The Accidental Spy Read online

  “It was strange to me that Joe was religious and yet he couldn’t see anything wrong with the bombings and shootings. I asked him about it on the way back and he said, ‘It would be a sin if it wasn’t for the sake of Ireland.’”

  Rupert then drove Joe from Bundoran to Dublin for the Republican Sinn Féin Ard Fheis (annual convention) in the second week of November. As vice president of the party, and as one of the party’s few councillors, he had to be there.

  It was one of the moments where my life intersects with Rupert’s. I was also at the Ard Fheis. Security outside was very tight. Special Branch jumped out of unmarked cars to talk to anyone coming out of the hotel. I went out at lunch and two approached me. “We saw you coming out of the hotel. What business do you have there?” said one.

  When Rupert left the hotel, he saw four men jump out of a car. “One of them ran at me and I thought I was being mugged so I pulled back my fist to punch him and he pulls out his badge and says, ‘No, no, garda, garda.’ I came so close to knocking him.”

  Republican Sinn Féin was suddenly relevant again and the bombing of Markethill showed that it had the violent intent.

  The BBC was there, as was Sky News. “Do you have a paramilitary wing?” one TV reporter asked the Republican Sinn Féin leader, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh. “Well, we’re not saying whether we have or we haven’t,” he said.

  He and his party were deliberately old-fashioned and romantically republican. They were, and still are, against abortion and, to this day, are the only party in Ireland never to have endorsed same-sex marriage. At funeral services and commemorations, of which there were many, they often knelt down and said a decade of the rosary in Gaelic.

  Theirs was a Catholic, nationalist politics of the 1920s. Old men got up on stage and denounced the partition of Ireland and peace talks at Stormont Castle in Belfast.

  “The only way I’d walk into Stormont is with a barrel of dynamite under each arm,” said one speaker, to thunderous applause.

  Rupert was learning more and more about the party’s conservative agenda.

  “I remember there was this gay guy speaking and he was very obviously gay. He was a shorter, chubby guy and he was talking about human rights and, then, that everyone should have the right to love who they want. He was talking for about 10 or 15 minutes before Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and that crowd figured out what was going on.

  “Ó Brádaigh says, ‘That’s enough now, I don’t know if we want that human right.’”

  The Chicago Irish Freedom Committee supporters flew in for the event, and Rupert had his photograph taken with them and with Ó Brádaigh.

  After lunch, I met members of the boy scout group, Fianna Éireann, who were wearing their green uniforms and black berets. On the stage, to a standing ovation, they pledged their allegiance to the Continuity IRA.

  Later in the lobby, the Fianna’s leaders, the Ryan brothers, said with excitement that Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, the party leader, was coming in to say hello.

  In the main function hall, David Rupert was being led around by Joe O’Neill, who was keen to show supporters that the US fundraising and support wing was working well. Rupert also stood at the top of the room and counted votes for the many resolutions calling for the withdrawal of British forces from Northern Ireland. His huge frame, as he stood there doing a head count of votes, was unmissable. “That was deliberate,” he said. “Everyone in the Continuity IRA was in the room and I’m up there counting their votes. I wanted to show that I was at the centre of things, at the centre of the movement. I was central and they saw that.”

  *****

  Cars pulled one by one into Ballyconnell House, a former Catholic boarding school in Falcarragh, County Donegal. The 80 delegates had rented a function room from Údarás na Gaeltachta, the Irish state agency that oversaw the Gaelic-speaking areas of the county and which now owned the school. Ostensibly, the delegates were there for a Sinn Féin Irish language seminar.

  Unknown to Údarás, the Irish language meeting was a front. After killing 2,000 people over the past 30 years, the Provisional IRA was about to accept the principles on non-violence, ending its campaign on condition that Sinn Féin was allowed into talks with the British.

  Under IRA rules, it had to hold a general convention to hear the views from units around the country. The last such convention was in 1986 and it was only done in the most extreme of circumstances.

  The majority of the army council was behind Gerry Adams and those who supported the ceasefire. The majority of the executive, which appointed the army council, was behind Mickey McKevitt, a hardliner and the IRA’s quartermaster.

