McKevitt was concerned – the gardaí had figured out the Provisional IRA were still importing weapons by mail from a cell of sympathisers in Florida.
It was all over the media.
The gardaí also knew that one address in Meath was being used that wasn’t on the Provisional IRA’s list, so they knew it must be going to McKevitt. He was concerned that Smyth would be exposed in a big arms clampdown in the US and wanted him moved to El Paso, where McKevitt could meet him.
He was still annoyed about the newspaper article and vowed that Mickey Donnelly would pay for it.
The fact that Mickey Donnelly openly admitted to me for this book that he was the source of the article says something about his personality. As with the Provisional IRA, his attitude was “Come and get me.”
They talked more about newspaper stories. Campbell noted that the papers said the Real IRA used satellite photos, now commercially available on computer disk sets, to check out a barracks in Derry before a recent bombing. McKevitt, starting to thaw out, turned to Dominic and said perplexed, “Did you?”
Everyone laughed.
The entire media commotion left little time to talk about the London cell.
The group agreed that things were going well in London and would gear up for bigger targets, but revealed little else. They had another problem – two senior members of the bomb-making team were supposed to be at the army council meeting but there was no sign of them.
They waited and waited. They were growing increasingly worried that the two had been arrested and that the gardaí might raid the meeting. Campbell looked visibly upset. They waited a few more minutes.
Campbell and Dominic decided that using their mobile phones would be too risky, so they drove off to a phone box.
They came back 10 minutes later. Nobody was answering. Something was wrong.
They decided to get Rupert out of there and carry on with the meeting, which they could say was 32CSM if they were raided.
The woman of the house, the one whose attractiveness Rupert had noted, was called to the front room. She and her family carefully avoided being in the room when the meeting took place. Campbell asked her to drive Rupert to the Carrickdale. She got her car keys and took Rupert back to the hotel. Rupert was trying to talk to her but she didn’t say much.
Back at the hotel, he wrote a report on the army council meeting. Paul was very pleased and said he would locate photographs of Dominic to show to Rupert when he returned to London in a few days.
As soon as the meeting was over, South Armagh Real IRA members called around to people close to the Dublin-to-Belfast railway in Meigh, County Armagh.
They told the locals that there would be a bomb on the railway line but not to worry because it would be small and would not hurt any civilians. They knew the community distrusted them after Omagh and wanted to assure republican areas that there would be no mistake.
On the night of 29 June, a bomb destroyed the rail line, causing havoc and mass cancellations of Dublin to Belfast trains.
The following day, McKevitt agreed to show Rupert around the area, so that he could choose a rental house.
Rupert felt it was important to have a house in the area and to be trusted. It was also a good way to understand McKevitt’s movements in the area.
They got into Rupert’s rental car to drive around looking at houses. “So you heard about the railway?” said McKevitt.
Campbell and his men had detonated it to test the security force reaction, he said. The Real IRA had spotters there all day, studying the pattern by which the Northern Ireland police and army dealt with the situation and seeing if they had air support.
“We’ll do a few of these,” said McKevitt. “They may use a different pattern next time but then we’ll find the rotation of how they move,” he said.
They drove out to Clogherhead in north Louth, overlooking the Irish Sea, to view property for sale and rent.
McKevitt loved the area. It was a beautiful coastal village and the people around here were good, solid republicans, whereas the republicans of Carlingford Peninsula were fanatics, either for or against the Real IRA. He didn’t want fanatics, he just wanted solid people, he said.
After they finished looking at houses on Carlingford, he told Rupert to drive a bit further along the border road, to the road overlooking Narrow Water Bridge and Warrenpoint on the other side of the inlet.
It was a spot that always made McKevitt happy when he was stressed: it was the site of one of his greatest accomplishments.
They sat on a car on a hill, looking down on Narrow Water, which lies just inside Northern Ireland. It was here that, in 1978, McKevitt had dreamed up the following year’s double-bombing that killed 18 British soldiers on the same day that Mountbatten was blown up in Sligo.
They got out of the car and McKevitt pointed out all the points, like a battle historian recounting a great victory.
They had watched troop movements for months, and saw the soldiers had to use the border road to get back to base. He pointed out where the first bomb was planted at the side of the road and how they could watch it all unfold from the hill on the southern side, without ever having to go into Northern Ireland. Brendan Burns, one of their best bomb-makers, pressed the button as the bus was passing a haystack mounted on a truck. The bus was blown up and fell on its side. The nearest rescue point would be an old lodge house, where the soldiers carried the injured and called for help. Burns picked up a different device and pressed the button. The lodge house blew up, killing the injured and their rescuers.
McKevitt clasped his hands. “A great operation,” he said. It was a major career booster for him in the Provisional IRA and had greatly impressed IRA leaders in Belfast. Best of all, on a busy road, there were no civilian deaths. He seemed nostalgic. It was a glorious time for him.
They got back in the car and drove back to the hotel.
McKevitt was trying so hard to impress Rupert.
They had tea for an hour back at the Ballymascanlon House Hotel.
He knew by now that the BBC were coming around to Campbell’s house and that a major documentary naming Omagh suspects would soon be released.
