The Accidental Spy Page 6

  “I felt scared just standing around to pick her up,” says Rupert, who would come in to see her at the main store on South Western Avenue, close to Midway Airport.

  Yet within a few weeks, they had repaid Maureen’s father for the deposit on the apartment.

  How could their marriage survive this financial ruin, when Rupert’s three marriages had failed under less strain? In part because, through the pain he had experienced, David Rupert had matured. He no longer craved the next girlfriend and the one after that. Once that was an exciting game, now it left him feeling empty and soulless. In Florida, he had been a sad figure, cruising the beach bars for the next female fix. In Maureen he had found a best friend, a woman from the trucking world who laughed at his jokes and who made him laugh. Most of all, she had a deep sense of the absurd, honed from two decades at the trucking plaza. Their time with the FBI was absurd and so was their new life in Chicago.

  Rupert, still burning with anger from his experience at the Drowes, asked for help in finding a lawyer. Maureen’s daughter, Dorie, had graduated from college and was doing a job placement while preparing for law school. She put him in touch with a former prosecutor turned criminal lawyer named Jim Koch, who had an office near the FBI headquarters in downtown Chicago.

  Rupert went to see him in early December and started to unravel the whole story – Linda and the IRA and the FBI showing up at the truck plaza and the free trips to Ireland and the pub in Leitrim.

  “He didn’t believe a word I said. He thought I was crazy. He said, ‘Did they give you a badge and a gun?’

  “He said he’d look into it and I didn’t hear from him in weeks. I thought I’d never hear from him again so I stayed trucking to Columbus every day.”

  Then one morning just before Christmas, Koch called. He had spoken to the FBI, and they wanted to talk. He seemed even more surprised than Rupert.

  He and Koch went together to the FBI building and were ushered into a conference room to meet Ed Buckley, Buckley’s new assistant, Mark Lundgren, and the FBI lawyer Jim Krupowski.

  Lundgren was polite and accommodating and enthusiastic. He was well dressed and polished and seemed almost the opposite of Buckley’s gruff and confrontational style.

  Rupert also liked Krupowski, who seemed sympathetic to his plight. When Rupert outlined what happened, Krupowski gave him a piece of advice: “If it’s not in writing, don’t expect to get it.”

  “I was used to the trucking world,” says Rupert, “where you delivered on your honour and you subcontracted to truckers on the expectation that they would just show up. Krupowski sensed that about me and wanted to help.”

  From then on, whenever the FBI promised him something, he refused to accept it unless it was in writing.

  “I don’t know how many times I threw that in their face from that moment forward. Everything is defined by that one piece of advice from Krupowski.”

  By now, a peace deal in Northern Ireland was one of the most important foreign policy aims of the Clinton administration and it was causing major strain with FBI director Louis Freeh. He sided with the British in being implacably opposed to granting American visas to Gerry Adams and other IRA leaders. Adams was flanked by dozens of reporters when he visited the US for the first time during the IRA ceasefire. He appeared on Larry King and his arrival in the US made the cover of the New York Post. Once the IRA had bombed London and killed civilians, Freeh felt justified in taking a hard line on them. He felt they were murdering their way to negotiations.

  Agents like Buckley, who had chased the IRA for years, were firmly of the director’s view.

  But the FBI needed David Rupert to figure out if the IRA would split into factions supporting and opposing the peace talks. They also needed his help to shut down its supply routes in the US.

  With Buckley nodding approval, Krupowski offered a contract: up to $2,500 a month for infiltration of the IRA in both the US and Ireland.

  “I had to laugh,” says Rupert. “Up to $2,500 a month meant I could get a lot less. It was really nothing compared with the risk they wanted me to take. Maureen thought I was crazy to even consider it but I thought that if we got something in writing from the FBI, it might lead to something bigger.”

  “I did think he was crazy,” says Maureen. “I was done with the FBI, we had come out the other side of all this stress with jobs and a life and I wanted to move on.”

