Abernethy had proposed to Orla the night before coming to the US and she had said yes. He was in a good mood.
He was looking forward to married life, though his commitment to the Real IRA was unflinching, even after the killing of 29 civilians in Omagh, just a few miles from his home in Dungannon.
He complained to Rupert that the Provisional IRA were now getting weak, that in a recent punishment shooting they had shot the victim six times with what they called a “six pack” – shooting him in the ankles, wrists and kneecaps. Abernethy felt this was unduly lenient. The man was a suspected informer, he said, and should have been “put to sleep”.
Rupert nodded his head.
“Yeah,” he said. Informers should be executed.
The FBI followed them to Frank O’Neill’s house. Rupert dropped Abernethy off and, to the puzzlement of the FBI, rushed back to his own home to get his recorder and sped back again.
IFC members gathered at the house, where Abernethy informed them about the Real IRA bombing campaign in Ireland.
Abernethy spoke for two and a half hours, answering everyone’s queries.
He was conscious of the fact that, until Rupert and O’Neill’s recent intervention, all of these people had been Continuity IRA supporters and that he should downplay its role in the struggle.
Every mortar and bomb attack in Northern Ireland this year had been Real IRA, he said, apart from the bombing of the hotel in Fermanagh, which was Continuity IRA.
“The Continuity IRA is a figment of the imagination of about a dozen men,” he said firmly.
The Provisional IRA was bigger than the Real IRA but was being dismantled as part of the peace deal. Abernethy told the guests that South Armagh Provisional IRA volunteers had told the leadership that if they surrendered even a single bullet, there would be a mass defection to the Real IRA.
There is some truth to this boast. There were large parts of South Armagh’s two battalions that were on the brink of breaking away, but were wary of McKevitt, Campbell and their history of mistakes.
“What can we do from America?” one person asked.
“Money,” Abernethy said. The army needed all the money it could get. The Real IRA had to buy untraceable cars for operations and if security was compromised, they had to send the cars to be crushed and start all over again. It all cost money. And propaganda: they needed vocal support in the US.
Rupert asked his own question – why had Abernethy travelled under his own name and why had he come through Dublin and not continental Europe? Abernethy said that McKevitt told him Rupert himself had suggested using his own name to avoid hassle at the airport.
Rupert was happy with the response: it showed that McKevitt trusted him.
After the meeting, when the others had left, Abernethy, Rupert and O’Neill had a chat about guns. The sharp admonishment from the FBI not to buy weapons was fresh on Rupert’s mind. The gun situation in America, he told Abernethy, was very bad following the Columbine school shooting and other massacres. You could still buy a truck-load of weapons if you wanted, but it was now easier to trace back to the purchaser.
Abernethy said he understood but they would find a way.
Abernethy also said that Donnelly was already on his way out of the army and that his “stirring the pot” about Rupert had not been credible.
Rupert was relieved. He, Abernethy and Frank O’Neill were able to laugh about it together. Donnelly the crank. Donnelly the paranoid. Donnelly the absolutely correct.
Donnelly: “Did I send a letter to people in American warning them about Rupert? Absolutely I did. They went to McKevitt and he was saying, ‘Oh don’t mind Donnelly, he’s feeling left out because I took Rupert from him.’ So they have themselves to blame.”
Rupert passed on Abernethy’s travel plans to the FBI – he would fly to Boston the next morning and call at IFC supporter Joe Dillon’s house. He would have meetings with a senior member of the Catholic fraternity, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and other Republican-leaning groups and then Rupert would drive him to New York on Tuesday to meet supporters there. Abernethy would fly back to Dublin on Thursday.
Then the Chicago field office called Rupert and hit him with something he wasn’t expecting – he was to wear his recorder and tape Abernethy for the rest of his time in Chicago and Boston, but he was to switch it off at the New York state border because they didn’t want the FBI in New York to know what they were doing.
For all their talk about working by the correct protocol, Rupert was amazed.
