The Accidental Spy

by Sean O'Driscoll

  With a throwaway burner phone and using the pseudonym “Karl”, he took a call from someone he thought was an Iraqi government agent in Baghdad.

  In reality, it was another Iraqi MI5 agent calling from London, and Scotland Yard officers were in the room recording the conversation.

  “Karl” didn’t want to get into too many details, only that he was willing to travel to see the equipment and had been to the Middle East before. MI5 knew from Rupert that McKevitt loved to travel to see weapons, that it triggered memories of his Libya arms shipment. The agent held out the prospect that they would invite him to Baghdad. McKevitt said he would like that very much but said he had to be cautious.

  It was the first of 19 phone calls between McKevitt and Michael McDonald on one side and three MI5 agents posing as Iraqi government spies on the other. McKevitt was adamant on one point – they needed a million euros in cash to begin with, and Saddam would be well rewarded with a series of attacks on the British establishment in London.

  Once off the phone, McKevitt moved quickly to put a link on the 32CSM webpage, extoling the virtues of Saddam Hussein’s government, and how it had been wronged by an illegal invasion after the Kuwait war.

  The link became a source of great amusement for Paul and the other members of the MI5 team.

  On 20 January 2001, the day after the first phone call between “Karl” and Iraqi intelligence, David and Maureen drove in to Chicago to meet Diarmuid O’Sullivan and Martin Callinan, along with Mark Lundgren.

  As they sat around a conference room, O’Sullivan explained what they had come for – they wanted Rupert to testify against McKevitt directly in a courtroom in Dublin.

  Rupert was adamant that his FBI contract was very clear – he was an undercover agent who provided evidence that could help them reach a prosecution. He was not, under any circumstances, going to take the stand.

  Lundgren countered that the FBI was working on a new contract for Rupert that would be extremely generous on monthly payments for whatever security he and Maureen needed.

  All sides agreed to think about their positions. Lundgren called Maureen, who said she would try to convince David to testify.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” her diaries recorded Lundgren as saying.

  Rupert was stressed.

  He and Maureen took to the road again. After weeks of travelling all over America, they finally found a house to rent in Coral Gables, Florida. The FBI was delighted. It would pay the rent for however long it took.

  That week, an event occurred in London that almost derailed the investigation. Dermot Jennings, the Special Branch garda who had the first contact with Rupert, went to London to meet MI5. It had potentially damaging memos – the first from when Rupert met Jennings in the back of a bread van in Boyle, when Jennings is supposed to have said that he didn’t care what happened in Northern Ireland, he wanted information on what was happening in the south. It also had a memo of a conversation with the FBI, in which Jennings had described Rupert as “a bullshitter”.

  Jennings suggested to the MI5 agent that the references should be removed from the record before being disclosed in any trial. Jennings didn’t know it at the time, but the MI5 agent was secretly recording him.

  A very senior garda source said it was the worst time in the investigation. “We could not believe that MI5 would record a police officer without his knowledge when we were supposed to be working together,” he said. “We were furious when it emerged, and so were the FBI, who felt it was a betrayal of a case they had worked so hard on. Old habits die hard with MI5, I guess.”

  On 15 February, Maureen and David moved into the new house. Maureen was delighted. Her diary entries are overcome with a sense of excitement at finding stability.

  Two days later, as Maureen unpacked their belongings, David, who was feeling restless, drove up to Chicago to see Dorie’s new house. Dorie later drove him to his old house to pick up some personal possessions. Just as he arrived, he got a call from Liam Clarke, the Sunday Times journalist. He said he was looking for David.

  Rupert stayed on the line for a few seconds, not knowing what to do. Then he hung up.

  The Sunday Times had got a leak from the gardaí – Rupert was a spy for the FBI on the Real IRA army council. It was an unbeatable story. After a few days, they contacted Joe Lori, a Boston Globe reporter, offering to share the story with him and pay him if he could find out about Rupert’s life in Madrid.

