The Accidental Spy Read online

  Staff would steal from them just as easily. Maureen used a trucker’s cab for her own surveillance after food kept disappearing from the restaurant. One of the employees could be seen smuggling the food out in the linen basket and loading it into the back of his car.

  In the afternoon, pimps would bring prostitutes up to the trucking plaza six at a time and collect them at 4am.

  The prostitutes, desperate and often addicts, would knock at the truckers’ cabs while they slept and ask them if they wanted company. It was the height of the 1990s crack epidemic. Some truckers would park further down the road to avoid the 2am knock.

  “It was a hopeless situation,” says Maureen. “You would call the cops and get the hookers busted but they would bail out the next morning and be right back there that same day.”

  The problem reached its worst point when Maureen’s immediate supervisor found one of the women inside the office building and chased her out onto the roof. “We looked up and he’s holding her out over the ledge and he is shouting, ‘Do you want to die? Do you want to die?’ We had to go up there and talk him down from it.”

  In a city that was still reeling from a crime wave, the threat of violence was a regular hazard in Rupert’s office. As his business expanded, more and more drivers would come from the poor neighbourhoods looking for work.

  “I told one of them he’d failed a drug test and he got real mad and pulled this small knife on me. I said, ‘First of all, look at me. You are not even going to penetrate my belly fat with that thing and the second you do it, I will drop-punch you to the floor.’”

  Rupert’s preoccupation was in proving to himself, after three divorces, that he could find love.

  The same week as FBI Agent Buckley’s visit, he was planning a motorbike trip with one of his truckers, John Orndorff, and Orndorff’s wife, Nancy.

  Maureen remembers it well. “I was passing through the diner and John asks me if I wanted to go on a bike ride with them to Oklahoma that Sunday. I knew John was married and his wife was right there, so I figured this was Dave’s way of asking me out.”

  That Sunday, Maureen rode hundreds of miles on the back of Rupert’s oversized motorcycle all the way to Oklahoma and back. By the time they made it back to South Holland, they were dating.

  Within a few days, he asked her to come with him to Ireland, promising her they would stay at Ashford Castle, the country’s most beautiful hotel, and tour the west coast.

  Maureen accepted immediately.

  She had never been outside America before, except for a disastrous honeymoon in Acapulco with her second husband. Her whole life had been lived within a five-mile radius – from her home in Dolton to the truck plaza. She drank with work mates but everything else went to college tuition for her daughter Doreen.

  “Well,” says Maureen., her voice quivering, “I just couldn’t believe it when he asked me to go. My mom had passed away six months earlier so it was my chance to live her dream of going to Ireland.”

  *****

  “So we arrive into Joe O’Neill’s pub in Donegal and there is this dog, Rebel, sitting on the bar stool and the place is wall-to-wall IRA posters. It was all threatening stuff. And women were coming in with prams and dancing around while Joe is up on stage singing all these IRA rebel ballads. I thought, ‘Jesus, what is this?’”

  Maureen Brennan was meeting Rupert’s new world.

  “I liked Joe, he was this good old boy from the old IRA, that’s how I saw it at the time,” she says.

  “Then we drove down to Vincent Murray’s place and it’s more Republicans and more rebel ballads. We had a good time, and I just got into it. I’ve lived my whole life in a man’s world at the truck stop, so this was just an extension of that. I drank up with the rest of them. I loved Ireland, the friendliness and the beauty. We both wanted to be there.”

  David drove with Joe O’Neill to visit the Republican Sinn Féin headquarters in Dublin, where they picked up some arts and crafts made by prisoners – Celtic design bodhrans and miniature harps, to take back to Donegal.

  On the way back, Joe said that he had to meet Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and several of the Continuity IRA army council at Ó Brádaigh’s house in Roscommon. Rupert wasn’t allowed to attend, so Joe dropped him off at a hotel in Roscommon town for an hour.

  Rupert knew better than to argue. He sat in the lobby listening to the muzak. In his wallet, he discovered Ed Buckley’s business card: “Ed Buckley. Agent. Federal Bureau of Investigation”, with the FBI and Justice Department logo. It was a serious lapse – one that would have got him killed had it been discovered.