  In February 1997, Rupert, with a roll of the eyes from Maureen, signed the contract with the FBI for $2,500 a month plus expenses. One clause in the contract stated that he should not carry out criminal acts unless they were expressly authorised by the FBI.

  Buckley explained that they would fund a trucking office for Rupert in Chicago, which was to be a front for spying on IRA supporters in the US. The office would be bugged, and groups fundraising and gun-running for the IRA should be encouraged to hold their meetings there.

  Rupert could pick the office, but it should be somewhere with its own entrance, so that IRA gun-runners could not claim they had gone to the building to visit another office.

  They also told him that the FBI technical team wanted to fit a bugging device in the cabin of Rupert’s truck. He should pick up IRA supporters in the truck and encourage them to talk.

  The technical details would be worked out at a later date.

  After signing the contract in the FBI’s Chicago office, Rupert handed in his notice at the freight company. Now he was a paid FBI employee. In future, there would be no more vagueness, or suggestions, or maybes or promises.

  “From here on in with the FBI,” he says, “it was ‘put it in writing or fuck off’.”

  That same week, 23-year-old Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick was shot dead by what had become known as the “South Armagh Sniper”, who had killed nine British soldiers and two police officers between 1990 and 1997. There were actually two sniper teams operating within the IRA’s border heartland of South Armagh and they were its most effective units. The British were pulling out of many patrols because of the snipers, and rerouting helicopter sorties to avoid being hit. Most of the 20-plus IRA members involved were local farmers, whose roots in violent republicanism ran back generations. They used Barrett high-impact, long-range rifles, mounted on the back of hatchback cars, with a bullet-proof metal plate in the back through which the gun protruded. The snipers were under strict instructions: “one shot, one kill”. The car would drive off immediately after the shot was fired and they had never been caught.

  The chief sniper was Michael Caraher, whose brother, Fergal, was killed in 1990 when British soldiers riddled their car with bullets, allegedly when they tried to ram a soldier. Michael Caraher himself barely survived the shooting and lost a lung. When he got out of hospital, he helped devise the sniper teams.

  FBI intelligence showed that the Barrett rifles had originated in Chicago, the first one being smuggled into Dublin in 1986 and brought to the north. A second was purchased in 1990 from a gun dealer in Ohio and smuggled piece by piece into Ireland.

  The FBI were requested by the British specifically to short-circuit the Chicago arms route, which was run by Frank O’Neill, a Chicago publican, and others deeply committed to the republican cause.

  On 27 February, Rupert flew back to Ireland and straight to the Drowes to sort out the financial mess.

  “The bar was still there so I just took up residence upstairs. I had signed a contract saying I couldn’t do anything illegal without the FBI’s consent. Things would have to be a bit more formal now. No running illegal kegs from the north. So I get to the Drowes on the first day and I smell diesel. I knew it was fucking trouble.”

  A customer from just north of the border was running a fuel-laundering business near the back of the pub.

  Diesel washing, or laundering, was Irish republicanism’s single biggest financial asset. Diesel was sold at a reduced rate to farmers who needed it on their farms, and the UK and Irish government put a supposedly indelible dye into it so that customs officia
ls could inspect petrol stations and ensure they weren’t selling it. Using corrosive chemicals, the IRA ran an illegal tanker system that removed the dye. It then sold the diesel to petrol stations at a reduced rate and ran its own petrol stations along the border. Some border roads had petrol stations every few hundred metres in the 1980s and 90s. The IRA, and the smugglers who paid them a percentage, also smuggled cheaper petrol and diesel from the north and sold it in the south. If there was a fluctuation in prices and the south became cheaper, the fuel supply suddenly flowed the other way. The Provisional IRA chief of staff, Thomas “Slab” Murphy, had a two-way pump installed under his pig shed, which was built right on the border. Whichever side of the border had cheaper fuel, he would pump it under the pig shed to tankers waiting on the other side.