At this point, it was one year and four months before 9/11 and 18 months since President Clinton promised to help defeat the Real IRA in the wake of Omagh. The FBI was so caught in its own territorial disputes that it wouldn’t share anti-terror information, even internally.
Before Rupert drove down to Boston to pick up Abernethy, the FBI had another request – stop singing. It was a habit Rupert had picked up to keep himself awake during long-distance trucking. Pop, country music and Irish rebel songs had filled his previous car recordings with Phil Kent, Joe Dillon and Frank O’Neill.
He had to learn to be quiet, except for conversation.
For the next two days, the Boston field office followed Abernethy to his meetings, using the itinerary supplied by Rupert.
Abernethy had flown to Boston and needed a lift around Massachusetts and then New York. In a motorway layby, Rupert switched on his recorder and collected Abernethy. They drove through Massachusetts and Connecticut. Along the way, Abernethy explained the cigarette business and its distribution, and the structure of the Provisional IRA and the Real IRA.
As they were coming close to New York, he switched to talking about fertiliser bombs, similar to the one used in Omagh, and how to construct them.
Rupert: “He gave me a full description of how to build a bomb. The mix of the fertiliser, you should use 18-6-12 and not 0-30-30, because of its explosive effect, how to use a timer, the whole thing.
“What could I do? I was under strict instructions to switch off the recorder before crossing the New York border. If I didn’t, the Chicago office would have to tell the people in New York what they were up to, and they didn’t want that.”
When he saw signs that they would soon be crossing over to New York, Rupert told Abernethy he was thirsty and pulled into a filling station.
“So I stopped to get a soft drink and went into the bathroom and shut the recorder off, by pressing a paperclip into the side.”
He got back into the car and Abernethy continued talking about building bombs.
He dropped him off in New York to meet the lawyer, Martin Galvin, and some of the New York supporters who had defected from the Continuity IRA.
He then waited around the city for Abernethy to finish.
Rupert dropped him off at the airport in New York, and said a final farewell. Abernethy reminded Rupert that he should meet soon with the sleeper agent they had in Boston, the one that they would bring back to assassinate Tony Blair or some major target.
Rupert wished him good luck on his flight back to Dublin and drove back to Chicago.
That night, under Abernethy’s insistence, he called a phone number listed for a house in Worcester, Massachusetts. As instructed by Campbell and Abernethy, he identified himself as “Dale” and asked for “James Smyth”.
An American woman immediately recognised the code name “Dale”. “I’ve been waiting for you to call,” she said.
CHAPTER 16
There was a loud knock on Michael Donnelly’s door.
He checked the spy hole and swung it open. It was Liam Clarke from the Sunday Times.
Most of Clarke’s off-the-record information about the Continuity IRA and Derry republicanism had come from the veteran republican.
Donnelly: “Liam was desperate for a story. He got like that sometimes. He said he had nothing for Sunday and did I have anything interesting?”
Donnelly, who had written to the IFC to warn them that Rupert was a spy, was s
till hurt that McKevitt had ostracised him for leaking information to the media and for taking Rupert from him.
“You should check out a guy called David Rupert,” Donnelly told Clarke.
Clarke got out his notebook and began to write while looking at Donnelly. David Rupert.
“Who is he?”
Donnelly: “I said he’s a money man from America, bringing a lot of cash over here. He’s part of the Irish Freedom Committee. Liam jumped at it, it saved him that week. I knew him a long time and I knew the system. There was an ex-admiral in the Sunday Times and if a story was stopped, Liam would say, ‘The admiral stopped it.’
“He looked into Rupert and said it was a great story and it would be in on Sunday. Then he phoned me and said that the admiral pulled it. For some reason it was sensitive but then he said it would take a few weeks and it would be published.”
Clarke began calling around, convinced that Rupert must be a multi-millionaire who was supplying his own fortune to the Real IRA.