  Martin McGuinness, IRA army council member and the Sinn Féin deputy leader, was at this army convention, as was Brian Keenan, who oversaw the worst of the IRA’s bombing campaign in England, which had cost 21 lives in the Birmingham pub bombings and five in the Guildford bombings among many other atrocities.

  The dissident members arrived later. They included McKevitt and his wife, Bernadette Sands McKevitt, a sister of the IRA’s most revered martyr, the hunger striker Bobby Sands.

  Seamus McGrane, a member of the IRA’s executive and a McKevitt loyalist, entered with them.

  After several people spoke in favour of accepting talks, McGrane spoke, with the IRA constitution in hand, and gave a legalistic interpretation of why the IRA could never accept peace without a British withdrawal.

  McKevitt, who controlled all the IRA’s weapon depots, was next to speak. He loudly denounced those present and said that they were using jargon to disguise the obvious truth, that they were going to disband. He said that they were misleading the units present. He then got up and walked out, along with his wife, McGrane, and several others.

  McKevitt was delighted, a senior garda told me later, because he was now the leader, and would wage the war he wanted.

  A few weeks afterwards, he and his supporters reconvened at a sympathiser’s farmhouse in County Meath to create a new army structure.

  Liam Campbell, the South Armagh Provisional IRA leader, was appointed second in command. Campbell, now a millionaire from smuggling along the border, was softly spoken and always kept a neat appearance. He was clean-shaven, his hair always fixed, and well dressed. “He has a military bearing, you’d know he had some training,” said a solicitor who had reason to fear him.

  McKevitt appointed his wife, Bernadette, as third in command and she was to head their political wing, to be called the 32 County Sovereignty Movement.

  McGrane, a stocky, moustached IRA veteran, was appointed director of training. He was instructed to set up arms camps around the country, as he had in the Provisional IRA.

  In the IRA heartland of South Armagh, a showdown was coming. Sean Hughes, a local IRA commander, summoned Liam Campbell to a meeting. Campbell showed up with many of the local brigade to give support. Hughes backed down and Campbell left with his men. The split was now complete.

  McKevitt held meetings in the following weeks with the leadership of the Continuity IRA, including Des Long, its chief of staff, and Colm Murphy, a wealthy builder, who agreed to act as liaison between the two groups. In reality, the Continuity IRA was becoming a feeder organisation for this new group. It would build the bombs and deliver them, but McKevitt would supply the equipment and take control.

  The McKevitt group set up a checkpoint in Jonesborough in South Armagh, directed by Liam Campbell, to stop cars and show that they were in control. One of its masked Armalite-carrying members was asked by a motorist, “Who are you?” The masked man replied, “We’re the IRA, The real IRA.” The media immediately picked up on the phrase. The Real IRA was born.

  On 6 November, Bernadette Sands McKevitt led a dozen Sinn Féin members in Dundalk to walk out of a meeting and join her new group. Both sides traded insults as she left.

  State television did an interview with her, as did newspapers from all over Ireland, the UK and the US. Under Ireland’s strict libel laws, reporters, including me, could only say that Bern
adette Sands McKevitt was the leader of a new anti-peace group called the 32 County Sovereignty Movement and that it was linked to the Real IRA, which was led by “a former quartermaster general of the Provisional IRA”. Libel lawyers in media organisations forbade us from revealing that the former quartermaster general was in fact Bernadette’s husband, Mickey.

  None of this had yet reached Rupert, who knew only that there was a split in the Provisional IRA.

  “Joe O’Neill and all the Continuity IRA guys weren’t exactly shouting about it to me,” he said. “I was the money man from America and they wanted me only on their side.”

  After a long stay in Ireland, Rupert flew home to Chicago, after writing a long report on the Ard Fheis and the Continuity IRA’s insistence, as always, that the fight must go on.

  He and Maureen celebrated Christmas with Dorie, Maureen’s daughter, and resolved that, when Rupert returned to Ireland in the new year, Maureen would come with him.