  “I knew the FBI had this rule – never flush anything down a toilet unless you flush it three times because it can float back up again,” said Rupert. “I was worried about doing that, so I just took the card out of my wallet and ate it. I had it chewed to pieces and swallowed by the time Joe came back to the hotel.” Joe spoke excitedly about the coming Continuity IRA bombing campaign, now that the Provisional IRA was on ceasefire.

  David and Maureen flew back to Chicago four days later.

  Agent Ed Buckley drove to Calamet to see David. The mainstream Provisional IRA had just declared a ceasefire. President Clinton was heavily involved in brokering a potential peace deal and wanted to know if the ceasefire would hold, or if disaffected IRA members would break away and restart the bombings.

  “Buckley is all worked up,” says Rupert. “He says to me, ‘the FBI will pay for the trips to Ireland for you and Maureen. You just have to tell us what’s happening.’

  “I thought, ‘Hey, if I can sucker the FBI into paying for our trips, great.’ We both loved Ireland, so why not? I didn’t know anything anyway, so let the government sponsor us in Ireland.”

  That night, he told Maureen about the FBI visits.

  She was astounded. “It was like something out of this world, the FBI following our movements and wanting to pay for our trips. To be honest, after 20 years as a woman in the trucking business, nothing scared me. It was exciting and if the FBI pay for us, great. Looking back now, I had no fucking idea how deep into this thing we would go.”

  CHAPTER 4

  At 6pm on 9 February 1996, Gerry Adams, the leader of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin, called the White House and asked to speak to Anthony Lake, President Clinton’s national security adviser. He had disturbing news that the IRA’s ceasefire was about to break, and promised to call back. He was harried and people were talking in the background.

  One hour later, a 3,000-pound truck bomb exploded in the Docklands in London’s financial district, killing two people and seriously injuring six others. The blast destroyed three office buildings, and severely damaged the light rail line. Bloodied office workers, with glass in their heads, ran screaming from nearby pubs.

  The 18-month ceasefire broke down because the IRA refused to surrender its weapons before Sinn Féin entered peace talks with the British government. Chief among those adamant that there should be no weapon surrender was Mickey McKevitt, the IRA’s quartermaster general. He controlled all of the IRA’s huge quantity of weapons and explosives, mostly stored in underground bunkers in farms south of the border and, after building it up over decades, he was not going to destroy the weapons, or the power they held.

  In Chicago, news that the IRA was back to violence was met with renewed FBI interest in David Rupert. He and Maureen had married after three months and had spent the year travelling back and forth to Ireland, collecting bits and pieces of information on the mainstream Provisional IRA, mostly through Vincent Murray’s bar in Sligo, and the never-on-ceasefire Continuity IRA, through Joe O’Neill’s bar in Bundoran. In Sligo, Rupert had learned that the IRA was sneaking its members to the US through Shannon Airport. Shannon town had accepted a large number of Irish republican refugees from the north when the violence erupted in the late 1960s. Now republican supporters were helping to spirit IRA members to US-bound flights.

  “The FBI were all about that information because, at
the time, US visas for IRA members was a huge issue,” says Rupert. “Clinton was giving visas to Irish republicans as a reward for peace and if you had them using Shannon to get in and out of the US, then America was losing a major bargaining chip.”

  As Buckley had hoped, once Rupert had accepted the free holidays to Ireland, he was more amenable to revealing the secrets of IRA members living in the border region, where the IRA were strongest and where its largest bombs were manufactured, including the Docklands bomb.

  For Rupert, who had tried everything from clown wrestling to mob-supported offshore gambling, being an FBI spy was another layer of excitement for a mind fascinated by the grey area between legal and illegal.

  Maureen was in awe of her new husband. When they first met, he was a trucking agent. Now he was revealing himself to be a committed spy in the murky world of international terrorism. For a woman who had spent almost her entire life within a five-mile radius, it was an escape. “An escape into the IRA, that’s what he offered,” she says.

  Over several meetings with Buckley at a restaurant near FBI headquarters in downtown Chicago, Rupert suggested that instead of bar-hopping, he and Maureen would like to set up their own bar along the border so the IRA could come to them, and so they would be in control. He wanted the FBI’s clearance and funding.