  The following Wednesday, while David was still in Chicago, a woman with an English accent called David’s phone, looking for “Dave Rupert”. It was a very bad connection. She called back a few minutes later.

  Then Joe Lori called Maureen. “I understand you know a Dave Rupert,” he said. She hung up.

  The next day, Liam Clarke called David again.

  Maureen’s diary records the conversation:

  “Mr Rupert?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m calling you from Ireland.”

  “You got the wrong number.”

  Click.

  Mark Lundgren called the following day. The Sunday Times had hired a private detective to find David and Maureen. They thought it was disgusting. They had done nothing wrong and it was putting a police operation, and their lives, at risk.

  They went to see the film The House of Mirth to relax. Maureen couldn’t understand any of it. “AWFUL!” she wrote.

  The next day, 21 February, a 14-year-old old army cadet named Stephen Menary spotted a flashlight lying on the ground at the gates of a Territorial Army barracks in Stepherd’s Bush, London. He picked it up. It exploded in his hand, sending packed shrapnel in every direction. Menary lost his left hand and left eye, and suffered severe stomach and chest injuries. He almost died.

  The attack was exactly as McKevitt had described to Rupert several months earlier – he came up with the idea of a bomb in a flashlight that had blown a soldier’s arm off at a checkpoint and he thought it could be used again. It was a device of which he was very proud.

  It showed an intelligence failure. MI5 was moving towards prosecution, but it had failed to inform the army of this most basic of tip-offs – that McKevitt was very proud of his flashlight bomb and that the army should be aware that it might reappear.

  Two days later, on 23 February, Liam Clarke called again. Rupert told him he had the wrong number. Clarke: “I know it’s the number for David Rupert because I checked it.” He put Rupert under pressure, saying he was running an article on Sunday and wanted Rupert’s comments.

  In reality, Clarke was under pressure from the newspaper lawyers – he had to get Rupert to confirm the details of the article or they wouldn’t let him run it. It was a trap that many people fall into with reporters – explaining themselves when the entire purpose of the call is for the reporter not to hear their side of the story, but to trick them into confirming facts.

  Rupert knew what Clarke was trying to do. He hung up and decided to change their phone numbers that day.

  Everything was starting to move faster and faster. Mark Lundgren called within the hour – he was in Washington, just after a meeting with the heads of the FBI. They reviewed Rupert’s emails and wanted him to stop using the word “deployment” about his travels to Ireland – it sounded too FBI, too coached. When testifying, he should say “trip” to Ireland.

  Rupert demanded, “What do you mean, ‘testify’? I’m not testifying.”

  Mark stumbled, trying to find a way out, and said it all depended on the circumstances.

  The next day, David travelled to Chicago for a meeting with the FBI. He was furious.

  His first visit was to Maureen’s dad to give him their new mobile numbers.

  When he got there, Mr Brennan was in a fury, demanding to know where his daughter was.

  Rupert said that she was in Florida.

  Mr Brennan went into a rage, calling Rupert a selfish bastard and accusing him of deliberately holding his daughter hostage in Florida.

  He s
aid that this IRA stuff had destroyed the family, forcing Maureen to divorce her own family and abandon her own daughter.

  Rupert shouted back that he was lying.

  It was the nastiest conversation between them.

  “You don’t even know what a close family is,” said Mr Brennan. That hurt Rupert. There were divisions within the Rupert family, Mr Brennan knew it. Now he was being accused of trying to keep Maureen from her own family for his own selfish reasons.

  Mr Brennan was up close against him. He was so mad he was about to punch Rupert.

  Rupert screamed back at him that he had no right to talk like that, that it was an FBI operation.

  He stormed out of the house, enraged.

  Maureen: “Both of them called me, shouting about the other one. I thought, ‘What a pair of assholes.’ I didn’t say that back to my dad but I sure as hell said it to David. I couldn’t believe it. Like we didn’t have enough problems, the two of them acting like little boys.”

  Maureen was so angry with both of them that she couldn’t sleep that night.