  Throughout that winter, there were frantic talks between the Real IRA and Continuity IRA about waging an aggressive new bombing campaign.

  In the new year, having taken some of the best of the Provisional IRA from its South Armagh heartland, and having won over the Continuity IRA to help deliver the bombs, McKevitt began.

  CHAPTER 8

  On 20 February 1998, a 500-pound car bomb exploded outside a police station in Moira, County Down. Seven police officers and four civilians were injured and it wrecked the centre of the town. It was a joint operation between the Continuity IRA and the newly formed and far more powerful Real IRA.

  From their base in Dundalk, McKevitt and his group celebrated. They were now in charge. More Provisional IRA members started to come over to McKevitt, impressed by the calibre of leadership he was attracting.

  Three days after the attack in Moira, a 300-pound bomb exploded outside a police station in Portadown, County Armagh, a town then famous for its contentious loyalist parades. The blast destroyed buildings across a wide area.

  In March, they began the mortar attacks, first with what was called a “barrack-buster”, a Provisional IRA-created giant mortar that fired like a cannon into police and army barracks. Two weeks later, there were two more mortar attacks in South Armagh, one at a police and army base, another at a British army watchtower.

  Bernadette Sands McKevitt would appear before the media, saying that she didn’t know who was in the Real IRA but adding that her position was to support those who were “engaged in armed struggle” and who were “protecting Irish sovereignty”.

  In Chicago, Rupert got a call from MI5. They needed him in Ireland urgently. After exhausted and often heated talks, all the parties in Northern Ireland were close to signing a historic peace agreement with the British and Irish governments. There was a mood of celebration, even jubilation, in Ireland that the Troubles might finally be ending.

  By now, Bernadette Sands McKevitt had been expelled from Sinn Féin for calling the leadership traitors. She was interviewed by PBS in America, the BBC, and the New York Times. The international media often commented on how polite she was and how she had a striking resemblance to her brother, Bobby.

  Rupert was told to fly to Ireland and to find out what was happening with the Continuity IRA. Police in Ireland and the UK were concerned that they would try to bomb Northern Ireland while the agreement was being signed.

  He and Maureen flew into Shannon and drove north to Donegal. Since the closure of the Drowes, they had been renting a house in Tullaghan, paid for by the FBI, and so could slip quickly back into the local community. As soon as they were unpacked, Rupert drove north to meet Joe O’Neill, while Maureen met for coffee with her friend Pauline, the former bar manager.

  At his bar, Joe took fundraising money from Rupert and said that the agreement would never work. He seemed excited, because this sell-out by Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA would bring dozens of new recruits.

  Talks in Belfast dragged on and on that day. After all-night talks on Easter Thursday involving the White House, Downing Street and a dozen Northern Ireland political parties, Tony Blair flew in to Belfast for the signing of a peace deal, soon to be called the Good Friday Agreement.

  Congratulations flowed in from around the world. President Clinton said it was a historic moment in Irish history, while the Pope said the whole world was praying for Ireland.

  It was the biggest news story in the world that day. The Agence France Presse reporter in Belfast, for the first time in his career, got to press a button on the AFP software that signalled to newspapers around the world that his article was the agency’s top story.

  The next day, as the country was celebrating, Joe O’Neill asked Rupert to call over. He sounded animated. He asked for a lift in Rupert’s rental car because his own Mercedes was well known to gardaí.

  “It was clear to me something big was up,” said Rupert. “He told me to drive from Bundoran, all the way through Donegal to Letterkenny. When we saw a garda car, he covered his beard with his hand to disguise himself. When we got to Letterkenny, Joe told me to turn around and go back towards Bundoran. He was looking for roadblocks throughout the county.

  A Donegal undertaker, who was also a Continuity IRA member, was storing a rocket-launcher in his funeral home. Under direction from the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA was to use it to blow up a police Land Rover on the other side of the border, either in Derry or Omagh. Time was of the essence. It had to happen that weekend, while the world’s media were still gathered in Belfast and the peace agreement had the world’s attention.

