The Accidental Spy

by Sean O'Driscoll

  The restaurant was on a single floor, close to the Dublin Road. As soon as they sat down, Maureen and Bernadette spoke of family and children. Maureen was impressed by Bernadette as a mother – she was very protective and determined that her children would have a better life.

  She mentioned the Omagh bombing and that her children were being ostracised and picked on at school, because their parents’ names were linked to it in the papers.

  Maureen’s eyes widened. “Really? Oh my God, that’s just awful, that’s terrible, to have to go through that.”

  Bernadette was glad she understood what her children were suffering.

  “Awful for the kids,” said Maureen.

  Rupert: “I thought, ‘Why is Maureen so concerned about Bernadette’s kids after Omagh?’ Then I realised, that was acting.”

  Maureen: “I was a spy too, after all. I was living in the same world as David. I liked Bernadette very much but at the same time you are thinking of why we are really here.”

  Maureen’s post-Omagh sympathy for the McKevitts led her to the question, “Do you think you can ever get your business back again?”

  The McKevitts had been kicked out of their shop in Dundalk in the days after the Omagh bombing.

  Bernadette no longer wanted it back, she said. She had now moved on to a communications and computer course and was on a new path in life.

  Bernadette seemed confident and upbeat. The Ruperts were due to fly out the next day and both expressed their delight in seeing the McKevitts.

  Mickey and Bernie both said that they looked forward to the Ruperts coming back to see them in the Spring.

  A garda on surveillance outside saw all four of them leave the hotel together and walk to their cars. Rupert gave a last wave and he and McKevitt wished each other good luck.

  It was the last time they would ever speak.

  CHAPTER 19

  “Don’t tell me what to do! Don’t tell me what to do!”

  Rupert’s face was pushed up against the agent. They were pointing at each other angrily. One of the Chicago group had to break them apart.

  Rupert’s lifelong hatred of what he called “federal arrogance” had exploded, just as Smyth was about to come to the Holiday Inn in Worcester.

  “We’re just fucking asking you do your job!” said the agent.

  “I’m doing my job, you’re not,” shouted Rupert.

  As they wired up the hotel room with bugging devices and a hidden camera, the agent was urging Rupert to draw Smyth into incriminating conversations.

  Being condescended to by authority was Rupert’s greatest hatred.

  “It was the worst argument I ever had with the FBI. I don’t know what I called this guy. I’ve always had my own way of doing things. I never ask too many questions, I never draw people out and this jerk is trying to lecture me on what I should say into the microphone. He didn’t know the first thing about the operation. Smyth was a very dangerous guy, I’m trying to get into my usual relaxed head space and this FBI guy is in my face. I shouted back, it was bad.”

  The Chicago field office asked to speak to the agent outside the hotel room. When he came back in he stayed in the background and didn’t talk to Rupert.

  Chicago had handled Rupert for years and they had seen him blow up on them before.

  When the microphones and video cameras were set up, the agents retreated. Rupert called Smyth, who was leaving his house on Epworth Street, a short drive from the hotel.

  Smyth walked into the hotel room carrying two large holdalls.

  “Alright big man?”

  He put the bags on the bed.

  Inside were two dozen disassembled Uzis, several hundred rounds of ammunition and the army council’s shopping list of bomb parts – plastic explosives, timers for Intertec sports radar guns, Apogee RockSim 4.0 game consoles, scanning devices and infrared detectors.

  Agents from the Boston and Chicago field office were watching from video cameras on either side of the hotel room.

  Smyth explained that he had taken the guns apart and erased all their serial numbers.

  “He says, ‘You want me to show you how to put them together?’ I said: ‘No, I already know, thanks.’”

  Rupert had no idea how to reassemble the guns but was concerned for his safety if Smyth had two dozen functioning Uzis in the hotel room.

  “In the rooms either side of us are heavily armed FBI guys and I’m in this room with this trained assassin who has all these Uzis and hundreds of rounds. I really didn’t want this situation to escalate.”

