The Accidental Spy Read online

  “After I dropped him off in Chicago I had a meeting with Buckley and the FBI guys.”

  But Ed Buckley had been transferred from Chicago to Norfolk, Virginia.

  “Nobody in the FBI had told me about Ed’s transfer. Frank O’Neill was very old at the time and pretty much retired so he got a job working as a janitor for the Cook County sheriff’s department in Chicago.

  “He heard about Buckley’s transfer because people in the sheriff’s department, who he talked to all the time, were involved in the joint terrorism task force with the FBI.

  “I asked my new FBI handler, Mark Lundgren, why they didn’t tell me that Ed had been transferred. He looks at me real surprised and said, ‘How did you figure that out?’ I said, ‘Frank O’Neill told me’.

  “The FBI guys had a fit, they kept calling me and checking it. It was a nightmare for their internal security. A major terrorism funder like O’Neill had information directly from the joint terrorism task force about an FBI agent who had pursued him for years.

  “That was the thing with the Irish American scene, it wasn’t like Al Qaeda, with one side over there and our side over here. In every city in America, you had cops and all kinds of typists and administrators who were loyal to America but also loyal to the IRA. The FBI have got all this fancy equipment on trucks and in cars to record, and there is the number one target with a mop and bucket and he knows their movements even before they do.

  “The FBI wanted to record IFC meetings. So I kept suggesting to Frank that they could use my office as much as they wanted but the problem was that they all lived on the north side of the city, and there is a big divide between north and south in Chicago. North-siders would never come south just for a meeting.”

  By the second half of 1997, the Stockyards office was starting to look like a bad idea for Rupert and the FBI. “Besides, I didn’t like the office. It was hugely, hugely infected with cockroaches, which were coming from the apartment behind us, where one of Maureen’s former employees at the convenience store lived. This woman didn’t put out her trash and pretty soon cockroaches were taking over my office. I was talking on the phone and a cockroach climbed up the phone and onto my ear. It was disgusting. So I left everything behind in the office that day. I didn’t want to remove any furniture that might be infected. The FBI thought we had some big sophisticated bugging operation going on in there, the only thing they recorded was me running from cockroaches.”

  It didn’t matter, because Lundgren wanted to see him. There had been a development that would make the Chicago efforts seem almost irrelevant and elevate David Rupert to a space never before seen in spying. Lundgren asked to see him at a restaurant in downtown Chicago. David Rupert, trucker and spy, was about to go international.

  CHAPTER 7

  Rupert has his head thrown back in laughter. FBI agent Mark Lundgren is telling him a story about his single days.

  By now, Rupert had a friendship with Lundgren that he never enjoyed with Buckley. Rupert, committed to Maureen, could live vicariously through Lundgren’s tales of dating and chasing women.

  “Mark was a funny guy, too, so I really enjoyed listening to his stories, and then going home to Maureen,” said Rupert.

  Maureen really liked Lundgren, who was always polite and impeccably dressed. “He and Dave just got on so well. Buckley was…” She searches for a word. “He was the kind of guy who would scratch himself all the time. I don’t know if he actually did but he was just a bit unkempt.”

  Over lunch at a diner in downtown Chicago, Lundgren told Rupert that the British Secret Service wanted to meet him. It would more than double the pay he earned with the FBI.

  News from Ireland suggested that the Provisional IRA was about to fracture between those who wanted peace and those who wanted war. The British urgently wanted him in Ireland.

  Agents in London wanted an initial meeting to assess Rupert. They had been badly stung several times before. In October 1987, an MI5 agent, “Steve”, had passed money to Stephen Lambert, a Derry republican, and requested a meeting. The agent told him that they were interested in spying on Martin McGuinness, a member of the IRA army council and the vice president of Sinn Féin. Unknown to MI5, Lambert was secretly recording the meeting and handed it over to a jubilant Sinn Féin, which played it at a press conference.

  MI5 wanted to assess if Rupert really was an innocent who just stumbled into the IRA, or part of a much more sophisticated republican plot.

