The Accidental Spy Read online

  “Joe was in the middle of a set,” remembers Rupert. “He’s told that there is a call for him in the bar. He just gets off the stage, no explanation and Peggy continues singing.”

  Joe drove his Mercedes from Bundoran a short distance to Ballyshannon, where Hucker was lying in the back of a car, moaning.

  They drove down the street to a doctor, arriving at close to midnight.

  “It’s an emergency,” O’Neill said, knocking on the doctor’s door. “The man has no fingers.”

  The doctor opened up a blood-soaked bandage. Hucker took the fingers from his pocket.

  Joe tried to explain that fireworks had gone off in Hucker’s hand. The doctor knew Joe O’Neill and knew that fireworks would not blow three fingers off, sheared at the base.

  He said that he would have to refer Hucker to Sligo General Hospital.

  In Sligo, doctors could see almost immediately that the fingers could not be reattached. The bones were fractured, the veins ripped and the fingers shredded.

  Meanwhile, in Belfast, the British army had arrived and sealed off College Avenue. A robot approached the taxi and leaned its video camera in the back door.

  It revealed two and a half kilos of Semtex, still unexploded, and a timing device. Only the bomb’s detonators had gone off. Had the Semtex exploded, it would have blown up the taxi and everyone standing nearby.

  It was clear from the taxi driver’s account that the man was badly injured, missing fingers and bleeding from his hand.

  Sligo Hospital told the gardaí that they believed Hucker had explosives injuries.

  Hours later, a group of gardaí arrived at the hospital.

  Joe again tried to explain that fireworks had gone off.

  He was immediately arrested under the Offences Against the State Act and taken to Sligo garda station.

  Upstairs at the hospital, gardaí found Hucker lying on a bed, his arm heavily bandaged, just after a blood transfusion. He was pale and in shock but still conscious.

  He was arrested and told he could remain where he was, under garda supervision.

  Joe posted bail the next morning. He drove straight to the hotel in Bundoran where Rupert was staying.

  Rupert was making last-minute preparations before going back to the US. He knew Hucker, and many other IRA members, from Joe’s bar. Joe looked stressed.

  “Dave, listen to me. A terrible scene in Belfast, Hucker’s fingers were blown off. When are you going back to America?”

  “Today.”

  “Good man. Army business. I need you to buy the biggest firecrackers you can find, blow them up and them send them to me immediately. Immediately, now.”

  “How is Hucker?”

  “He’ll make it. I need those firecrackers.”

  “Alright.” Fireworks were strictly banned in Ireland. Joe needed the most powerful American firecrackers.

  Back in the US, Rupert called the FBI field office in Chicago. Agent Buckley cleared it for him to buy firecrackers in a megastore, blow them up and send them to Joe for Hucker’s alibi.

  “You can’t get fireworks in Illinois, but across the border in Indiana, they were on every street corner. So I just bought some big ones, let them off across from the trucking office and sent them to Joe. The FBI recorded the serial numbers of the package.”

  Joe visited Hucker in hospital to get their facts together and, with a solicitor sitting beside his bed, Hucker made a statement to the gardaí telling them that he was showing off Rupert’s American firecrackers to his children on the beach when one went off in his hand.

  On 17 May, when doctors said Hucker was well enough to move, he was escorted to Sligo garda station and immediately rearrested. Shrapnel embedded in his hand had matched that of the bomb fragments in Belfast.

  Garda Detective Inspector Thomas Farragher said that when told he would be charged, Hucker replied, “I want to know why the emphasis is on an Irish citizen, and I am not guilty.” Political offences had long been a difficult subject in the Republic. In the 1970s, it passed legislation allowing terror suspects to be tried in the south for crimes committed in the north. It was rarely used but Hucker’s solicitor advised him to take it, as he already had IRA convictions in the north.

  He had a one-year wait before his case came up in the anti-terrorist Special Criminal Court in Dublin.

  “Hucker had just received a big compensation payment because he was hit by a car in Bundoran and he was determined to spend it, as he knew he was going to prison for a long time,” says Rupert.