  The Drowes sat along this vast network that stretched the length of the border. Located just a few miles inside the border right between Donegal and Leitrim, it was a good location for quick distribution. “I wasn’t happy about this fuel business operating near the pub. You could smell the diesel all over. He had the tanks washing fuel, he made an awful fucking mess out the back. The place reeked of oil. The FBI had no interest in fuel smuggling in Leitrim and I didn’t want to get busted for that.

  “All the time, this guy running the diesel is a good customer in the bar. He’d come down to the pub to drink, and his wife would send his daughter with him to make sure he didn’t drink too much and he’d get drunk and off they’d go back home.

  “I had to try to convince him that putting it near the back of the pub on the main street wasn’t a good idea and that it could be raided at any time.

  “Then he moved it up to his house. Even then there was still enough fuel-washing equipment near the pub to bust any of us.

  “I went up to his house and there were fuel lines running across the road in front of his house, cars had to drive over them. I said it wouldn’t take long to find you, your house fucking smells like a truck stop. But I was just glad to move the fuel lines away from us.”

  David Rupert was in a very dangerous situation in the spring of 1997. For $30,000 a year, a tiny fraction of what he made in trucking, he was informing on both the Provisional and Continuity IRA, both of which would torture and kill him if they found out. Without his consent, the bar was storing equipment for the fuel laundering business, the IRA’s most precious commodity.

  He decided to cut his ties with the Drowes. The drink sales would never pay the rent and he didn’t want to get implicated in the fuel scam.

  He decided that he and Maureen would rent a house in Tullaghan and come and go from the US when they wanted. It was owned by Pauline’s brother, who would stay there when he came back to Tullaghan from work in Galway. “It was far from ideal,” said Rupert. “No offence to the guy, we just wanted our own space. Besides, there were Continuity IRA meetings taking place in the house behind his back and he was beginning to suspect we were up to something. The chief of staff came up from Limerick for one meeting and I’d leave them to it.”

  Soon after renting the house, he called over to see Joe O’Neill, who had an office above his pub in Bundoran.

  “Joe liked to talk upstairs. He talked Continuity IRA stuff in the local graveyard but he also trusted the office because someone was usually in the bar downstairs and he and his family lived right behind it, so it was unlikely the cops could bug it.”

  Upstairs, Joe was in a great mood. The Provisional IRA was in disarray. Their best people were disillusioned with the talk of peace and were starting to come over to the Continuity IRA. The organisation was also being supplied with Semtex and other bomb-making equipment by Mickey McKevitt, the quartermaster general of the Provisional IRA, who was bitterly opposed to peace.

  “I said, ‘Joe, is there anything I can get in the US that would help the movement?’

  “That’s when Joe told me about this woman, a teacher in Donegal committed to the Continuity IRA. She had helped in the past and she would be waiting at the school to pick up whatever I sent from the States.”

  Joe had a verbal list of supplies for the Continuity IRA, which was escalating its attacks, mostly aimed at hotels and other businesses close to the border. He wanted three things: detonating cord, plastic explosives and detonators.

  As the bomb parts would be sent to a school, Joe said that the plastic explosives should be stuffed inside teddy bears, the detonating cord should be disguised as skipping ropes and the dets could be hidden in radios, where they would look like electronic components.

  “They had clearly done this before because they had this whole system set up.

  “Also, I would be sending bomb parts by airmail to Ireland.

  “You wonder how many times you have flown on a plane and some asshole has placed these in the storage where it could go off.

  “I guess there was a bit of a change in my mindset at that moment. I looked at Joe. Here he is, this religious guy willing to use a Catholic school full of six and seven-year-olds to smuggle in explosives when everyone in Ireland is dreaming of peace.

  “I shook his hand and said I would do my best, but I don’t think I ever looked at him quite the same again.”

  This was a major jump. “Now Joe trusted me enough to share weapon routes from the US. I felt he was treating me like a full member of Continuity.”

  Rupert contacted the FBI almost immediately and gave them the address of the school.