  Smyth suggested that Rupert should make absolutely sure McKevitt approved of the plan to get the guns and bomb parts to Ireland.

  He wished Rupert good luck and left. Out on the street, Boston FBI agents photographed Smyth walking to his car.

  Rupert looked around the room. “Alright, we’re done,” he said.

  The Chicago agents were the first in. They leaned over one of the bags and looked inside. The Boston field office came in behind them and began photographing.

  Rupert sat on the bed. Six years he had been spying, and this was his final day.

  It was 20 December 2000, five days before Christmas.

  After the FBI finished in the room, he flew that same day back to Maureen and her family.

  Maureen mentioned over Christmas dinner that David was going back to Ireland in the new year. “As far as my family knew, David was gun-running for the IRA. That’s what they assumed from the company he was keeping and the Irish republican mementos and all that. So my father and my brother would give me these looks whenever I said David was going to Ireland, as if to say, ‘Come on, we know he’s mixed up in something bad.’”

  On 8 January, Rupert flew in to Dublin and booked into a hotel in the city centre. He knew little of the city: he usually only visited for the Republican Sinn Féin events.

  He walked to Harcourt Street garda station. Martin Callinan, Diarmuid O’Sullivan and the Special Branch officers were waiting on the top floor. They had never met him before.

  O’Sullivan, a wiry officer with 20 years’ experience, immediately sized up Rupert: “The first thing I noticed was the enormity of his size and his personality. He was quite opinionated about himself and the subject.”

  Rupert held a long grudge against the gardaí for the way he was treated when he was at the Drowes, for which the gardaí felt no responsibility as they never had an agreement with him.

  O’Sullivan bristled. “As far as he was concerned, we were not at the races. We were unprofessional and he was going to tell us that.”

  Over the day, as the information poured out, he saw another side to Rupert.

  “As we discovered, he had very good reason to have an opinion on the subject because he had huge knowledge. He had very detailed knowledge of the organisations, of their workings in Ireland, their connections in the US and how those connections came about and how the funding operated and the main players in the States. It made sense to us because the detail he was talking about could only have been had by meeting these people.”

  Rupert remembers blasting the gardaí about the Drowes, and then getting down to business.

  “It was all top-secret stuff, nobody outside this small group was supposed to know,” said Rupert. “They sat me down and explained the process. Then for three full days, I told them everything.”

  *****

  At a hotel near where Rupert was making his statement, a journalist called Bakr stirred his tea as he waited.

  Michael McDonald walked up the foyer steps and looked around.

  “Are you…?”

  McDonald had spoken to Bakr on the phone, in coded language, as had McKevitt and Campbell. This was their first face-to-face meeting. From the phone calls, MI5 knew that McKevitt was keen to travel to Baghdad soon.

  Bakr came with a notebook and pen and was dressed smart-casual, like a serious journalist hoping to understand the Irish conflict.

  McDonald was enjoying the subterfuge.
<
br />   Bakr had presented himself over fax and email as a Lebanese journalist, until both sides understood that journalism was a front for his real work as an Iraqi agent.

  McDonald gave Bakr a rundown of IRA history, and how its campaign had been heavily armed by Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.

  Gaddafi had gifted the IRA over 100 tons of weapons and plastic explosives and three million pounds sterling. His supplies had been enough to keep the IRA bombing and shooting for 20 years. If they got that level of cooperation from Saddam, it would rip the peace process apart.

  Bakr slid his notebook to McDonald, who began to write from a coded list he kept in his pocket.

  “£1.5m, 500kg of explosives, 500 handguns, 2,000 detonators, 200 rocket-propelled grenades and a wire-guided missile.”

  He slid it back to Bakr, who ripped the page from his notebook and slid it into his wallet.