  Maureen, who came and went to Ireland when her husband was there, remembers Hucker in the bar. “I didn’t really remember him before this but afterwards, I sure did because he was missing three fingers and drinking really heavily.”

  Joe O’Neill and Declan Curneen, the two local Continuity IRA leaders, were close to Hucker.

  They visited him frequently in Bundoran and told him of past martyrs – how the late aunt of Marian Price, the dissident IRA leader, had her arms blown off when her bomb exploded prematurely, but she never complained. As children, Marian and her sister, Dolours, would put their aunt’s cigarette in her mouth and light it for her and she would sit back, puffing and tell them through the corner of her mouth when it was time to tip the ash and put the cigarette back in again.

  The evidence against Hucker was overwhelming and the gardaí in Bundoran were adamant that Joe and the Big Yank had concocted the fireworks story.

  Hucker pleaded guilty and was jailed for seven years.

  Rupert had only been back in the US a few days when the FBI said they wanted to meet him.

  Big things were happening in Ireland.

  They agreed to meet at the truck stop.

  Now devoted to the spying game, Rupert had been set up by the FBI with a new front office, where he was to capture recorded conversations with IRA financiers and gun-runners.

  For the operation, Rupert had chosen a small trucking office close to downtown Chicago in an area called the Old Stockyards.

  “The Stockyards was once the cattle and meat capital of Chicago. I used to haul meat from there where I was based in New York. Now it had really changed and it was rough. I would take the train there every day, carrying a pistol in my pocket,” Rupert said.

  Across the road from the stockyards truck depot was a small apartment building with an office at the front for a company called US 1 Industries, a legitimate trucking logistics company with whom Rupert had an agency contract. But the rent for it, security cameras and bugging devices were all paid for by the FBI.

  In the parking lot across the road was Rupert’s red Kenworth T600 truck, in which the FBI had fixed a listening device under the dashboard. He helped them install it and connect it up to the truck’s electrical supply.

  When the device was recording, a dashboard red light would switch on.

  “At that time, the FBI really wanted results in Chicago. It was pretty obvious that a lot of money was going to the Continuity IRA from the city. They weren’t interested in diesel-washing in Donegal or guys blowing their hands off in Belfast. They wanted to show their bosses they had this threat in Chicago under control.”

  Rupert’s sole focus was now on the Continuity IRA’s US support group, the Irish Freedom Committee, which was being run by the Irish-born publican Frank O’Neill. Frank was close friends with Joe O’Neill in Ireland but they were not related.

  The IFC was set up after Republican Sinn Féin and the Continuity IRA broke away from Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA because they bitterly opposed recognising the southern parliament in Dublin. As far as they were concerned, they would bomb and shoot the British out of Northern Ireland, and only then could any parliament be allowed.

  The FBI was urging Rupert to get closer to the IFC, which was gaining disillusioned Provisional IRA supporters in the US.

  On 23 May, 1997, among the hefty truckers milling around outside the offices, one might have spotted Agent Buckley walking into Rupert’s office. Intelligence from I
reland suggested the Provisional IRA would move towards a ceasefire. If President Clinton was to clinch peace in Ireland, the FBI would have to clamp down hard on Continuity IRA people like Frank O’Neill. “In short,” says Rupert, “they wanted convictions.”

  *****

  “Do you see that? What’s that?”

  Octogenarian Frank O’Neill is pointing at a photo of a dog on the wall of his Chicago pub.

  “Patch, that’s Patch.” Patch was a regular at O’Neill’s.

  Frank would encourage her to climb up on a stool and push the pool ball with her paw. He would shout instructions in his booming Northern Ireland/Chicago accent until Patch knocked the ball into the pocket, and the bar crowd would cheer.

  A TV assistant was in the crowd one night and Patch performed her trick in front of millions of people on the David Letterman Show.

  “Ah, she’s gone now,” Frank liked to say. “Won’t be long before I’m joining her.”