McKevitt said that they had a shadow army council and engineering team in place, in case he and Liam were arrested at the same time. “I hope it doesn’t happen, but it might,” he said.
Back at the Carrickdale, Rupert didn’t have time to write down all the real estate addresses he visited with McKevitt, so he wrote a quick note to MI5 saying that he would deal with it later as he had to reduce what he was now calling “exposure time” – the time when he was writing his spy reports and could be exposed if someone came into the room.
Late that night, he discovered that the bomb team couldn’t make it to the army council meeting because they were being tailed by the Special Branch and had to duck back into Dundalk. Campbell told him they would reconvene the meeting at the cottage the next day.
After breakfast, the cottage owner picked up Rupert and drove up into the mountains once more.
In the cottage driveway, Rupert walked slowly so he could pick out the Dublin number plate of a black Nissan Sunny car.
Dent and Frank, the bomb team leaders, were there.
Both were wearing white gloves as they examined and explained new bomb components to Campbell.
Both were happy with Hammersmith but thought they needed to develop new detonating techniques. It was as if they didn’t realise they were in the Real IRA, or had come from the Provisional IRA, but were in a hobbyist club for people who liked to construct explosives from every imaginable type of electronics, each competing with the other for the best adaptation and best bomb technique.
They were having an argument when Rupert came in. Frank wanted to adapt a mortar bomb detonation system similar to that used by Hamas in Gaza. Dent thought it was a stupid idea, too cumbersome and not modern enough. Dent was always well dressed and well mannered. He spoke about giving lectures and Rupert believed that he
was a college professor. He listened closely as they talked about getting components. Dent told him about an electronics shop that was run by a man from the border area who would let them buy what they wanted, no questions asked, and that it was a back-door system of purchasing electronics without being traced.
Campbell listened attentively, then divided out expenses for them, in wads of cash that were in dollars for one and British pounds for the other. Rupert, watching carefully, realised that they were from different sides of the border.
If only he had their real names.
Campbell supplied Rupert with a handwritten address of a car valet service in county Kildare where he could ship guns and bomb parts when he got them from James Smyth. The valet, run by a Real IRA member, had been used several times before. The guns from America came in with other business envelopes. Guns were wrapped in lead to avoid metal detectors. They were hidden in the company’s offices until the time was right and moved quickly up to one of the weapon teams in Meath and Louth.
It was a major find for Rupert.
Through this meeting, he also discovered the details of McKevitt’s plan for the navy ship in Carlingford Lough.
On his last visit to Ireland, he was asked to co-ordinate with Smyth in getting marine magnets that would work underwater. He now learned that they were for attaching bombs to the underside of ships in Carlingford harbour. They needed them soon, so they could attack the ship.
He wrote down a list of all they needed from America for the bomb parts: Untraceable computers, sports radar guns, encryption software, a specific type of flashbulb, Intertec mechanical switches, software for military rockets already in their possession, stun guns, a white noise generator, a digital voice changer, a scanner for detecting humans nearby, so that they would not get caught at training camps again, and a GPS receiver so that they could locate their own arms bunkers.
Frank, digging at the regular members, said they shouldn’t be using X-marks-the-spot to find their own bunkers in the 21st century.
Campbell laughed at this and said he didn’t use Xs for weapon bunkers.
The men broke up the meeting after an hour. Rupert said he would do what he could to get the components.
But things were beginning to get uncomfortable. “It was just more Dave,” said an army council member. “Always with the waffle, not delivering. I had lost faith in him by that point. I couldn’t understand why McKevitt was so insistent on him.”
A few days later, Rupert moved down to Dublin for a small break before going back to the US.
M15 had booked his hotel in advance. It was the five-star Shelbourne Hotel on Stephen’s Green in the centre of the city.
He woke up the next morning and looked out over Stephen’s Green.
“I must have been doing something right, this was really one of the best hotels I was in.”
He lay there on the bed, in a hotel bathrobe, eating room service and flicking through Irish TV.
Then he got a call from Mickey McKevitt on his untraceable phone.
“Well?” said McKevitt. “When are you on your way to Mexico?”
CHAPTER 18
The morning sun rose over the Mexican hills and the heat bleached the roads. A gauze of dry, muggy air pushed against Rupert’s skin. He was alone in Ciudad Juárez.
He stopped off at a café and with a little broken Spanish, ordered a coffee and checked his phone. No word from James Smyth. Nothing. He was getting concerned. Had the FBI jumped too soon? Was Smyth in custody?
On the other side of the Rio Grande river lay El Paso, Texas.
Rupert was to check a safe route for McKevitt to enter the United States from Mexico, as the Real IRA army council had agreed. He was struck by how easy it was to drive over to Mexico and back to the United States without a search. Smuggling McKevitt across wouldn’t be a problem.
Ever since the huge shipments from Gaddafi in the 1980s, McKevitt had been quartermaster of the Provisional IRA. He was insistent, to the point of obsession, on seeing any major arms shipment himself before purchasing. He loved that world. He loved the feel and excitement of weapon purchases. For the Real IRA, he had smuggled himself out of Ireland to South Africa, Bulgaria and Croatia to look at weapons. Now he would go one step further, and finally see the huge US gun market for the first time. “I’m very hands-on with weaponry,” he told Rupert. McGrane and Campbell had also noted McKevitt’s schoolboy excitement for major arms deals.