  Rupert dropped O’Neill back at his pub, where he was organising Continuity IRA members to launch the attack, now that the roads were clear.

  He drove quickly back to his apartment and emailed MI5, marked “Urgent” with the details of what was happening.

  He also called them on a special hotline Norman had told him about, which was only for agents to pass on vitally important information.

  The British called the Irish garda, who swamped the Letterkenny to Bundoran road with checkpoints. It would be an enormous international story if those who were becoming known as “dissident republicans” pulled off an attack within 24 hours of the peace agreement.

  News of the garda clamp down in Donegal made the Irish newspapers but gardaí reassured the public that it was just routine security following the signing of the agreement. The rocket-launcher operation was called off and it was smuggled back to the funeral home.

  For Joe O’Neill and his comrades, there was general suspicion that someone in the Real IRA had tipped off the gardaí about the rocket-launcher operation, or that they had a spy among them.

  Mickey Donnelly, the Ulster chairman of Republican Sinn Féin, was adamant that there was a spy within the Continuity IRA.

  Donnelly had a big beard and heavy-set eyes, with a warm lilting Derry accent. He was one of the first four members of the Provisional IRA in Derry in the late 1960s.

  People in O’Neill’s bar would say to Rupert, “Do you know Mickey Donnelly over there? He was one of the ‘hooded men’.”

  In 1971, in the middle of a sustained IRA bombing campaign, the British had introduced internment without trial, allowing the army full martial power to arrest and lock up anyone they suspected of terrorism. In a single night, they snatched more than 340 men from their homes, including Mickey Donnelly. He was one of 14 who were taken to an RAF base in Ballykelly in Derry for a sensory deprivation experiment, in which they were hooded, blasted with white noise, told to stand in stress position against a wall until they collapsed, beaten and flung screaming out of helicopters only to land on hillocks a few feet down. The experiment lasted a week, before the men were sent to a regular internment camp.

  The Irish government was outraged and took the British to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that Donnelly and the 13 others had been subjected to inhumane and degrading treatment.

  Donnelly liked Rupert and soon asked him to be his driver. Rupert became a frequen
t visitor to his house.

  “He told me about his torture experience but, to be honest, I wasn’t listening all that hard. It was in the past and I was focused on what was going on right now,” says Rupert.

  Donnelly’s experience of torture had left him furious with any republican who dared speak of peace. In his native Derry, just over the border in Northern Ireland, he angrily denounced the Good Friday Agreement as a sell-out and treachery, inflicted on the nationalists of Northern Ireland.

  On the street, in newspapers and on the radio, he said the Provisional IRA were cowards who were now in league with MI5. Martin McGuiness, the Derry-based deputy leader of Sinn Féin, was nothing but a puppet, he said.

  The Provisional IRA finally had enough.

  Five masked men broke into his house in Derry, announcing “IRA – Provisional,” and beat Donnelly with metal baseball bats while his family screamed in horror.

  “They smashed my leg in a few places. I don’t know how I did it but as one of the blows was coming down on my head, I caught the bat with my hand. The force ripped my thumb out of its socket,” he said.

  His son ran at them and was also beaten with the bats. His daughter was punched in the face.

  Donnelly tried to stand up on his broken leg to fight them off. His leg bone was sticking out through the broken skin. He shouted at his son, Declan, “Run and get help.”

  Declan ran out the back door, banging into a hooded gunman standing watch. He knocked the man over with the force, then ran down the road. The group panicked and fled.

  Donnelly appeared on the front page of nationalist newspapers, lying in a cast in his hospital bed. Then the BBC appeared, and Ulster Television, each documenting that he was attacked for opposing the Provisional IRA’s move towards peace.

  Rupert and Declan Curneen visited Donnelly at a cottage he was renting after the attack, which was located by a donkey sanctuary in Sligo, away from the threat in Derry.

  “The injuries were a horrible, horrible sight but Mickey was a real hard guy. It made him more determined. He healed well and he was soon speaking out against Sinn Féin, in defiance of the Provisional IRA,” said Rupert.