The Accidental Spy Page 5

  “I swear to God, the show, Father Ted, is accurate if you ran a rural pub in those days. We had a whole family of farmers who would come to the pub clinging to one tractor. Father, mother, grandparents, grandchildren hanging off the side of this tractor.

  “There were always fights. There was this local guy, he was the nicest guy in the world until he got drunk, then he would come at you with hands like shovels, and he’s built like a fucking moose. Mostly, they kept me out of fights because of my size and because everyone knew I was connected to the Continuity IRA.

  “All kinds of people were coming in and out – fuel smugglers, terrorists, beer-runners.

  “There was even a local prostitute who used to come in now and then. She was used by local boys to get broken in.

  “There were a lot of IRA people in the bar. One of the older women from the caravan park used to bounce her grandson on her knee and tell him that he would grow up to shoot policemen in the north. How do you defeat that? That always stuck with me.”

  The woman gave Rupert a miniature carved harp, made by her son-in-law and other IRA prisoners. “She never had money for the caravan rent so she gave me the harp. The caravan park was turning into a nightmare. There were supposed to be 20 caravans but there were 40 and nobody wanted to pay the rent. I’m chasing around after them all the time.

  “Also, the caravan park closed for the winter but nobody took their caravans away. There was one family in particular. They decided they were going to stay the winter. So I shut the power off on them because I wasn’t going to pay for the electricity all winter. That got a war going. One of them was already a few years behind on the rent. Some of them I would forget about, but not this guy because he was a real asshole.

  “I took his caravan out and put it out by the road so he could get it. Then someone saw it and stripped the aluminium off it, so he sued me for the price of the caravan. I wrote back to his solicitor and it went away.”

  A member of the same family was drunk and abusive to customers one night, so Rupert ordered the staff to open the door. “Then I just ran at him and we both went flying out the door. I was about to land on him, so I put out my knee to block my fall and really damaged my knee. He kicked me and said he’d kill me, but he was in the next night, looking for free pints.”

  In the middle of all this aggravation, there were moments when Rupert questioned what they were doing.

  “There was this guy who came in called Black Peter, the guy who said he’d paint the place for booze, along with Frank.

  “One day at the weekend, Black Peter’s girlfriend wanted him to go to the doctor because his stomach had ruptured from too much drink. She told me to pretend we were going to the lumberyard because he hated going to the doctor.

  “Frank wants me to drop him home because he’s drunk. He was crying in the bar because he thinks his sick cow is going to die. I drive to Bundoran. Black Peter realised he’s being duped into going to the doctor. He won’t go in, but his girlfriend runs in and gets the doctor to come to our car. The doctor comes out and examines him in the back seat while Frank is still crying about his cow. One needed a doctor, the other a vet.

  “It was one of those moments of clarity because most of the time, I was too busy to stand back from it all. I’m sitting at the steering wheel listening to both men crying, thinking, ‘Who am I, and what the fuck am I doing here?’

  “There was always some hassle going on. There was a bunch of those tin boxes for collecting money for charities. One of them was for Catholic missions. Nobody ever put money in it except for pennies. One day I took it and emptied it because the bar was so small and I really needed the space. I wrote a note about how much I took out and put the note in the box.

  “It was six months later when a priest showed up for the money and he got all furious with me about it because I had opened the collection box. I said, ‘I don’t have room for it. If you want a donation, I’ll give you a donation.’ So I gave him the amount that was in the collection box plus a 20-pound note.

  “Then I’d have Joe O’Neill come in telling me to keep kegs for making bombs. It was like all human life was passing through this place.”

  One customer was horribly upset because a neighbour had threatened to sue if he didn’t get rid of his goat. So the man brought his goat to the cliffs to fling it off the edge. With the momentum, he fell with the goat. He was badly bruised in the fall and the goat had to be put down.

  Within a month, both Provisional and Continuity IRA members were coming down in big numbers from nearby Bundoran, unsure what to make of the eccentric American and eager to find out his true background.