  Frank had closed his bar to the public but opened it at night for his fellow Continuity IRA supporters, people like David Rupert, and Irish American hardliners like Deirdre Fennessy, the glamorous daughter of a Chicago doctor, and her husband, Richard Wallace. There was also Catherina Wojtowicz, a conservative Irish/Polish American who would later become a major figure in the Tea Party movement.

  “Frank would invite me up to his bar to have a chat but then some of his IFC friends would just happen to come along. What he was really doing was getting them to check me out, to see if they had seen me anywhere before.”

  A native of Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland, Frank O’Neill had a pencil moustache and tight haircut and was seldom without a suit and a smile.

  Beneath his folksy republicanism, he raged against the Northern Ireland government, and wanted its destruction, as much for revenge as for ideological reasons. His writings of the time, contained in an Irish American magazine he partly owned, are tirades of anger and hatred, justifying the worst IRA atrocities with talk of job discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland.

  O’Neill grew up in Northern Ireland in the bad days of Protestant British hegemony in the 1930s and 40s. Local elections, housing and jobs were rigged in almost every area to keep Irish Catholics from gaining any power. The Irish flag was illegal, the Irish language and sports viewed with official suspicion.

  O’Neill moved south and joined the Irish army in 1943, hoping to convince military leaders in Dublin to invade the north and drive out the British, but nobody would listen.

  “They just weren’t interested, nobody wanted to know,” he would later tell the Chicago Tribune.

  He and several others were put on trial in the south of Ireland for IRA membership but he fled to Chicago, where he ran his bar until the mid-1990s. Like many of his generation, he was as pro-American as he was anti-British.

  “I really, really liked Frank,” says Rupert. “We just always got on. He was very relaxed with me. Deirdre Fennessy’s husband, Richard, didn’t like me one bit but as long as I said, ‘Up the IRA’ in the bar, I had Frank’s protection.”

  A rift within the IFC was growing over whether Frank should give fundraising money directly to the Continuity IRA.

  “The other groups in New York, Philadelphia and Boston wanted to give money to the families of Continuity IRA prisoners, so their children could have Christmas toys and clothes, but Frank wanted all the money to go directly to bombs and weapons,” says Rupert.

  “This old-timer in Philadelphia, she used to be in Cumann na mBan, the women’s section of the IRA. She told me that if the money went to prisoner families, it still freed up the finances of Continuity IRA to do what they had to do. She was hoping I could convince Frank. But Frank never listened to that. He wanted money to go to the fight, nothing else.”

  Frank had been under FBI surveillance, and the close attention of Agent Buckley, for at least two decades.

  Once, in 1993, while arresting one of Frank’s supporters in a sting operation, Buckley accidentally left a $2,000 tape recorder in Frank’s bar, which had been recording observations of people coming in and out. When he came back to get it moments later, it was gone. Frank denied all knowledge, despite threats of arrest. The incident made it into the Chicago newspapers and O’Neill often enjoyed taunting the FBI about the missing recorder.

  The FBI even considered Frank a suspect in a Chicago murder because someone wrote the letters IRA in blood before dying. It emerged that the real murderer’s name began with the letters I-R-A. “That made Frank mad as hell with the cops,” says Rupert.

  Rupert found infiltrating the Irish Freedom Committee easier than he expected, because he was coming from Ireland with the blessing of Joe O’Neill and the Continuity IRA.

  “I had been living along the Irish border, helping supply bomb parts and knew a lot of IRA people by that point. The IFC were really impressed with my credentials.”

  While he was still operating from the Stockyards truck depot, the bureau supplied Rupert with a tape recorder for use at IFC fundraisers in Chicago.

  “Many of the fundraisers were in Catholic diocese school halls and every penny we got was going towards explosives and weapons.

  “Deirdre Fennessy’s mother was always there helping out and she had no clue what was really going on. She said to me, ‘This is for the IRA prisoners, right?’ That was always the story they told people. I said, ‘Yeah, that’s what it is.’ It was always meant to be ‘prison relief’. It was only the upper people who knew that it was going to the army.”

  At the fundraisers, it was $10 in, with $100 for a raffle ticket, with a top prize of $10,000.