McKevitt told Rupert to take the funds for his trip to El Paso from the IFC prisoner relief fund. Rupert used it to stay at a five-star hotel in El Paso.
“I wasn’t paying for it, so I didn’t care,” he said.
All those fundraisers and lotteries in Chicago were keeping him in luxury on the Mexican border. Every day, he would drive across to Ciudad Juárez, have a coffee, check the route for smuggling McKevitt back to the US and then drive back to El Paso. Ciudad Juárez was so close to El Paso that, along with Las Cruces in the neighboring US state of New Mexico, they formed the largest bilingual and binational work force in the Western Hemisphere. For smuggling, it was perfect.
Rupert drove back over the bridge to El Paso, imagining if he had McKevitt hidden under a seat at the back. No checks, no searches, it would be easy.
He went back to the hotel in El Paso, lay on the bed and flicked through the TV stations. After an hour, he went out to the corridor. He saw men in suits with guns coming towards him. He must be busted. This could ruin everything. He was instantly mad with the FBI for not giving him cover.
An agent approached. “What’s going on?” said Rupert. “Visit to the hotel by Governor Bush,” said the man with the gun. He was secret service. Nothing to worry about. Bush was running for president. As governor, he had won over the Democratic town of El Paso and now he was coming to appeal for votes in his election fight against Al Gore.
Rupert went back up to his room and left a message on Smyth’s mobile phone.
His second function in El Paso was to find accommodation for James Smyth in Texas so he could escape the scrutiny of Boston and set up an explosives and gun testing range in the desert. It would also be easier for him to meet McKevitt there. “I drove out myself into the desert, looking for a good place to test weapons. Obviously, it had to be far enough into the desert that nobody could hear it,” Rupert said. “Our research and development facility, as I called it.”
Smyth called back an hour later. “Why aren’t you down here?” said Rupert, leaning against his car out in the desert. He knew Smyth carried huge respect. He couldn’t be mad at him.
Smyth paused at first, and stumbled, but then told the truth. He didn’t want to go through with the move to El Paso. He was in love. McKevitt had sent Smyth to South Africa to intercept a Provisional IRA arms shipment. When the Provisionals found out about it, they were furious and were going to shoot Smyth, so McKevitt sent him to Boston. Now Smyth had met a beautiful American woman and didn’t want to move to El Paso.
“I just don’t want to go,” Smyth said.
“Where are you now?” said Rupert.
“In Canada.”
Rupert knew McKevitt would be furious. So did Smyth.
“You’re supposed to be down in El Paso. What’s in Canada?”
From his days in the French Foreign Legion, Smyth loved speaking French with Québécois, the closest North America had to a French ex-pat scene. Quebec had many former legionnaires like him, and he was with this girlfriend, showing her around a French-speaking island in Quebec.
“You know someone’s not going to be happy about this.”
Pause.
“Yeah, I know.”
Smyth had tried to reach a compromise, by volunteering to bring his girlfriend, who had military experience, into IRA operations.
McKevitt had rejected it completely. He didn’t know anything about this woman and Smyth was never, ever to discuss operations with her.
Meanwhile, she was putting pressure on Smyth to show real commitment. He knew
everything she said made sense. He was sick of being moved around the world at a click of McKevitt’s fingers. First Ireland, then he lived in South Africa, then Boston, now El Paso. He was still on for assassinating Blair, but moving to Texas was a step too far.
“Alright,” said Rupert.
He called McKevitt to say that the parcel wasn’t going to be delivered to where it was supposed to be, because of a woman.
McKevitt was furious. He couldn’t believe that Smyth, the most militaristic, the most loyal, would disobey an order, and for a woman.
The good news from Rupert was that the place they talked about was perfect and easy to get to from the other side.
McKevitt said he didn’t give a fuck.
He couldn’t shoot Smyth – he was far too valuable. So that made McKevitt look weak, which angered him even more.
Rupert told him that Smyth would be up in French-speaking Canada for a while. McKevitt said, “What the fuck is he doing up there? You tell him he has to go where he is supposed to be.”
When Smyth came back from Canada, Rupert drove to Boston to explain the seriousness of the situation and also to give him some rocket-launcher software that the army council were seeking.
He met Smyth at the Holiday Inn in Worcester. The FBI had wired the room and were listening. It wasn’t a long meeting. Rupert did not want to get caught in the middle of the difficulty between McKevitt and Smyth. He knew Smyth was well respected and that it would eventually blow over. So he just reiterated what McKevitt had said and that he was angry. Smyth said that he understood, but that he had to have some kind of life and he couldn’t keep his secret from his girlfriend forever.
Smyth picked up the software disk from the table and left.
The FBI agents came into the room. They were close to a prosecution but needed to see Smyth deliver weapons to Rupert. It had all got sidetracked by woman problems.
Rupert assured them that it would happen and drove back up to Chicago.
Back in his study at home, he sat down at his computer to write a report for MI5.
The Accidental Spy Page 19