  Chief among them was Philip McCluskey, who was wanted in the US for allegedly running an IRA ring that smuggled 2,900 bomb detonators from Tucson, Arizona. McCluskey fled the US after he was indicted and was hiding out in Bundoran.

  “McCluskey knew a lot about the FBI from his time in the US. He had a lot of dealings with one agent in New York who was chasing down the IRA, like Buckley was in Chicago. He’d sit at the bar counter and say, ‘Do you know the guy?’ and stare at me. I’d keep cleaning the bar and say, ‘Never heard of the guy.’ Then he’d ask me about another FBI agent, or a prosecutor, and I’d just shrug my shoulders and keep cleaning.”

  As time went on, Rupert became better and better friends with Declan Curneen, a Continuity IRA member from Leitrim. He was short, bearded and was a Republican Sinn Féin purist, who believed there should be no parliament in Ireland until there was a united Ireland.

  In 1995, he was convicted of climbing up a flagpole outside an electronics factory, ripping down a Union Jack and tearing it to pieces. In prison for a few weeks for refusing to pay the fine, he went on hunger strike and Leitrim County Council called for his release. He and his son also had convictions for fighting with gardaí at an IRA commemoration in Limerick.

  David visited his house and regaled him with stories of the US. Curneen, a close friend of Joe O’Neill, named one of his best greyhounds Rupert, in honour of their American friend. Human Rupert came out to Curneen’s house to pet him and stand for a photo together. Canine Rupert was blue with dark streaks, an unusual colour for a greyhound and considered good luck. He raced in Donegal and all over the border area.

  It was a sign for David that he was totally accepted in the Continuity IRA. Curneen loved to have Rupert over at the house to recount tales of gun battles with the Brits.

  Curneen and O’Neill approached Rupert with a special project. They could see that he knew about computers – dial-up, broadband, websites – it was beyond their generation but they knew it was powerful. O’Neill asked Rupert to set up a Continuity IRA cyber-terrorism unit, and Curneen supplied young recruits to be the other cell members.

  Rupert: “So we had our first meeting. I could see these two kids had no interest in this and barely knew how to switch on a computer. I suggested we learn how to hack, so we could get into MI5’s webpage and post Continuity IRA symbols on its home page. I knew we had zero prospect of getting it off the ground, but it gave me cover. It made it look like I was doing something for the cause when I wasn’t.”

  One rainy day, when Rupert was entertaining customers with trucking stories, he got a call on the phone upstairs from Ed Buckley, who told him to go to a meeting with the FBI’s legal affairs liaison in Dublin.

  “Chris Patton was the liaison in Ireland when I started and he was related to the general. So I left Maureen in charge of the pub while I drove down to Dublin.”

  Patton was in charge of liaising with Irish police so that they did not feel that the FBI was invading their jurisdiction with undercover work. Over a cup of tea, he explained that he wanted Rupert to meet a senior garda, so that Rupert’s spying would not lead to a diplomatic crisis with the Irish government if it was ever uncovered.

  Patton and Rupert discussed their families for an hour and waited for the garda. “Patton seemed nervous to me, an all-over-the-place kinda guy.”

  Chief Superi
ntendent Dermot Jennings walked in. A tall, thin man with mousy hair and known for his efficiency, Jennings was attached to the crime and security unit and was leading the Republic of Ireland’s fight against the IRA.

  He had been part of a unit that was set up to tackle paramilitaries after a Marxist group, the Irish National Liberation Army, killed two gardaí in a bank raid. In 1990, he spent three months on placement with the FBI, learning modern surveillance and detection techniques that he was keen to bring to counter-terrorism work.