Donnelly suggested Clarke call John McDonagh, an IFC leader who hosted the pro-Continuity IRA radio show called Radio Free Éireann on WBAI, New York’s popular liberal station. McDonagh was also beginning to wonder about Rupert, but also carried a burning resentment that Rupert had successfully convinced much of the IFC to move from supporting the Continuity IRA to the Real IRA.
McDonagh: “Rupert would come to New York and say we should be supporting this and we should be supporting that. I thought, ‘Who the fuck is this guy? He’s not even Irish American. How did he get into this and who put him in charge?’”
McDonagh was a Continuity IRA loyalist and was also suspicious that Rupert seemed to hand out laptops to a lot of people.
Meanwhile, Dorothy Robinson, one of the leaders of the Irish American republican group Clan na Gael, was also developing her own suspicions about Rupert. Robinson, who lived in Philadelphia, was one of the most bloody-minded US-based Irish Republicans. A Daily Mail reporter bought a ticket to a Clan na Gael fundraiser in New York that year to see what they talked about. Robinson got up and proposed a toast to the IRA members who had bombed Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles’s great-uncle. The 250 people at the fundraiser clapped in approval and raised their glasses with Robinson; some were prominent lawyers in the Irish community.
She had been friends with Rupert but disagreed with the split in the IFC and was still loyal to the Continuity IRA. She also found Rupert’s sudden rise in the movement very strange.
That year, she flew to Ireland to talk to Mickey McKevitt directly. Her main focus was Rupert and her concerns about him. McKevitt dismissed it and said Rupert was “solid”. Robinson was known to be opinionated and headstrong. She told McKevitt that he should back the Continuity IRA and their ideology and that he was running his campaign the wrong way. McKevitt was furious. He got up and walked out of his own living room. Robinson stayed in the room, having a polite cup of tea with Bernadette. Rupert was saved, but how much longer before McKevitt began to listen to the growing chorus of suspicion?
Rupert drove from Chicago to Worcester, Massachusetts, on 24 April 2000, listening to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code along the way. The FBI had already booked him a room at the Holiday Inn and spent the morning bugging the room. Armed FBI officers were poised in case anything went wrong.
James Smyth met Rupert in the hotel room at 5pm. This was the man that the Real IRA had set up in the US, in preparation for the assassination of Tony Blair or another major British establishment figure.
He was as Rupert expected – lean, military build, Northern Irish accent, very serious and knowledgeable about military hardware. He was about 35 and came from a very hardline republican family.
In Rupert’s hotel room, and with the FBI listening, Smyth told Rupert he had already sent handguns to Ireland but needed an untraceable mailing address to post Glock handguns and bomb timers. He needed Rupert to get a safe address from McKevitt. Rupert said he would sort it out.
He handed Smyth a military catalogue and asked him to choose what he wanted from it, saying that IFC funds could pay for it. Smyth flicked through it and said he would come back to him, and took the bomb component list the engineering department had given Rupert. He left shortly afterwards, saying he’d be in touch within a month.
The FBI were happy with the meeting. The conviction of someone plotting to kill Blair would be good for the agency.
The agents came into the room to congratulate Rupert.
He is reluctant to talk about how the room was bugged.
I press him several times, but he resists.
“It’s trade craft and obviously there will be certain people reading this book who would like to know that information, so I can’t.”
In May 2000, as suspicion about Rupert mounted, Maureen had one of the proudest moments of her life. She and David flew down to Bloomington, Indiana. Dorie had graduated from law school. Maureen had dropped out of high school and was pregnant with her as a teenager. She had raised her without a husband, put every penny from the truck plaza towards her education, had never travelled so that Dorie would one day have a profession, and here she was with a law degree.
“I cried. It was an immense day,” said Maureen. “David came down with me and I was just glowing with pride. David and I are in the spy business and it all felt so strange being surrounded by all these people in Bloomington who had normal jobs. Dorie’s graduation was like our rock of sanity with all the madness going on in Ireland.”
A week later, a bomb exploded under Hammersmith Bridge in London.
The blast woke people a mile away and left a major split on the city centre side of the bridge.