  McKevitt had pulled off the IRA’s biggest coup with the Gaddafi shipments. Now McDonald was in his place and was on the verge of pulling off an even bigger shipment, one that would include wire-guided missiles that could accurately take out British helicopters. In the IRA-controlled border areas, the dream of destroying the British air capability had been a long one.

  He, McKevitt, Campbell and the entire army council had missed some vital clues about Bakr.

  McKevitt had failed to get Saddam’s attention until he told Rupert about his frustration, and then suddenly an Iraqi agent appeared.

  Also, McKevitt told Rupert that he wanted the Iraqis to make contact with him directly in Dundalk, and then one day he received a fax from an Arab journalist seeking an “interview”, but clearly with bigger intentions.

  Two British intelligence officers sat in a car, watching the meeting between Bakr and McDonald.

  According to Rupert, Bakr had been “recycled” from British intelligence’s Iraqi operations for use on “the Ireland problem”.

  “Operation Samnite”, as it was now known, was hidden from the Irish government. If MI5 were caught operating within the independent Republic of Ireland, it could create a diplomatic problem in a country with a deep mistrust of British spies. MI5 chiefs believed that the potential prize of putting away the entire Real IRA army council was worth the risk.

  Before they parted, McDonald and Bakr, a British spy posing as an Iraqi spy who was posing as a journalist, had agreed to set up several more phone calls with McKevitt on a secure phone line.

  At that exact time, David Rupert was a short distance away on Harcourt Street, completing the third and final day of his statement to the gardaí.

  It was already 40 pages long.

  He told them of every meeting with McKevitt, the American weapon shipments, the army council meetings, how the Real IRA’s structure worked, how Bobby Sands’ sister was third in command, every IRA shooting and bombing he knew about, going right back to the killing of Prince Charles’s great uncle he heard about in Murray’s pub.

  Rupert talked and talked and a police officer wrote it down. Callinan had selected a fourth officer to type up the written notes. It was so sensitive that only one officer could be trusted as a typist.

  “It amazed me that the top guys in the gardaí only trusted one typist,” said Rupert. “They had told me about two Northern Ireland police officers who were murdered coming from Dundalk station because a garda had tipped off the IRA. So, hey, I got the secrecy.”

  Once Rupert had finished his statement, the entire three days of notes were read back to him and he signed it.

  He was not allowed outside in case he was identified.

  “It was funny, I was up in the part of the garda station where the upper echelon had their offices.

  “I went through a doorway to go to the bathroom and couldn’t get back in. It didn’t occur to the gardaí that it was a one-way door. I’m locked out in the corridor and I had a flock of people around me, wondering who I was. I had no ID, I had a US accent and everybody was nervous about what I was doing there.

  “They asked who I was there to see. I couldn’t remember the names of the gardaí. I said I’m with the FBI/Department of Justice.

  “They said, ‘Well, do you have ID?’

  “I said, ‘Actually no. It’s kinda unofficial.’”

  Finally, an anti-terrorism officer opened the door and said, “It’s ok, he’s with us.”

  Rupert walked past the crowd, wordless.

  He stayed with the gardaí all evening, talking and eating. They were killing time, waiting for nightfall, so that they could sneak him up to the border and into IRA homeland.

  As they were eating, Michael McDonald arrived back from Dublin and pulled up at McKevitt’s house in Blackrock to tell him the good news – that Saddam Hussein was on board for tons of weapons.

  Back at police HQ in Dublin, it was explained to Rupert that his entire credibility rested on his ability to identify the places in his statement. So that the police could use his evidence in court, he would have to lead them to Mickey McKevitt’s house, the army council and bomb-making houses, all without any prompting from the detectives.

  Two car-loads of gardaí set off from Dublin at 1am. Rupert was in one car with three Special Branch detectives.

  The car behind had four armed gardaí.

  It was 2am, now 12 January 2001, when they reached Blackrock village, just south of Dundalk.

  At the centre of the village, they turned left and left again into the comfortable middle-class estate and past McKevitt’s two-storey house.

