was a myriad of scams to boost profits.

  It ran two sets of books, one for the government and one for Gene, the owner, who bought a new Porsche every few years and whose main passion was jazz accordion. When he wasn’t playing accordion in his office, he was enjoying the scamming that was systemic in the trucking business.

  “One night he called me at 11pm and told me to get $10,000 from the safe,” says Maureen. “He was buying a stolen forklift worth $100,000 for 10 grand and needed the money fast. They scrapped the forklift’s serial numbers and used it in the plaza for years.”