  Under Standing Order 8 of the IRA’s rules, its members were strictly prohibited from attacking police or army in the southern Republic of Ireland, with which it claimed a certain nationalist allegiance and with whom its northern members hoped to be one day politically united. Still, the IRA bitterly resented the gardaí, especially those in the anti-terrorism Special Branch, over which Jennings presided. In June, an IRA unit in the south killed a garda and seriously injured another during a bank raid. Two men rammed their car and then sprayed the two gardaí with automatic fire from AK-47s. The brutality and senselessness of the killing led to a national outcry: 50,000 people lined the streets of Limerick for the funeral and public anger refocused garda attention on breaking up IRA structures in the Republic. Jennings wanted Rupert on his side.

  In the beginning, the two men got on well. They discussed life in the FBI, the pub, Joe O’Neill and the local atmosphere along the border now that the Provisional IRA’s ceasefire had been shattered.

  Rupert was hoping that the gardaí were going to pay him a salary, along with the FBI, but there was no mention of payment. Gardaí ran an entirely different operation from the FBI, the pace was slower and they generally refrained from paid agents and electronic bugging.

  “I didn’t know that at the time,” said Rupert. “All I knew was that Jennings wanted to meet me again, so I was hopeful that we are going to reach a deal.

  “Jennings wanted to meet in Donegal and I thought that was very dangerous as I’m well known there.”

  They agreed to meet in Boyle, Co Roscommon, in the Irish midlands, about an hour from the Drowes.

  “I’m not one bit happy about it because it’s too close to the border and my bar, but I go along, hoping Jennings is the key to keeping the pub open.

  “Boyle made me nervous. A lot of people knew me and I stuck out because of my size. Here comes Jennings in a fucking bread van and he’s a big fellow and he’s well known by the IRA.

  “He had two chairs set up in the back of this van and we sat down and talked. So I’m already nervous and then he tells me that I’ve been turned over to the gardaí.

  “The pub was barely surviving. I’m hoping the gardaí can pay me $5,000 a month to keep it going. He said, ‘What do you want, some travel expenses or something?’

  “I said, ‘No, I’m doing this for a living.’”

  “You’ve got the pub there.”

  “Well, it’s losing money.”

  “And so it became very apparent the gardai didn’t have any money. They literally wanted me to put my life on the line for petrol money.

  “I was in big trouble now. I’m an unpaid informer in a dangerous situation. I’m cut adrift from the FBI and the gardaí are offering nothing but mileage. I’m losing money and, in the bar, I’m literally surrounded by the IRA.

  “I climbed out of the bread van and watched Jennings drive away. I knew he wasn’t surviving on mileage money.”

  Rupert went back to the Drowes and told Maureen what happened. They heard from the FBI that Buckley would fly in to Ireland to sort everything out. This time, it would be at a hotel near Dublin Airport – Rupert, Buckley and Jennings.

  Rupert continued with the bar work, breaking up fights and delivering drunk customers home. He was waiting anxiously for the meeting.

  When he got to the hotel by the airport, Jennings and Buckley had already been talking. From their faces, it didn’t look good.

  Rupert set out his dilemma, that he gave up his business on the understanding that the FBI would finance him in Ireland, that the pub wasn’t making any money, that if the IRA found out what he was doing, he and Maureen were both dead.

  Buckley looked at Jennings and then at Rupert. He put down his tea cup. “That was never the deal,” he said.

  He laid out that the FBI were authorised only to pay the startup costs for taking over the Drowes, but that policing in Ireland was a garda matter and the FBI couldn’t overstep its territory.

  It was a financial disaster for Rupert.

  “I don’t get confrontational but God help you next time,” said Rupert of his style in meetings. “I just got up and walked out. I walked to the car park and drove back to the pub. I was crushed.”

  “We were devastated and I was angry,” says Maureen. “I was so angry that I felt we should never go back to them. We felt the FBI duped us. I didn’t know what to do but I thought we’ll just have to go back to nine-to-five jobs in trucking and we are both capable of making a good living.”

  “I don’t really see it in those terms,” says a now-retired FBI officer familiar with the case. “As far as I knew, the deal was to help them set up the bar and they would live on its proceeds. I don’t know if the FBI was ever supposed to be organising their Guinness runs.”