  She woke up the next morning still upset with her dad. How could he say that she had abandoned her own daughter? Didn’t he know that she had to be away from Dorie to protect her? That people who would kill 29 civilians and not even care wouldn’t think twice about torturing and killing her and David?

  Her father called to apologise, but said he would not be coming to visit her in Florida, as planned, as he had a sinus problem and couldn’t fly. It made her even madder. Did he really expect her to believe that?

  Dan, a banker who had been Rupert and Maureen’s next-door neighbour in Indiana, called the same day. Liam Clarke and Joe Lori were both at the old house outside Chicago. He could see them peering in the windows and sitting in a car down the street, waiting for Rupert.

  David had a meeting with the FBI’s logistics officer the following day. It was the first time they met. The man was small and tough and looked like Joe Pesci, the nickname Rupert gave to him from then on, even to his face.

  Rupert complained that the money still hadn’t come through for paying off the mortgage on their old house, which the FBI had agreed to do.

  “Hold on a second, here,” said the logistics officer. “We are not under any obligation to pay your mortgage.”

  “You’d better.”

  He had been warned about Rupert.

  “Really,” he said. “And what are you gonna do if we don’t?”

  “I fucking quit is what I do,” said Rupert. He grabbed the leather satchel he brought to the meeting and was leaving the office.

  “No, no, wait,” said the officer. “Wait.” He didn’t want to be blamed for the collapse of the case. “Wait, let’s talk it through. I didn’t say we wouldn’t.”

  Rupert: “It was like that all the time. It was this constant battle with the FBI, as I saw it. I was always bringing things to the brink because that was the only way I could get anything done.”

  After the meeting, Rupert drove back to Maureen’s father, at her insistence. She threatened to never speak to Rupert or her father if they didn’t talk it through.

  Mr Brennan stretched out his hand. His voice was faltering and he was almost crying as he apologised. It was a huge strain on him and all the family to lose their daughter. “She’s gone,” he said, “and we don’t know if she can ever come back.”

  Mr Brennan called Maureen and said that they had made up. He had also called his doctor, he said. It wasn’t sinuses after all, it was a just a cold and he would be coming to Florida to see her. Maureen was overjoyed.

  The very next day, David bought a Harley-Davidson motorbike, after Mark wired them $17,902.

  “David, why didn’t you tell me you were buying a Harley-Davidson?” said Maureen.

  Rupert said he travelled to relax and needed it.

  Maureen said that his James Bond lifestyle had gone to his head and it was feeding into his midlife crisis. She was worried sick because he could be killed if he was thrown from the bike, or end up injured just as the McKevitt case was coming to a climax.

  They argued and argued but he wouldn’t listen.

  She told him that if he didn’t sell the motorbike, she would tell the FBI. “Go right ahead,” he said.

  The next day, 8 March, Maureen’s friend, Sue, emailed her. She had got a call from Joe, the reporter for both the Sunday Times and the Boston Globe. Did she or anyone in the area know Maureen and David Rupert? What were they like? He had a private message for them, and would she have a number for them?

  Sue emailed Maureen straightaway. “I’ve been contacted. What to do?” she wrote.

  Maureen called Sue, reassuring her that it would be ok.

  It added to Maureen’s lingering anxiety and depression. She realised that they would always be on the run. She lay in bed, unable to move. “I think the reality of it all hit me. David did all the unpacking today,” she wrote in her diary.

  As she struggled with her mood, David surprised her by suggesting that she try his supply of St John’s Wort, the natural anti-depressant. He had been hiding it from her.

  The stress of not having a connection with Ireland anymore and of no longer having the adrenaline rush of being a spy had caught up with him. He hid the depression from her, because his generation just didn’t talk about it.

  They went to a boat show in Fort Myers to relax, then a car show at the local Elks club. When they came back, David called his brother, Dale. Dale said that a reporter had called their brother Bud and sister Bonnie.