  In July, unexpectedly, the Provisional IRA called a ceasefire. This time it would be permanent, it said, if Sinn Féin was allowed into peace talks. A deep and bitter split was emerging in the Provisional IRA, and MI5 wanted Rupert to tell them what was going on, and if the members who wanted to continue the violence would defect to the Continuity IRA.

  Lundgren told him to expect a man called Norman at Heathrow Airport. He would be holding a coloured sign, as if picking someone up for a conference.

  Maureen was finding the plot more and more intriguing and thought he should at least hear what the Brits had to say.

  “I was a little concerned but also intrigued,” she said. “David was always eccentric and larger than life, even from when I first met him. I felt if he could handle it, he might as well see where it goes.”

  Rupert flew into London in mid-August. Norman was waiting with the sign. He put out his hand. He had a warm smile and was sincere and earnest without being overbearing.

  “And he was tall too,” says Rupert, who carried a long and unreasonable resentment of small men. “They either knew I liked tall people or they guessed it,” he said. “If he had been small, we would have started off real bad.”

  Norman was in his 50s. He had spied against the Soviets in the Cold War and was known for gaining information with his naturally easy manner. Now he was in charge of handling new recruits in the Ireland desk.

  They walked to Norman’s Daihatsu car, which was striking for Rupert because it was still not available in the US. It was only when they were on the motorway out of London that Rupert learned that they were going to Southampton, on the south coast of England. MI5 rarely took new recruits to London, where they might be spotted.

  At a hotel near Southampton pier, Rupert dropped off his bags and rested. The room was spacious and open, with a view out on to the street near the sea.

  Norman took him that evening to Joe Daflo’s restaurant, across from the Mayflower Theatre in central Southampton. Over dinner, with enough noise around them to ensure they couldn’t be heard, Norman asked Rupert how he became interested in Ireland and how someone with no Irish connections could end up being asked to move bomb parts for the Continuity IRA. Rupert ran through the whole story, as entertainingly as he could, about Linda Vaughan and his gradual move from womanising into violent republicanism.

  “We got on real well. He was perfect for the job,” said Rupert. “He was good company and he made you feel relaxed, like he was really interested. An acquisitional-type personality I called it from trucking – someone who is good at selling and getting you to trust them.”

  That night, Rupert couldn’t sleep. It was a hot summer night and the heating in the room was running at maximum. He called reception several times but they didn’t fix it. He stayed on top of the bedclothes, in his underwear, staring at the ceiling until morning.

  “I think MI5 did that deliberately to keep me tired, because it’s easier to tell if someone is lying when they are exhausted,” he recalled. “I felt that they had used that particular room plenty of times before.”

  Rupert checked with other guests, who said that they had no problem with the heater in their room.

  “I doubt we altered the heating in the room,” says a former MI5 agent familiar with Rupert’s case. “This is what I call ‘goblin stuff’. Once I was told we caused it to rain in Islamabad to keep someone indoors. You hear all kinds of things we are supposed to have done. If only we had that ability.”

  The next morning over breakfast, Rupert was feelin
g groggy. Norman said he would look into the heater problem.

  In the hotel garden, he asked Rupert what he would say if they wanted him to assassinate Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, the leader of Republican Sinn Féin and a member of the Continuity IRA’s army council. “I could see he was just pushing me to test me,” says Rupert. “I asked how much it would be worth to me.”

  Norman laughed and said they weren’t in the assassination business.

  He asked how Rupert assessed the Provisional IRA ceasefire and whether its members would move over to the Continuity IRA. Rupert said that there were already defections, but that the Provisional IRA breakaways might set up on their own.

  That night, the heating in the room was just as bad and again Rupert stayed above the bedsheets, unable to sleep. He stared at the ceiling, and made a few more futile calls to reception, looking for help.

  By the next morning, he was bleary and unable to think straight. He felt annoyed but tried not to show it. Norman had more questions for him about his background. Some of them were repeats from yesterday, others could be checked against information MI5 already had. Rupert felt he was being tested. “I just told the truth. Nobody can catch you out that way. Ninety-five per cent of what I told the IRA was also the truth.”