  Most FBI agents would have turned down foreign operations as absurd but Buckley, the free-thinking maverick, readily agreed. The FBI was under huge pressure from the White House to gather IRA intelligence and to shut down its US fundraising and arms shipments in an effort to squeeze it towards peace.

  The agreement between Rupert and Buckley, worked out over lunch in Chicago, is a matter of dispute even today and it would be unwise to interfere. Rupert said he was told the FBI would help to keep the pub in operation. Buckley believes that Rupert heard “$8,500 from the FBI” and assumed that he was going to be a contract spy. He believed that the FBI could never overstep the role of the CIA, or the Irish police, in running a foreign operation.

  At that time, Rupert was in the process of selling his trucking agency in Chicago so that he and Maureen could find a pub in Ireland and move there full-time. He had spent his life in trucking, it was time to move on, to be a spy, to live the life of intrigue to which he had always aspired.

  In June, David and Maureen flew into Shannon and drove up to Sligo to see Vincent Murray, whose pub customers were now on an FBI list for aiding the violation of US immigration and anti-terrorism laws.

  Rupert offered to pay for the lease on Murray’s pub.

  “He did make the offer and I suppose at the time I was interested in getting out of the business but nothing came of it,” says Murray. “To be honest, I thought he was talking bullshit.”

  Next, they drove up to Joe O’Neill, who was running an estate agency in Ballyshannon, a few miles from his pub in Bundoran.

  He showed them a few bars on the market. As they drove around, Joe spoke in code to David.

  “It was kind of sexist,” says Maureen. “I was either left out of conversations or Joe drove off with David by himself. I got the feeling that in Joe’s world, women were for the home and for pulling pints.”

  He took them to the Drowes, a bar in Tullaghan, a short drive south of Bundoran, in the tiny sliver of land where County Leitrim meets the Atlantic coastline. It came with its own caravan park, where some northern IRA members spent their summers. The two-storey yellow building, on the main street going through the village, had a small shop, a two-bed apartment upstairs and fishing rights to the salmon-rich Drowes river, which met the Atlantic Ocean just to the right of the bar. On the other side of the bar, close to the caravan park, were steep cliffs where the Atlantic smashed against the rock, sending plumes of mist over the edge.

  They decided to take it. They flew back to the US to make final arrangements and then, on 31 July 1996, they signed the lease and shook hands with Mick McNulty, the bar owner. The FBI, which supplied $8,500 cash for the deposit and rent, was now in the Irish pub business.

  The Ruperts had a lot to do to get the place ready. They hired a cleaner and remodelled some of the bar. Rupert quickly discovered that there was more work than he initially thought. “We found used condoms, there were lots of empty beer bottles, there was a freezer full of old salmon that customers would use to pay their bar bill, it was a mess.”

  They put Maureen’s maiden name on advertising leaflets for the reopened pub because her name sounded more Irish. Covering all bases, the leaflets gave the bar’s address as being in the Republic of Ireland followed by the parenthesis (The Free State), the IRA’s dismissive term for the southern state.

  A local woman, Pauline McGovern, was hired to help them run the place. “Pauline showed me how to wash glasses and pull pints,” says Maureen, who had never worked in a bar before. “When I put ice in a mixed drink she would say: ‘No! no! No ice for that now.’”

  The bar clientele was a mixture of IRA people, holiday makers, fishermen, locals and visiting ODCs (ordinary decent criminals).

  “Some families were kind of half and half,” said Rupert. “Like maybe one half of the family was IRA and the other half were criminals, who would be expected to steal a car or two for the cause when it was required.”

  Whole families would come in on rainy days and spend hours drinking and singing.

  “You have to be careful with the ODCs. I had a beatbox in there playing music and people are up dancing. I turned around and it’s been stolen. We had some rough customers in there. I had to physically throw some of them out of the bar at closing time.”

  David and Maureen learned why the bar was up for lease – it had no Guinness and its stock was old.