The Real IRA didn’t manage to collapse it but it was the best effort yet in the IRA’s long history of attacking the bridge. Long lines of traffic queued up at other bridges in the following days. News reports showed tailbacks and angry truck drivers.
It took two years of intermittent repairs before the bridge was deemed safe and it still has weight restrictions in place 18 years later.
The target was symbolic – the IRA had set two suitcase bombs on either side of the bridge in 1939. One of the bombs exploded, a support column collapsed, but the other needed to explode to bring the whole bridge down. A hairdresser coming home from work spotted a suitcase with smoke billowing out of it and flung it over the bridge into the water. It exploded, sending a 60ft jet of water into the air. The hairdresser was later appointed MBE for his bravery. The Provisional IRA returned to the same bridge in 1996 with the largest bomb ever planted in mainland Britain. It was nearly all Semtex, designed to destroy the supports of the bridge. The detonator went off but for reasons still disputed within the IRA, it failed to explode. By coming back for a third attempt, the Real IRA was signalling the longevity of the cause.
MI5 contacted Rupert – finding the London cell was now an absolute priority. Could he find out anything from McKevitt about who was responsible and when the next attack would be?
They had known since Rupert’s meetings in November that the London cell was using young “lilywhites” with no criminal convictions and with no known republican connections. In America, Smyth was in a great mood because of the scale of the attack. He asked to speak to Rupert in Worcester. Again, Rupert drove down there and the FBI bugged his hotel room.
Smyth came into the room with a big smile.
“Smyth was very, very excited about the Hammersmith bomb, it got publicity in the US and it showed that the Real IRA were back in London,” said Rupert. “It was even more exciting to him that the Real IRA now had untraceable lilywhites in London and would soon be striking again.”
Now Smyth said he needed $5,000 to $10,000, to buy weapons and bomb components from the military weaponry catalogue Rupert had left with him.
Rupert was in a difficult situation – he was taking legitimate IFC funds and diverting them to buy weapons and bombs.
But the FBI believed that it was a different scenario from that with O’Connor
– Smyth was a Real IRA member and was not being induced to commit crimes.
Rupert told him he would get the money and would be in contact. Smyth, who lived just minutes from the hotel, said they would meet again when he had the weapons, and left.
It was time for Rupert to return to Ireland.
MI5 wanted a meeting first. They were deeply concerned. The Provisional IRA had previously caused billions of pounds worth of damage in the financial district of London, had bombed the Conservative Party conference in Brighton, had bombed many restaurants, pubs, shops and parks in London, and the Real IRA were determined to continue with the England campaign.
On 18 June, Rupert flew from Chicago to Paris for a meeting with Paul at a hotel room near Charles de Gaulle Airport.
They agreed that the London bomb cell and McKevitt’s direction of it was a major priority for the trip. They planned out how Rupert should raise the issue without forcing the conversation.
Because of the meeting with Paul, Rupert missed a connecting flight to Dublin and had to travel the next day. Mickey and Bernie McKevitt were getting very worried when he failed to arrive in Dublin. Bernie said she sensed something was wrong – that he had been arrested, or worse.
When he got to Dublin, Rupert sent word to them that he was all right and would see them soon in the Carrickdale Hotel, where Real IRA supporters were gathering for the annual 32 County Sovereignty Movement AGM. That same day, police found a primed Real IRA bomb on the grounds of the residence for the Northern Ireland secretary of state, Peter Mandelson, at Hillsborough Castle. It was designed to kill him and as many members of the Northern Ireland parliament as possible. It came just weeks after a Real IRA cell were caught trying to deliver a car bomb to Hillsborough to destroy the parliament building.
Wiping out the parliament was almost as important a goal for the Real IRA as bombing London.
On the night of 22 June, Rupert was in a frustrated mood. Real IRA members were coming in from all over Ireland for the Republican Sinn Fein Ard Fheis in the same hotel as him and McKevitt spent the evening talking to senior leaders in the bar downstairs.
The Accidental Spy Page 17