  Rupert was due to fly out the next day and would stay at a hotel near Heathrow that night. As they packed up to leave Southampton, Norman asked if he could show him a tourist site. He drove him to Winchester Cathedral. “I’d told Norman that I loved history and again, he might have been testing me, to see if I really did have the pastimes I said I had.”

  After a tour of the cathedral, Norman suggested they go for a stroll. They walked to a statue of Alfred the Great, whom Norman explained was Britain’s first spy. He told Rupert a story about Alfred disguising himself as a travelling minstrel to enter the camp of Viking invaders called the Great Heathen Army. There, Alfred learned of their battle plans and left the camp waving and promising to come back. He slaughtered them in battle days later, saving England.

  “I can still remember us standing by this statue and Norman trying to link what he was doing right back to Alfred the Great,” said Rupert.

  They drove to the airport hotel, where Norman asked for a double bed for Rupert. “Will you be sharing the bed?” asked the receptionist. “No, no, no, no,” said Norman waving his hands. Rupert, behind him, starting sniggering. Norman turned around and started laughing too.

  “I liked you, Dave, as a friend,” he said.

  They shook hands and Norman left. Rupert booked into the airport hotel and looked out over the bland office blocks and car parks around Heathrow. It was a kind of purgatory, neither the pubs of Ireland nor the trucking plazas of Chicago. He felt disjointed and wanted to come home to Maureen. On the flight back, there were empty seats all around him.

  As usual, he was listening to an audiobook. This time it was Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally. A man with an English accent sat beside him and asked him what he was doing in the UK and if he had a good time.“The plane had plenty of seats all around and this guy is up beside me asking all these questions while I’m trying to listen to my book. I don’t like talking to people on planes anyway, so I just shut down on him for the whole flight, but he was persistent.

  “There were seats across the whole row, empty. To me, it was pretty obvious that this was a test of whether I had a big mouth.”

  “Yeah, that sounds plausible,” said the MI5 agent. “We do try to check out if people are too talkative.”

  Back in the US, Rupert heard very quickly that the British secret service approved him for spying work. He was fast-tracked because he was coming in through the FBI and had been vetted by the Americans many times.

  He agreed with Norman to work for the British for $50,000 a year, plus expenses, on top of the $30,000 he was making with the FBI. He also agreed that every time he was flying in to and out of Ireland, he would meet with his MI5 handler in London. He should also document everything on email and send it to MI5 and to the FBI – the beginning of a process that would stretch to more than 2,300 emails.

  In a box store in Chicago, he bought encryption software, which he could share with MI5 and the FBI.

  “People think you live in this big James Bond world but back then, email encryption was only beginning and we improvised a lot of ways of doing things,” said Rupert. “The encryption package, it was 24-bit, now it would be in the thousands of bits.”

  With encrypted email, he learned from MI5 about a secret phone line for agents.

  “They gave me this number to call in London in case of absolute emergency. The woman on the other end of the line sounded like a housewife answering the phone. They had a phrase and I would give a response so they knew it was me.”

  A week after his return to the US, the Continuity IRA exploded a car bomb in the small town of Markethill, in Armagh, which has a Protestant majority. It destroyed many businesses in a town that had been bombed several times before by the Provisional IRA. It was the Continuity IRA’s way of signalling that if the Provisionals wanted peace, they would take over. Josephine Hayden, a Continuity IRA prisoner, was delighted. “We need more Markethills,” she told the media. It was now clear. The car bombing of town centres would escalate in the coming year.

  At his home in Chicago, Rupert got a call from Chris Fogarty, an Irish Freedom Committee member.

  “Fogarty was completely hot-headed, always going on with conspiracy theories. He and Frank bickered and fell out a lot but always patched it up, because Chris needed Frank to listen to him.”