  “If you are coming around to McKevitt’s street at 2am you are either gardaí or Provisional IRA coming to shoot him.

  “He had a lot of cameras in his house, linked up to TV,” says Rupert. “There were two cars and one of them was all armed gardaí. We could have had a shoot-out because now Mickey had a lot to lose.”

  They approached McKevitt’s house. “That one, with the low gate, on the corner,” said Rupert pointing to the house on the left.

  “Are you identifying the house here on the left at the corner after the greenway?”

  “Yes.”

  Mickey and Bernie McKevitt were asleep as David Rupert came within feet of their house. The two dark-coloured cars turned at the end of the street and drove past the house again. “That’s it for sure,” said Rupert.

  The car returned to Blackrock village and turned left for Dundalk.

  There were roadworks in the town, which confused Rupert. The gardaí were getting nervous. It took him more than half an hour to find his way.

  “We went up and back, up and back, I just couldn’t place it. The police weren’t allowed to help me. Eventually, I found the right turn and we went up into the housing estate.”

  Rupert pointed out the house at Oakland Park where the bomb team had their meetings.

  Next, they drove out on Greenore Road to the countryside, and to the cottage where the Real IRA army council held its meetings.

  “There at the top of the hill, up the driveway.” Rupert pointed up at the remote house.

  They drove back to Dublin. Rupert was very relieved to be out of Dundalk.

  It was past 4am when the car dropped him off at the hotel in Dublin and disappeared around the corner. He entered the hotel room, kicked off his shoes and fell asleep in his clothes. At 6.30 the next morning, he called Maureen.

  They both laughed with excitement. After six years on the road, he had completed his final mission.

  “I was just so happy because I was really worried all week,” said Maureen. “Most of all, I was dying to reveal the truth to my family. David is not the man you think he is, after all.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Maureen went out for lunch with her friends, Judy and Sue, and told them that David had been a spy within the IRA and that she would have to go away with him. She didn’t know when she could come back. Judy and Sue were two women from mid-America, with no concept of the world Maureen was living in, except that it was foreign and terrorist-related and scary.

  They put their
hands on hers and wished her well and said if there was anything they could do, they would be there.

  Maureen went on a tour of the area, talking to relatives, friends and neighbours.

  On 13 January, the day David arrived home from making his statement in Dublin, they drove over to Dorie’s house for a last goodbye.

  She and Dorie hugged each other and cried.

  Two days later, David and Maureen got into an FBI-hired mini-van and headed for the freeway. They had no idea where they were going. They only knew that the FBI would help them sell their house, and pay for any losses on the property, and that they should stay on the road for as long as possible.

  They agreed only to head south, to avoid the snow and bitter cold of Illinois. David drove from early morning all day, stopping for the night in Russellville, Arkansas.

  Maureen felt a burst of freedom. The good weather, the southern charm, the food – it felt like a different country from Chicago. The next day, they drove to Florida.

  When they got to Tallahassee, Mark called. It sounded urgent.

  Martin Callinan and Diarmuid O’Sullivan, two of the most senior anti-terrorist gardaí in Ireland, urgently wanted to see Rupert again, as soon as possible. They would fly to Chicago and needed more information and more statements. He should bring his passport for formal identification.

  The Irish government was taking the case extremely seriously. Rupert was its only real hope of destroying the Real IRA.

  Maureen and David were too exhausted that day to head to Chicago. They rested for the night and the next day got in the mini-van and headed north.

  Maureen was disappointed to be back up north in the cold and snow and misery again.

  In her diary, she was recording the trip, but also the number of calories she burnt. That day, she walked 3.5 miles and burnt 375 calories.

  Even on the run, it meant a lot to her to lose the weight she had gained over the Ireland adventure.

  The next day, as Maureen walked another 3.5 miles to lose 225 calories, Mickey McKevitt was on the phone for what he thought would be the biggest weapons deal in IRA history.