  “When we moved in, we discovered all these leftover spirits that weren’t selling,” says Rupert. “There was this nasty green liqueur, Pernod. I wanted to get rid of it so I put up a sign saying one pound a shot. That was a big success. Some guys spent all day drinking shot after shot and then I would find green vomit sprayed all over the toilets.”

  Their best customer was Frank O’Rourke, who was dating Pauline’s sister.

  “Frank was supposed to paint the place for me but I discovered that he made the same offer to another bar in exchange for drink. He and a friend drank through $1,500 worth of booze in the other bar and didn’t paint an inch.

  “So once the cheap shots started, Maureen phoned me shouting because Frank was lying on the floor not moving. She says, ‘Frank’s dead.’

  “I said, ‘Is he on the green stuff?’ She said ‘yeah’, so I said, ‘Just drag him to the couch. If he moves, he’s ok, if not, call an ambulance.’”

  “I was terrified,” says Maureen. “I kept saying, ‘We’ve killed Frank, we’ve killed Frank’. Then Frank gets up behind me, wipes his mouth and says he wants another drink. I thought some members of my family were alcoholic, but they were just wannabees. Frank and some of our customers in the Drowes were the real thing. It was all-day drinking, every day, the same four guys propping up the bar.”

  Their single biggest problem was not the old liquor, but the lack of Guinness, and that was how they entered the bomb-making business.

  Without Guinness, a rural bar was bound to fail and the previous bar manager had not paid the Guinness invoices, so they cut her off.

  “Maureen and I both knew that without Guinness we’re finished. I asked round. Turned out the IRA had a good racket smuggling Guinness across the border.

  “So I learned about this bar in Sligo where I could buy the Guinness kegs out the back door for cash. It was run from the north and the big problem now was the empty kegs. We had a lot of them and even if we convinced Guinness to start supplying again, they would refuse to take these kegs, because they were obviously smuggled from somewhere in the UK because of their serial numbers. So I ended up giving the local scrapyard all the kegs just to get rid of them.”

  Joe O’Neill heard about the beer keg surplus and moved quickly to take them.

  “They wer
e ideal casing to pack bombs into, the IRA had been using them for decades. Best of all, the serial numbers on the kegs were untraceable because they’d come through unknown smuggling routes in the north,” said Rupert.

  Joe O’Neill’s group, the Continuity IRA, was taking in Provisional IRA members disillusioned with the peace talks and was bombing the border area, often using the long-established IRA method of packing bombs into beer kegs.

  Two weeks before the Drowes opened, the Continuity IRA exploded a 1,200lb bomb outside a hotel in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, injuring 17 people, most of them wedding guests, as they fled the hotel.

  “Joe never said bomb or explosive or gun when he came in. He never talked on the phone and he never said any incriminating word in case he was being bugged. He would simply come in and say, ‘I need a few kegs.’ Then he would make an explosive motion with his hands.

  “So I would write down the UK serial numbers of the kegs before I would hand them over to Joe, so the FBI would know where they came from if there was a bomb.”

  As a close friend of O’Neill, Rupert was under tight scrutiny from local gardaí. “There was one cop, Marcus Mulligan, he didn’t like me very much because I was Continuity IRA.”

  “I had nothing against him personally,” says the now-retired Garda Mulligan. “But he was a known associate of Joe O’Neill. Rupert seemed a nice enough fella, but O’Neill was very well known to us,” he said.

  Mulligan, and other gardaí in the area, kept the Drowes under occasional surveillance.

  For the bar patrons, and the families in the caravan park, the Ruperts were a popular novelty.

  “They loved to hear Dave’s stories about America,” says Maureen. “One of the women from the caravan park loved to imitate his drawl. She’d say, ‘If I taaalk realll slooooow, I can taaaalk likkke Daaaaviidd.’”

  “Everyone called me ‘the Big Yank’,” said David. “We bought an old Volkswagen Jetta and we used to drive customers home for free every night so they could get tanked in the bar if they wanted. That made me popular. One night I’m dropping them home and Frank is drunk as usual. So I drive away from his place and I don’t see him in the mirror and then I see that his pants were stuck in the door and I’ve dragged him 100 metres. If I hadn’t checked the mirror, he would have been dead for sure.