  Fogarty and Frank O’Neill had been questioned by Ed Buckley about a murder in Chicago, on the spurious grounds that the murdered man’s sister was involved in civil rights issues in Northern Ireland. It became a notorious case and the murder had nothing to do with Ireland. The stress of the investigation drove the conspiracy-minded Fogarty into a mental vortex from which he never recovered. Although the FBI conceded that they should never have been investigated, Fogarty began to imagine bugging devices everywhere, and that someone in the Irish Freedom Committee was an FBI plant or working for the British.

  “I had safety in numbers with Chris,” said Rupert. “Nobody took his theories seriously, so if he said I was a spy, I would be just one of a dozen that day so I didn’t worry.”

  Fogarty’s suspicions had intensified back in January 1991, Fogarty and his wife, Mary, were at a meeting in a residence at the back of the Irish Wolfhound bar in Chicago. They had a new recruit, John Tuttle from Chicago, who was good at selling tickets for fundraising events. Everyone applauded him that day for the number of tickets he sold for an upcoming dinner. Then Mary walked over to her husband, sat beside him and pointed at her notebook. “Watch Tuttle!!” it said.

  Chris Fogarty saw the note and stopped the meeting. “I immediately looked over, saw Tuttle and at that moment, he seemed to be aiming something, a revolver I thought, from underneath his coat, at our chairman, John Henegan. I immediately reached out my hand and pushed his hand toward the floor to deflect what could be a shot.”

  He pulled the device from Tuttle and found it was sophisticated bugging equipment. He shouted at Tuttle, “Who are you working for?”, but Tuttle stayed silent. Fogarty called for a knife, then ripped out the lining of Tuttle’s coat and found a transmitter insider. Within minutes, a team of FBI agents rushed into the room shouting, “Where’s Tuttle?” They grabbed him and left in silence.

  The next day, Chris and Mary Fogarty, Frank O’Neill and another Irish nationalist Anthony McCormack were charged with threatening the life of a federal informer and of supplying materials to the IRA. Mary: “The media had us charged with trying to supply surface-to-air missiles but that wasn’t what we were charged with.”

  After an 18-month legal battle, the Chicago Four, as they became known, were exonerated by a judge. From then on, the Fogartys were highly suspicious of newcomers, especially ones trying to push them into weapon purchases.

  Chris: “It wa
s causing a split in the group. Rupert and Frank O’Neill wanted to buy weapons; we felt that buying weapons for the IRA was a one-way ticket to prison, so we wanted to go our own way. Frank was very contrite afterwards when he realised that he was being led by the FBI all along.”

  Chris and Mary Fogarty spent thousands of dollars buying a container load of Levi’s 501 jeans. He wanted to send them to Ireland to help Continuity IRA prisoners. Rupert said he’d run it by Joe O’Neill when he got back to Ireland. Chris Fogarty: “501 jeans were the most sought-after clothing item at the time. We were thinking mostly of prisoners. We bought them commercially, a few hundred pairs and we did what we could for the prisoners.”

  Rupert also picked up $10,000 in cash from Frank O’Neill for the Continuity IRA and its prisoners. He was going to Ireland for several weeks, stretching through October and November and would report to M15 throughout his stay. First, he needed the fundraising money.

  “I just had to stand there and listen to Frank go on about Gerry Adams selling out the cause and how the Continuity IRA would continue the fight. Then he handed over the envelope and said I was to give it to Joe O’Neill to do some damage.”

  When he reached Ireland in October, Rupert called in to Joe in the pub in Bundoran. Joe put the money in his jacket pocket. “Good man,” he said.

  Rupert raised the issue of Fogarty’s offer of a container load of 501 jeans for the prisoners.

  O’Neill turned to Rupert suddenly: “What the fuck are we going to do with a container load of dungarees? The army has pants, now we need money.”

  Joe was gaunt. He was suffering from diabetes and asked Rupert to take him to a faith healer in northern Donegal. Rupert drove him there in his rental car. People were queuing up to have the priest put his hands on them. Joe showed the priest his feet, which were swollen from diabetes. Joe prayed and blessed himself as the priest looked to the skies and asked God to remove the suffering, as he removed the suffering from Christ.