  Angry and frustrated with the FBI, David and Maureen decided to drop out of the project and return to trucking in Chicago, while leaving a manager in charge of the Drowes.

  They spent a week preparing and packing up. It was the darkest moment of their time in Ireland. They were broke and lost.

  They left their car to Pauline McGovern’s son and tried in vain to get money from residents in the caravan park. The drink stock alone had cost thousands and bar owner Mick McNulty agreed to reimburse them for it. It was their only hope of any financial salvation.

  After hugs and a shake hands with staff, they flew from Shannon to a bitter and cold November in Chicago. They stayed for a week in a Red Top hotel near Maureen’s parents in suburban south Chicago, while they looked for somewhere to live.

  “It was the most humiliating time of my life,” says Maureen. “We thought we were these big spies – we were nothing. I’m in my 40s and we had to borrow money from my father just for the deposit on an apartment. I cried and I was frustrated and didn’t know what we could do.”

  Every day, David called the Drowes, desperate for some profit to keep them alive in Chicago.

  “There was this local woman running the bar for us. I’d call her to see how we were doing. The bar was supposed to be open 14 hours a day and she would say we didn’t do any business yesterday. I said, ‘You didn’t do any business? You’re open 14 hours a day and you didn’t sell one beer?’

  “We couldn’t find a way through and I felt I had been fucked by the FBI. The year before, I thought I had suckered the FBI into giving me free trips to Ireland. Turns out, I had been an unpaid informer living in middle-of-nowhere Ireland. The FBI had suckered me all along.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Snow drifted sideways and lay in brackish pools of dirt at the edge of the motorway.

  Wind sheared off the Great Lakes and whipped sheets of wet ice onto the windscreen. Nearly three inches of snow fell on O’Hare Airport on 20 November, the highest for that day since records began.

  It was a bad winter in Chicago.

  David Rupert, an FBI spy the previous month, was a delivery man in November 1996.

  He was now working with the Land Air Transport Company, hauling packages and envelopes from O’Hare Airport to a sorting centre in Columbus, Ohio.

  It was more dangerous to carry paper in winter than car parts – heavy loads keep a truck from slipping on icy roads. The heavier the load in November, the more truckers like it.

  Bill Clinton was re-elected president that month, promising to complete his job of bringing about peace in Northern Ireland. Maureen and David, both Democrats, toasted his win, but Clinton’s backchannels to the IRA were now far removed from their daily lives. />
  Using money borrowed from her father, they rented an apartment on West Superior Street in downtown Chicago. She was depressed: “I hated, hated, hated living downtown. I was a suburban girl and now I’m in the city. No space, no parking, there’s congestion and noise. I was miserable and I told David over and over that we were done with the FBI and we had to restart our lives.”

  Maureen had a high-paying managerial job at the truck plaza before she met David. He had dazzled her with talk of his life as an international spy, and now they were left with nothing.

  She took a job managing four convenience stores for a company called Tuxedo Junction, which served some of the most crime-ridden neighbourhoods in south Chicago.

  “The pilfering by customers and employees was crazy, you just couldn’t control it,” says Maureen. “People walked out of there with shopping bags full of stolen stuff, they didn’t even hide it.

  “A lot of our staff were affiliated with gangs or were girlfriends of gang members. There was one kid from the projects, he had gotten in trouble with the law and had no job experience. I hired him to give him a chance and really thought we could turn this one around. He robbed us blind. I fired him and refused to give him his final paycheck for all the stuff he stole, which is illegal but I was so mad. He started threatening me and I shouted back, ‘No, you just get the hell out of here.’”

  The strain of daily theft was starting to show.

  “It was driving me a bit crazy because you couldn’t plan anything. One day one of the staff said that a woman had just walked out with a six-pack of beer. She was halfway down the block, so I got in my car and drove after her. I pulled up on the sidewalk in front of her, ran at her and grabbed the beer right off her.”