  The reporter had asked Bud for a picture of David and said he’d pay for it. Then he asked Bud, “Would you consider David a violent man?”

  The next day, David called his friend Christina in Massena. A reporter had called her grandmother, asking about David.

  Mark at the FBI called. Everyone was now very concerned that the media would break the story before McKevitt was arrested.

  Mark and his FBI partner, Doug, flew down to Florida the next day and David picked them up at the airport.

  Mark went into the rental office and booked a large storage space in his own name, expensed to an FBI bank account, to be used by the Ruperts.

  They picked up Maureen and all four of them decided to drive down to Miami for a chat. Along the way, they reviewed the situation. The FBI were denying all knowledge of David Rupert to the press, even putting out a statement to the Sunday Times to that effect, but it was only a matter of time before the story broke. Mark wanted them to consider completely new identities. It would involve new names, new family members and new life experiences.

  Maureen was completely against it. She could not deny who she was. If she met other parents, how could she deny the existence of Dorie, who was the greatest joy in her life? When they got back home, there was a two-word email from David’s sister Betty. “Call Me!” it said.

  David called her. Joe Lori had called the local high school that David had attended and spoke to the principal and to Marsha, the secretary.

  Marsha told him that David had organised the school’s first sit-in, which was a demand for more food. She also told him that the caption on David’s yearbook picture was “The Rebel Kid” and that Betty worked at the school. Now Betty was worried that he would turn up at the school and harass her.

  In the middle of all this tension, Maureen called her father to wish him a happy St Patrick’s Day. His grandson, Maureen’s nephew, had sent him a hand-drawn card. It was a reminder of that other Ireland. That gentle one of Irish Americans who exchange cards on St Patrick’s Day and toasted the old country. The Brennans had hated David’s IRA connections. Now, they hoped, he would soon be back to being one of them again. The peaceful silent majority.

  Still the calls flooded in from Joe Lori and Liam Clarke all week – to friends and family in Chicago and Madrid and Massena. Everyone was asking them what was going on. The circle of the informed had to be widened. No, they weren’t in any kind of trouble with the law, they had been doing their du
ty for America. No, they weren’t in danger, everything would work its way out.

  On 20 March, it reached its lowest point. A woman with an American accent first emailed Betty with the original Sunday Times article about David funding the Real IRA. She then called Betty at the school. The woman explained that she was part native American and had been adopted. She needed help to reach a man who had attended the high school many years ago and may be the man in the article. Her long-lost brother, David Rupert, she said.

  Betty paused. “That cannot be the case. I’m David Rupert’s sister,” she said.

  The woman immediately hung up the phone.

  Mark called from Ireland. The FBI had a meeting in Dublin and insisted on arrests as soon as possible because Rupert was about to be exposed by the media.

  There were frantic last-minute calls between Ireland and America. All the arrests, from Jim Smyth in Massachusetts, to Mickey McKevitt in Blackrock, would have to happen simultaneously, so nobody destroyed evidence.

  On 26 March, David drove back to Florida alone, listening to an audiobook of World War II history.

  Maureen went back to her father’s house and met her friend Julie for dinner at a crab restaurant. She hadn’t seen her since she went on the run.

  On the evening of 28 March, Mickey McKevitt made a call to the Iraqi agent he now knew as Khalid, who was in the advanced stages of preparing weapons the Real IRA needed. McKevitt was in a very insistent mood. He wanted to travel to Baghdad as soon as possible. No money had yet arrived and they were promised a million euros. Gaddafi had given two million immediately, without being asked, he said.

  Khaled promised it would be coming very soon, but there were bureaucratic considerations in Baghdad.

  McKevitt hung up the phone and went to bed annoyed. At 6.45am the next morning, there was a thunderous knock on his door.

  CHAPTER 21

  McKevitt opened the door. It was Diarmuid O’Sullivan and William Hanrahan of the Irish Special Branch, flashing badges and a search warrant. Behind them were over 30 gardaí, some from forensics, some masked and heavily armed Emergency Response Unit officers.