  Joe O’Neill had been guest of honour at one of their annual dinners and told the crowd that Prince Charles would visit the site of Lord Mountbatten’s death in Sligo. He told the crowd, to cheers, that the Continuity IRA had left a device for him that the prince would be lucky to avoid.

  By 1997, because he was travelling to Ireland so often, always paid for by the FBI, Frank appointed Rupert as their under-the-counter bagman to take money they had raised to Joe O’Neill for direct use by the Continuity IRA.

  “What they don’t know is that the FBI is paying for all my trips to Ireland, but as far as they know, I’m going there because I’m making good money in trucking and I’m committed to the cause. So Frank makes me the bagman for an organisation that didn’t want to leave any electronic records.

  “That’s it. That’s the whole key to the story of how I infiltrated so deeply in Ireland. When you turn up with $10,000 five times a year, a lot of people want you around. So much has been written about how I infiltrated these groups and there it is – I was the man with the bag of money from Chicago and the doors opened up.”

  The FBI was delighted with this arrangement but was very clear – he could only bring to Ireland what was raised by the Irish Freedom Committee, the FBI would not be helping to fund the Continuity IRA.

  Rupert’s truck, now a mobile bugging device, was put to use around the US, recording IFC members. The first target was Joe Dillon, leader of the Irish Freedom Committee in Boston.

  “They had tried to get him and Phil Kent, their guy in Canada, because the FBI had followed them to a depot on Long Island where they photographed them loading and unloading boxes. They got a search warrant and raided the place and found containers of IRA T-shirts that were being sold in Boston bars. That was a fuck-up so now they really wanted to get Dillon.

  “So I drove down to Boston to see him and he’s talking about buying up weapons to defeat Gerry Adams and the peace-makers but I just couldn’t get him into the truck to record it. I said, ‘Hey Joe, come into the rig, for a minute’, but he kept talking. I asked again and he kept saying he couldn’t stay but then kept talking. He did everything but get in the truck.”

  “The FBI realised that if you’re not in the trucking world, you just don’t jump in and out of each other’s trucks for a chat or a sandwich, like me and my drivers would.”

  The FBI decided t
o try a different technology for Kent, once a major Provisional IRA gun-runner, who was now very active in the IFC. He lived in Woodstock, Ontario, and operated through the conservative Irish Catholic scene on both sides of the US/Canadian border.

  “Their second attempt was with this bugged cell phone they gave me to record Kent. It transmitted directly to a recording device in an FBI car travelling behind me. Phil Kent came down from Canada and we’re going out to a gun place in Valparaiso, Indiana.

  “I pick him up in Chicago and I’m looking in the mirror all the time to see the FBI car, which has to stay close behind us to make sure it records. They couldn’t make it more obvious that they are tailing us because they are driving a black SUV, like real typical FBI. I look in the mirror and they are about four feet from my bumper.

  “Kent never noticed but I’m glaring at the FBI car in my mirror to say ‘ease up’. I got Kent on tape talking about moving weapons but I never got to hear it. It went straight to the car behind us and to the FBI for analysis. That’s the way it always went.

  “The gun store was massive. They had every type of ungodly device. It didn’t look like much from the outside, with canoes and outdoor equipment, and then you stepped inside to this superstore of weapons and military surplus.

  “I took him out to see it because they had rocket-launchers there that were demilitarised, but like a lot of the bigger stuff in the store, it could be remilitarised pretty easily.

  “We were looking at Barrett rifles. There was a rocket-launcher hanging on the wall. Phil’s trying to get my attention and motioning up at it with his head like, ‘This is what we want but I don’t want to point at it.’

  “At the time, you could buy 50 pounds of black powder, which is an explosive for guns. Just over the counter. There were also bullets for a Barrett rifle at $5 apiece.

  “The FBI was waiting outside the store for us to take the ride home. Kent used to talk a lot about how he moved guns for the IRA in the Middle East and Cyprus but he had fallen out of favour with the Irish Freedom Committee because he would take their fundraising money to Ireland and make it look like he was donating his own cash to the cause, so that’s why they favoured me.