  “Ed Buckley was really pleased. It was a big change in my relationship with the FBI. The FBI wanted to shut down all these weapon and bomb routes from America and force the IRA into talks. Ed went to check the school address against past shipments from the US. He told me, ‘You’re doing good, Dave. Looks like we might need you for bigger things.’ I didn’t know what he meant but I sure as hell found out later.”

  *****

  Several weeks later, Joe O’Neill was giving a speech outside the General Post Office in Dublin, once the headquarters of the Irish rebels in the 1916 uprising and a hallowed place in Irish republican lore.

  A group from the Continuity IRA-supporting boy scout group, Fianna Éireann, were standing to attention as he spoke. I was starting in journalism and had been following Fianna Éireann for a year, trying to understand the Continuity IRA mindset, and frequently interviewing Fianna Éireann’s leaders, Anthony and Alan Ryan, two Dublin brothers.

  In his speech, O’Neill angrily denounced Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA for preparing for talks. He referenced the bombing of the Docklands in London, which had killed two newspaper sellers and injured 40. He said the repeated bombing of the financial district in London “had the Brits on the run” and now the Provisional IRA was “running away from the fight” by allowing Sinn Féin to talk peace. “It’s the same fight since 1916, it’s the Continuity of the thing,” he said.

  It was a ruthlessly uncaring speech, one claiming authority from the dead of 1916, and not the living of 1997.

  I was standing a few feet away, watching the reaction of passing shoppers. One woman, holding her shopping bags, shouted at O’Neill, “Give us peace. We want peace”.

  A drunk man tried to rush the microphone. He was screaming at O’Neill to go home. A garda grabbed the man and hugged him. “I know, I know,” said the garda, putting his arm around him, “just let it go.”

  It was a tiny symbol of a changing Ireland. The economy was on its third year of the Celtic Tiger boom, boosted by huge inward investment from multinationals. Divorce was legalised the previous year and the Republic of Ireland yearned for peace in the north. The country wanted to develop into something new, and the narrow Catholic republicanism of Joe O’Neill seemed brutal and anachronistic.

  While Joe was in Bundoran, and a member of the town council, he was largely shielded from life outside the border area, where anger and frustration at the IRA was visceral.

  I walked over to the woman with the shopping, who was crying.

  “We’ve had 30 years of this shite,” she said. “I was just
out getting a few things for my family and you have to face this. Why can’t they just give us some fucking peace?”

  CHAPTER 6

  “Royal Avenue there, thanks mate.”

  The passenger climbed into the back of the taxi.

  He was carrying a holdall in his right hand. Security was tight in Belfast – a police officer had been chatting with friends in a gay bar the day before when an Irish National Liberation Army member, wearing a wig, walked up behind him and shot him dead.

  A British army helicopter hovered over the city, as it did most days, and there were extra soldiers on the streets.

  As the taxi turned on to College Avenue, the back windows smashed with a low thud. Glass flew onto the road.

  Three of the passenger’s fingers were strewn around the cab, one of them stuck to the taxi door.

  Blood was pouring from his hand. He was screaming as he searched for fingers. Dripping blood onto the seat, he put each finger he found into his pocket.

  The sports bag was in tatters; wires and a large lump of charred yellow cake could be seen in its remains.

  The driver stared at the bag and then at the passenger, who opened the taxi door with his uninjured left hand. Smoke followed him. A man walking his dog and a woman carrying her shopping stopped and stared.

  They saw a man limp his way down College Avenue, leaving a trail of blood. He was trying to find a phone box three streets away and then make his way back to republican West Belfast. It was 10 May, 1997.

  Within minutes, a car pulled up at the phone box.

  Gerard “Hucker” Moyna, barely conscious, was put in the back of a car.

  Hucker had already served 10 years for possession of weapons and would do life in prison if he was caught in the north. He was driven two hours west, over the border to Donegal.

  As with every Saturday, Joe O’Neill was on stage at his pub in Bundoran, singing rebel ballads with Peggy, a local woman who sang and played the accordion.